Is 60-70% Conversion and 100% Tracking Possible in AM Marketing?

[Xrproto]

Yeah and all those "million dollar" ideas that have happened on the net were put together by someone with urber people skills...chances are most of those happened due to the lack there of.

Your quest to incorporate personal contact with prospects is great for that niche but how many niches would that really work with? None that I work in currently. But hey you don't need an #800 number to spam craigs list.

 

[0352]

You're right about picking up the phone and just talking to people. I'm thinking maybe I'll have to go to a kinkos or something to get this done. Having a 2 year old screaming in the background isn't going to sound too professional. Any ideas are welcomed.

Duct tape, it works wonders!!

Seriously though, I feel your pain. I have a 4 year old at home with me. What I had to do (which is not easy) is I had to teach her that when I am on the phone, I am working and she has to be quiet. I really hate to say this, but it is like training a puppy. But after a while, she now understands that and is quiet when I am on the phone. Is this fool proof? HELL NO! Anything with kids isn't. But it sure beats going to an office for a 9-5!! Just make sure when you aren't busy to spend some time with them, so they aren't getting ignored and you should be good. Good luck with it. Hope this can help a little!

 

[Blastyourass]

Yeah...lol. They just ubered their pale white asses on to Wall Street via cyberspace, spamming craigslist and relying on link codes to get paid.

Your spams and scams will not last. I am talking about business models around offers you can creat yourself. You make the offer, you control the offer, your convert the offer and you track the offer.

This can work for almost any business under the sun. Even scams if that's your cup of tea.

Sometimes I come here and I go these guys are fucken genious with all the PHP, HTML and zip shit and then I go wait a second, they just don't get it do they?:error:

Why not make a company you can run and promote your company?

Oh wait let's do like everyone else and pick a product off the shelf, make a landing page, do ppc or spam craigslist:error: again. Then rely on a link code to see if your going to get paid in net 30:repuke: if your lucky.

Yeah and all those "million dollar" ideas that have happened on the net were put together by someone with urber people skills...chances are most of those happened due to the lack there of.

Your quest to incorporate personal contact with prospects is great for that niche but how many niches would that really work with? None that I work in currently. But hey you don't need an #800 number to spam craigs list.

 

[Blastyourass]

You just need to put the baby in another room. Crib, or playpen and take the call or have someone help. I have myself a nice Mexican gal that cooks, takes care of the kids, cleans and about anything I want. Maybe you need that BH?

Bite the fucken bullet for a few months and then you make a routine and the kids get used to it. If my baby is yelling, I just say, "I'm sorry my wife was real sick today so, I brought my baby to work to help her. I'm lucky I have a great boss. All that does is make more fucken brownie points, especially if they have kids. SOLD, next.

You're right about picking up the phone and just talking to people. I'm thinking maybe I'll have to go to a kinkos or something to get this done. Having a 2 year old screaming in the background isn't going to sound too professional. Any ideas are welcomed.

 

[0352]

LMAO!! I have done the same thing!! Awesome!

If my baby is yelling, I just say, "I'm sorry my wife was real sick today so, I brought my baby to work to help her. I'm lucky I have a great boss. All that does is make more fucken brownie points, especially if they have kids. SOLD, next.

 

[DrHowe]

I look at interacting with your customers, either with an 800 number or, at the least an email autoresponder/list-management program as essential. Essential to building a business that is.

If you're some genius code monkey then props to you. Go make your quick bucks. But what happens when your loophole is closed? You have to find another one and another and another and another. AND you have not created an ASSET. You cannot sell a bunch of crappy landing pages or arbi-sites that no longer convert.

Plus, call me weird, but I like to know I'm establishing trust and providing a service to people. Instead of contributing to the spam-muck that eventually kills or weighs heavily on what were once legitimate services. Like, say, Craigslist?

 

[Blastyourass]

You become a Guru.

You become fat like shoemoney from all the money he made off ringtones, eat cheetos and then pay a coach to teach you how to speak. Then you become the guru, lpay a personal trainer to lose wait, take a picture by your hummer with a check as big as your fat head and monetize a blog .

If you're some genius code monkey then props to you. Go make your quick bucks. But what happens when your loophole is closed?

 

[lerchmo]

you can focus on your offer, and building a business around your offer
or you can focus on traffic, and building a business generating traffic.

eventually its optimal to control your offers but not while your a one man show.

Blastyourass, you are suggesting people get into lead generation and lead sales rather than affiliate marketing and there is good reason the affiliate marketing industry is thriving.

Pros to affiliate marketing:

• Affiliate leverage the fact that there are 10000's of affiliate offers they can promote with 0 overhead. They only need to build traffic.
• You can monetize a much wider variety of traffic as an affiliate due to the huge pool of offers. where you as a mortgage loan generation business are restricted to a very targeted group of people.
• The advertisers take care of everything past the click.

Pros to selling leads directly

• You take out a number of middle men and increase your profit per lead by a great deal.
• You have full control of the offer and you can optimize the full lead generation path.
• you own the lead and can sell access to it to multiple people and upsell and cross sell the lead to your hearts content.
• you can leverage affiliates to promote your offers.

There are many more reasons to go either direction and alot of people do some of both with great success.

Affiliate marketing has many "lasting" business opportunities. for instance building a destination site: youtube, digg, whatever..
building a diverse PPC spend "not long term, but pretty stable"
large organic search engine coverage. As long as your not relying on a loophole or something temporary SEO has a good deal of long term opportunities.

If your generating your own traffic, and handling the full backend management manually and over the telephone I would guess your gonna have issues with scaling.

 

[Blastyourass]

Your points are more then valid and this is the best post I have read in a while.

However, I think affiliate marketing is just a glorified term for sales. I sold real estate. I was in sales. I sold weed, I was in sales. I sold vacations via landing page, I was in sales ie:affiliate marketing.

Affiliate management companies operate and manage a system of products much like a MLM operation would work because essentially it is. With it's army of sales people who sale and recruit. Rinse repeat. Recruiting dies, company dies. That's fine and I don't have a problem with them in general because the real estate business and mortgage business, from an operational stand point is based on recruiting 24/7.

They definitely do a lot of good and provide opportunity to many people.

Maybe I'm just a paranoid closet Jew who wants to make sure I count and track every penny. Plus convert every mother fucker who comes in contact with me.

I just can't sleep wondering if my clicks are converting and not knowing if those clicks will last.

you can focus on your offer, and building a business around your offer
or you can focus on traffic, and building a business generating traffic.

eventually its optimal to control your offers but not while your a one man show.

Blastyourass, you are suggesting people get into lead generation and lead sales rather than affiliate marketing and there is good reason the affiliate marketing industry is thriving.

Pros to affiliate marketing:

• Affiliate leverage the fact that there are 10000's of affiliate offers they can promote with 0 overhead. They only need to build traffic.
• You can monetize a much wider variety of traffic as an affiliate due to the huge pool of offers. where you as a mortgage loan generation business are restricted to a very targeted group of people.
• The advertisers take care of everything past the click.

Pros to selling leads directly

• You take out a number of middle men and increase your profit per lead by a great deal.
• You have full control of the offer and you can optimize the full lead generation path.
• you own the lead and can sell access to it to multiple people and upsell and cross sell the lead to your hearts content.
• you can leverage affiliates to promote your offers.

There are many more reasons to go either direction and alot of people do some of both with great success.

Affiliate marketing has many "lasting" business opportunities. for instance building a destination site: youtube, digg, whatever..
building a diverse PPC spend "not long term, but pretty stable"
large organic search engine coverage. As long as your not relying on a loophole or something temporary SEO has a good deal of long term opportunities.

If your generating your own traffic, and handling the full backend management manually and over the telephone I would guess your gonna have issues with scaling.

 

[Laura]

However, I think affiliate marketing is just a glorified term for sales. I sold real estate. I was in sales. I sold weed, I was in sales. I sold vacations via landing page, I was in sales ie:affiliate marketing.

AM *is* sales. Just online.

We do consulting with a local company that does a few different kinds of sales in a couple of different businesses. It's almost been a case study of automated internet marketing (landing page, content, offer, conversions, etc.) versus traditional on-the-phone lead closing.

One part of their business involves insurance leads and sales. While the lead generation is fully web automated via PPC and natural traffic, they are always sold on the phone with agents. (For now.) They do incredibly well here - one of the best in the nation in their field (if not the best - I can't recall).

Likewise, there is another division that offers a monthly management service for a monthly fee. The clientèle is low-income (they have to be to qualify for what they do for them), and all leads are generated online and then 'sold' by a big team of sales people in-house. These are both very traditional and very profitable businesses for them, but they are always looking to raise the bar and automate.

So they took monthly management part of their business and made it entirely automated on the web but as a one-time thing. There is no actual human interaction with customers ever (short of the occasional refund). There is no phone number even listed on the website. Mind you - it's the *exact* same clientèle as business number 2 that I mentioned above. One might even argue they are in competition (and they do advertize side by side). All traffic is driven via PPC from Google, MSN, and Yahoo. From concept to launch was about a month (because they could reuse the backend/database - which is the part that's difficult to replicate by another company without considerable investment).

That was a few weeks ago. The automated site is now making nearly $1000 a day in profit and profits have grown more than 30% each day. There has not yet been price testing, no backend selling, no upselling to their other service that involves the sales people, no affiliate program, etc. They are going to be moving to a monthly sub plan on this site, too - but without the people to manage it.

The site requires one person to run. (To manage the ads and other general observations.)

The original company has 15+ sales people there every day - plus all of the other support (processing, accounting, etc. - it's much more messy).

My point is that they could have easily stayed within their traditional sales comfort zone and felt like they HAD to talk to each prospect because that's the way it worked in their world. They have two very profitable business that do very well, but clearly the automated route does very well, too.

Foor for thought. (I love that I got to watch, too. Love this stuff. )

 

[Diorex]

I agree with BYA. This is how I built my first online company. I sold satellites and figured out I could get paid a heck of a lot more if I actually took control of the process.

Like mortgages this is a product that people want to ask questions about. How many ESPN's do I get? Can I get the naughty channels? Is it possibel to get both DVD and HD in the same room (pre HD-DVR's)? What happens when it rains? etc etc

None of the questions are that hard and it feels great when you sell someone you know would not have bought otherwise, but the downside is that even when you throttle the ads at night, people still call at all hours. I have made sales from some strange places... While getting a glass of wter at 3AM, while getting a traffic ticket, in the bathroom of a night club, in an airplane as the pilot was doing his pre-flight chatter, in the parking garage of the hospital 20 minutes after my daughter was born...I allowed it to consume me. I tried to outsource it but everytime I heard a call I knew I could close that didnt get closed I got pissed.

I was closing 40-50 sales per day myself and had reps doing 25 each with the same volume of calls. No matter how hard I tried to automate it, I was my best salesman.

Now one of the things I look for in new verticals is that it is a product that can be bought online, without the need for human interactions. I have seriously looked at doing an auto loan company (not leads, actually writing the loans - far more lucrative) but one of the critical factors is a call center which I just cannot convince myself I want to attempt again.

I think the important takeaway from this thread should be: Think outside the box. Dont just let someone throw up an 800 number and appropriate your leads. You can always land them on your 800 number which says "we are connecting you to an operator now, this call may be recorded for Quality assurance purposes." The fact that you listen to each call that lasts more than 5 minutes to make sure you get paid in the event of an order does not have to be disclosed...Once the merchant knows you might be listening, it is amazing how few of your sales get put into the wrong bucket.

 

[lerchmo]

But the main difference in terms of blastyourasses model and what most of the people promoting azoogle offers is the placement of responsibility.
either give the responsibility AND overhead to the advertiser to manage and monetize the prospect.
or take the responsibility yourself.

The biggest difference besides overhead is TRUST. when you shift the responsibility to the advertiser and whatever middlemen or facilitators there may be. You also are required to trust them with your traffic which is really kindoff a fucked up model. You are generating a real asset then giving it away and from that point forward you are completely in the dark to what the prospect does and if it converts. then you read reports as to what happens.

This disconnect between when you pass off the traffic and the reporting IS ABUSED. but that is a price many affiliates are willing to pay in return for the leverage to promote so many offers. The only real check that is in place when it comes to this disconnect is competition. but in the industries current state that really only barely keeps the problem in check.

Of course the affiliate -> middleman relationship is abused as well with fake or previously rejected leads being pushed among other things.

But in truth the leverage that you get as an affiliate in many peoples situations is worth more than controlling the whole cycle. And the best solution so far which shifts the Trust back into the hands of the affiliate is White labeling.

3rd party whitelabeling? mabye some type of 3rd party trust based white labeling hosting/verification business can improve that relationship.

ramble ramble ramble

 

[Laura]

But the main difference in terms of blastyourasses model and what most of the people promoting azoogle offers is the placement of responsibility.

ramble ramble ramble

Me likes the rambling.

 

[Blastyourass]

Laura. This is super interesting because I would compare what they do with my business. Very similar in nature and with low income clientel.

Ummmmmm....url please?

I mean if I could automate and convert like I do now and even less, I would most certainly chose to automate.

Maybe I'm being old school with my HAVING to talk with clients.

But the number you quote seems too good to be true? And to tell you the truth I believe you somewhat because I study this shit and eloan is doing that to. But there is always a human element there, somewhere. Yes, it wil be automated as much as possible but if you cut it out completely, I don't care what anyone says, you will lose sales. And it's not like 2-3% its more like 25-50%.

No phone number? What's the CTR and conversion?

Loss of sales would have to out way cost of labor.

If this is the case then that would be a case study to basically change the whole service industry over night. Lay offs would be in the millions. Companies would be saving billions.

Hamburgers will spit out of the drive through window, bank tellers would be landing pages. Oh wait there is ATM's but people still go to the bank, even low income people????? Drive thrus but people still sit down and eat. Ziprealty.com, save cash and buy a house online and save thousands but people will still go to RE/MAX and pay full commission to the tune of thousands more.

mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.......I'm not sold Laura. Close though.

AM *is* sales. Just online.

We do consulting with a local company that does a few different kinds of sales in a couple of different businesses. It's almost been a case study of automated internet marketing (landing page, content, offer, conversions, etc.) versus traditional on-the-phone lead closing.

One part of their business involves insurance leads and sales. While the lead generation is fully web automated via PPC and natural traffic, they are always sold on the phone with agents. (For now.) They do incredibly well here - one of the best in the nation in their field (if not the best - I can't recall).

Likewise, there is another division that offers a monthly management service for a monthly fee. The clientèle is low-income (they have to be to qualify for what they do for them), and all leads are generated online and then 'sold' by a big team of sales people in-house. These are both very traditional and very profitable businesses for them, but they are always looking to raise the bar and automate.

So they took monthly management part of their business and made it entirely automated on the web but as a one-time thing. There is no actual human interaction with customers ever (short of the occasional refund). There is no phone number even listed on the website. Mind you - it's the *exact* same clientèle as business number 2 that I mentioned above. One might even argue they are in competition (and they do advertize side by side). All traffic is driven via PPC from Google, MSN, and Yahoo. From concept to launch was about a month (because they could reuse the backend/database - which is the part that's difficult to replicate by another company without considerable investment).

That was a few weeks ago. The automated site is now making nearly $1000 a day in profit and profits have grown more than 30% each day. There has not yet been price testing, no backend selling, no upselling to their other service that involves the sales people, no affiliate program, etc. They are going to be moving to a monthly sub plan on this site, too - but without the people to manage it.

The site requires one person to run. (To manage the ads and other general observations.)

The original company has 15+ sales people there every day - plus all of the other support (processing, accounting, etc. - it's much more messy).

My point is that they could have easily stayed within their traditional sales comfort zone and felt like they HAD to talk to each prospect because that's the way it worked in their world. They have two very profitable business that do very well, but clearly the automated route does very well, too.

Foor for thought. (I love that I got to watch, too. Love this stuff. )

 

[Blastyourass]

You're right Lerchmo. Trust. I just don't trust a link code.

What about self gen leads directed to your inbox that are then filtered into a real time lead management platform. Lead comes to you, recorded, and then auto delivered to the recipient. What so hard about that? I just feel as if it's purposely manipulated that way so there is ABUSE and what I call SKIMMING the pot.

Any abuse on the affiliate should be immediate ban as far as cross seling because that what fucked up the industry as a whole anyway and why lead
management platforms (ebay style) thrive.

If you smart mother fuckers made a program operated by a third party that acts like an escrow/quality control for affiliates then you would be rich forever. But the affiliate management companies would not adopt it because?

They can't skim the pot, right?

This disconnect between when you pass off the traffic and the reporting IS ABUSED. but that is a price many affiliates are willing to pay in return for the leverage to promote so many offers. The only real check that is in place when it comes to this disconnect is competition. but in the industries current state that really only barely keeps the problem in check.

Of course the affiliate -> middleman relationship is abused as well with fake or previously rejected leads being pushed among other things.

But in truth the leverage that you get as an affiliate in many peoples situations is worth more than controlling the whole cycle. And the best solution so far which shifts the Trust back into the hands of the affiliate is White labeling.

3rd party whitelabeling? mabye some type of 3rd party trust based white labeling hosting/verification business can improve that relationship.

ramble ramble ramble

 

[lerchmo]

You're right Lerchmo. Trust. I just don't trust a link code.

What about self gen leads directed to your inbox that are then filtered into a real time lead management platform. Lead comes to you, recorded, and then auto delivered to the recipient. What so hard about that? I just feel as if it's purposely manipulated that way so there is ABUSE and what I call SKIMMING the pot.

Any abuse on the affiliate should be immediate ban as far as cross seling because that what fucked up the industry as a whole anyway and why lead
management platforms (ebay style) thrive.

If you smart mother fuckers made a program operated by a third party that acts like an escrow/quality control for affiliates then you would be rich forever. But the affiliate management companies would not adopt it because?

They can't skim the pot, right?

leadpoint and leadpile are to some degree like that.

 

[Blastyourass]

Yes but if you apply a lead management system for the affiliate as well. Lead point and pile are just middle men but effective because sellers know they can trust them to deliver the money and buyers can trust them to back them up for bunk leads. This will be the standard for many industries soon. But can only work in certain areas.

A simple affilaite protection code that relays the lead to the affiliate as well as the offering company. Lead is tracked and then company updates with a click. Coverted, in process, no contact etc. Sold, affiliate is alerted via email. I don't know all that code shot but I'm sure it would be easy shit for them

I know of companies offering this but not on a broad scale. It seems like all the companies are in control and raking in millions off affilaites and affiliates have no one to back them up, Unless thay are big hitters.

leadpoint and leadpile are to some degree like that.

 

[Onedollaridea]

Guess what guys, I got this new service working 4 weeks ago. I have a call center setup in india with 4 people working 24/7.
1) people go on my site
2) read product details
3) either call us on free number or make online order
4) order is taken and processed,
5) advertiser processes order and pays me for the sale.

I advertise about the site thru google and yahoo.

I generally make over 500 in prodit per week.

 

[Diorex]

If you are anything like me when I call an 800 number and get someone offshore, I hang up and call another business. I would be very careful having low wage workers being your sales agents.

I much preferred a base plus incentive for sales with all my call center guys, but that still did not get the results I was looking for. I just could not replicate my sales ability and passion with low paid workers.

 

[Xrproto]

Yeah...lol. They just ubered their pale white asses on to Wall Street via cyberspace, spamming craigslist and relying on link codes to get paid.

Well wall street blows ass but that's another topic. Point was you don't need awesome people skills to be successful. Just think outside of the box...like you.

Your spams and scams will not last. I am talking about business models around offers you can creat yourself. You make the offer, you control the offer, your convert the offer and you track the offer.

This can work for almost any business under the sun. Even scams if that's your cup of tea.

Well I don't spam, in fact I've never posted on craigslist before. Not sure what I've been doing that would correlate into a scam.

Exactly...my cup of tea. I find one of the biggest pains is dealing with customers directly and believe it or not business models have been built around spamming now that shit doesn't take any people skills.

Sometimes I come here and I go these guys are fucken genious with all the PHP, HTML and zip shit and then I go wait a second, they just don't get it do they?:error:

Why not make a company you can run and promote your company?

Oh wait let's do like everyone else and pick a product off the shelf, make a landing page, do ppc or spam craigslist:error: again. Then rely on a link code to see if your going to get paid in net 30:repuke: if your lucky.

Well that php, html and whatever your code of choice is what gives us the net. I'm not sure what everyone else is doing on here but that's what I've been doing...building my own company based off of the internet and craigslist isn't even in my plan.

I'm not knocking your idea or model just pointing out that there are an infite amount of models one can have online that doesn't include spamming of any type of linking code or taking calls.

Some things one does need the extra interaction with the customer but with others it would just relsut in the loss of sales where less is better. That's where knowing your target comes in handy.