A Windy, Curvy Path To Internet Marketing Success 2

My Invention Changes The Online Mortgage Business

So I told my client, “Let me see if I can generate leads for you. Maybe I can come up with a new capture system, something totally innovative, then drive pay-per-click and other types of media to it. Would you be interested?”

He said, “Sure, you can take a crack at it. Who are you again?” He was pretty skeptical of me. He was dealing with Ameriquest and other well-known vendors. I wasn’t in that category. (By the way, a footnote: I hate the mortgage industry. It’s sure not something I’d want to do long-term.) But he said, “Go for it.” So I went to a high-end creative marketing company that did creatives for large corporations.

We paid a pretty penny for the design work, and I put together the concept for our new lead capture system. I made a list of what I wanted it to do, what fields we wanted data capture for.

It ended up being a unique approach to lead capture, different from anything else out there. We’ve all seen mortgage sites. They give you similar direct marketing to start with, like “Isn’t the security of your family worth it?” or some other psychological direct marketing copy on the front of it. And then a lead-capture system on the back, filling out certain fields.

Personally, I didn’t want to spend 30 minutes filling out the information they asked for. Some of them asked for different fields of information. That’s how the lead business works – different leads pay different amounts, depending on what you’re able to capture.

I ended up with a unique online mortgage squeeze-page lead capture system. The site itself looked like a Pepsi machine. Bright and shiny, fun for the user to play with. Big buttons you could push. It looked like a vending machine. The fields already had pre-filled information. Most of the other mortgage lead-capture forms used drop-down menus with a list of all the different ranges. You’d fill out each one.

Mine was the same, but the difference was, once I captured the information, they were automatically forwarded to another form that pre-filled the responses they had just entered. So it was a pre-calculation system.

I had talked to many people in the mortgage industry and looked at all their lead-capture pages, so I knew what kinds of information we needed. I asked the experts, “Is it possible to pre-qualify people? What are the legal stipulations?” So we came up with a really cool system. It was kind of like a mortgage calculator, but the difference was, it was built into the lead-capture system. We pre-qualified you for a loan, based on the answers you gave us.

What they’d see was something like, “Based on what you’ve told us, you qualify for a loan of …” then we had to put little disclaimers on the bottom. (A LOT of legal problems in that industry!) So the user ended up with a pre-qual form which they could submit to a lender of their choice. We’d give them the choice of a random mortgage house in their state or some of the vendors we suggested. And they would immediately get a phone call from the lender, or they could specify when they wanted to be called on it.

It was a neat integrated system, done in a way that was very enticing for the user. It worked because I talked to so many people about what they liked about the capture systems and what they didn’t like. We also threw in a bit of personalization, so that when they selected their lender, the form would populate the lender information to say, “Mr. Smith, Ajax Mortgage will be calling you by 7pm Wednesday.” It was more of a warm lead. They were more pre-qualified than the other systems around at that time.

That’s 4 years ago, which is a lifetime in the internet industry. So today, a lot of systems have caught up with that model. Back then, it was the first of its kind. I was happy about that, but it sure didn’t make me rich. Not even close.

My Life As An Affiliate Marketer

Another important lesson I learned was, don’t do business without a business contract. If you want to do joint ventures or the selling of a specific product, that’s one thing. But don’t actually start to build a separate business with somebody without having a contract in place.

I learned that not just with the stranger I tried to build a business with back then, but also with some of my best friends. It’s an important marketing lesson. Everybody knows it, but still, lots of people don’t bother with that business contract.

From there, I went into capturing leads for different affiliate offers. I got sick of the mortgage industry. The deal fell through as I was left holding air and my partner went on to use my lead system successfully. So I figured I’d take my knowledge and experience and do some affiliate marketing.

So I sold web hosting, as an affiliate. I found deals with different hosting companies where they paid you $100 or more per sale. What I figured out was, we could sell hosting and then offer services on the back end. Running their DNS server, providing articles & other content, and so forth. We had a good response.

We didn’t market through pay-per-click or any paid channels. We just posted all over on a bunch of different forums, and we did quite well. There were a few months we made $6,000 per month. We weren’t getting rich, but we were doing OK. I was able to survive on that.

That is the first thing people need to realize. They can make a living doing this. They need a system that already works. I was trying to create things on my own. I had learned some stuff, but I didn’t really use the stuff that was right there in front of me enough. It would have been a lot easier for me to just go to Clickbank and market something as an affiliate, and I probably would have done a lot better, as far as money.

To be continued…

Internet Marketing Success Can Make Sense

Author: Scott Holden – TrafficEraBlog

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