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Shoemoney - Skills To Pay The Bills

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Crushing Short Term Loan Offers With Leads Market

Posted: 07 Apr 2016 06:00 AM PDT

I was first introduced into the short-term loan industry about 4 years ago when I was hired as a consultant to a company out of Las Vegas.

I improved their conversion by 17%.  Yes, I’m good like that.  For that I got to know the interworks of the internals.

Since they were the advertiser (product owner), I got to know a lot about the affiliate industry for short-term loans.  I had never promoted this niche as an affiliate so I was very curious where the affiliates came from and how they promoted the offers.

All of this was fascinating.  After all – affiliates had to use some creative & “out of the box” methods to drive leads for a commission because many advertising platforms do not allow the vertical of short-term loans.

The one thing that I learned quickly is that all the top affiliates went through an affiliate network called Leads Market.

When I first heard of it I assumed it was just a place that bought and sold leads because of the name.

But it’s a true direct advertiser that specializes in the short-term industry.

So I followed the path and got to know the folks over at Leads Market.  I was pretty blown away at how awesome their affiliate managers were and how they treated affiliates.

Like I said you have to be very creative in the industry. Most people would give up quick but their affiliate managers work hard and close with their affiliates. Not only giving tips to seasoned veterans but even to complete newbies.  While most affiliate networks focus on the 1%, Leads Market gives newbies the blueprint to be successful and keeps in contact with them as much as they do the top earners.  This is very rare in the affiliate industry.

Morgan Gethers - CEO LeadsMarketI recently sat down with the Leads Market’s CEO, Morgan Gethers, (who is a great guy) and got to ask him some questions:

Since when is the LeadsMarket.com platform active and what industry is LeadsMarket focused on?

Morgan: We’ve been around since 2011. Currently, our focus has been on leads for financial based products such as payday, installment, auto, and small business loans.

How has the company's service offer evolved in the last years?

Morgan: We started with payday, then we moved into installments and later we moved into personal loans. Recently, we also are active in auto and small business loans. To conclude, we’ve continued to really building out one product at a time and scaling it to our affiliates to make sure that they’re able to offer more products to their customer base as well.

Who are the key heads behind LeadsMarket.com and what is their background?

Morgan: The company was founded by our board members: Max, Michael and Frank. We also have many other key employees throughout our organization such as the Head of our Affiliate Department, Joe, the Head of our Lending Department, Anet, as well as our Operations Director, Sven. There are many others who really helped make sure we continue to grow the company in a manner that many other companies would be envious of.

What type of affiliates are joining the LeadsMarket.com network?

Morgan: We have affiliates with us who specialize in SEO, PPC, mobile, email and calls. Depending on the type of traffic we receive, we have different ways to monetize it while also making sure that this traffic is monetized in the best way possible.

How do LeadsMarket affiliates get paid and in what frequency payouts are conducted?

Morgan: We pay affiliates in any desired manner, either via check, ACH, Webmoney, PayPal, wire, and more. For revenues over one hundred dollars, payouts are generally distributed weekly. This means most of our affiliates get their cash flows in a fast and efficient manner, which allows for faster and further growth in their business.

How does LeadsMarket support its affiliates to increase revenues and what type of reporting LeadsMarket is offering?

Morgan: Great question. LeadsMarket does a few different things.

Firstly, we supply our affiliates with helpful materials to improve their PPC, SEO, and overall marketing strategies.

Secondly, we provide (1) JavaScript forms (iframes) (2) HTML templates (3) landing pages and (4) host and post sites that utilizes our robust hundred lender ping tree.

Thirdly, we have reporting that allows affiliates to break down EPL (earnings per lead) from wherever they’re trying to target and that allows them to see what kind of consumers they’re sending through, per ad, for example, and per sub IDs. So that they can always figure out the best ways to improve their profitable traffic while decreasing their less profitable traffic.

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What makes LeadsMarket.com the dominant affiliate network for loan products?

Morgan: As a lead generation business we’ve grown very quickly throughout the years and now we do over two hundred thousand leads a day. And we do that through a few different methods.

First, our EPLs are by far the highest as we consistently go 20 and 30 percent higher than our next largest competitor which is why we have so much traffic.

Second, we pay out 90 percent of the revenue to the affiliate. So we make sure that the affiliate is completely and fully compensated. If they don’t have the capability, we can even help them put exit pages on their traffic, help them monetize their data, and we also don’t charge the affiliate any fees.

How is LeadsMarket able to offer the highest EPL in the industry?

Morgan: Obviously, we have an incredibly large lender network over one hundred fifty lenders in our system and that allows us to have the most coverage possible. Moreover, being an affiliate with us also means you get the advantages of all of our own internal traffic we do as we spend millions on radio and TV. That always assists both the lenders and the affiliates. On top of that there is our technology, our proprietary system, which is truly one of a kind. It is not only self-learning but it’s something that we’ve really never seen in our space before and that also helped us go even further than our competition.

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What is the advantage for an affiliate to work with LeadsMarket rather directly selling leads to an online lender?

Morgan: There are two major reasons for working with LeadsMarket versus directly selling leads to an online lender.

First, building a large lender network like ours (100+) requires heavy resources, possibly twenty to thirty people to build the infrastructure and lender pool. From an affiliate's perspective, the overhead expense combined with only making the 10 percent that our company takes is going to cost you a heck of a lot more than that 90 percent that you would be gaining.

Secondly, when you work with us because we are so large we’re going to be able to get looser filters and higher payouts from the lender than a single affiliate is ever going to be able to get.

How to reach out to LeadsMarket.com affiliates managers?

Morgan: If you come to our website you can sign up and an affiliate manager will reach out to you directly. You may contact us through LinkedIn, email and phone. We’re also extremely active at tradeshows, serving as top sponsors for several national conferences. We are very viewable for our affiliates.

 

If you are already an affiliate in the short term loan space but want to go to the source then you better sign up for Leads Market.

But if you are a newbie and want to learn about the space I highly encourage you to check it out!

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How to generate your First 1-5 Clients (within 30 days) - DailyBlogTips

How to generate your First 1-5 Clients (within 30 days) - DailyBlogTips


How to generate your First 1-5 Clients (within 30 days)

Posted: 03 Apr 2016 09:04 PM PDT

Getting your first client or customer in any business is said to be the most difficult. Digital marketing businesses are no different. When you first start a company you have no case studies, no testimonials and more importantly no trust. In this article I'm going to outline the exact process I used to gain my first 3 clients and $1,700 a month in billing all in 30 days. This was an extremely time consuming process, but if you are willing to work it's the cheapest way to generate clients in the early days of your business and can be transferred to almost any business, website or industry.

The method itself is based around prospecting and personalised outreach. As you probably know, spam emails killed the semi-generic email blasts of 10 years ago which means even if you have a list of warm prospects, chances are they receive a number of spam emails every day. The key is to distinguish yourself from these and offer something of value very early on in your sales funnel.

This strategy is also for anyone looking to create a long-term business, my personal results are related to my seo business (HQ SEO) and gaining long term clients that pay us every month. Spending 100 hours to land the perfect client is worth it for us, but you should always calculate how much time you'd be willing to input for each new customer or client you acquire.

Research, Relevance & Prospecting

Researching your prospects is easily the most important element to this entire process. Before I explain how to collect prospects it's important to only add individuals that truly need whatever you are offering and also ones that you would like as clients, bad clients are not worth what they pay you! Below are the 3 methods I used to research potential prospects.

Method 1: Niche relevant forums

The first method I utilised was visiting niche relevant business forums. I focused on one business forum in particular as I was already active on this forum which made adding value a lot easier. When you've found a forum (of number of forums) you believe your prospects are active on, the next step is to post regularly, 5-10 posts a day is perfect, these should be relevant to what your business does, but also you need to build up your number of posts. This is so you can add a link in your signature or have enough posts to allow direct messages through the forum, this is usually around the 25-50 post mark.
Once you've built a rapport with the forum you can begin to ask individuals what aspects of their business they are struggling with the most, and begin to connect with individuals about their issues and remember to record the individual's usernames that connect with you frequently, continue growing this list every time you are on the forum.

Method 2: Google Ads

The next method is finding prospects that already advertise through Google. If you are looking for prospects in a specific niche, simply search relevant keywords in that niche and find the website and contact information of the business's using AdWords. This was the strategy I used to generate over 1,300 potential prospects! This was possible due to the range of clients we can take on, any business owner that needs more leads, which as you can imagine is 99% of businesses.

Method 3: Print advertisers (Newspapers and magazines)

The final method I utilised was finding businesses spending money on print advertising. Print is a relatively expensive and low ROI form of advertising, if a business has the budget for magazine or newspaper ads, they will likely have the budget for SEO (or whatever product or service you might be offering.) Simply pick up a number of industry relevant magazines and record the names of the company's advertising in these.

I recommend having a list of over 1,000 prospects… Yes I know that's a lot but if you can create a list of over 1,000 potential clients, you only need a conversion rate of 0.1% to get your very first client. Once you have your list you can move onto the outreach stage.

As I mentioned earlier, this is a very time intensive client generation technique, but to reduce the time you have to input you can always utilise staff or VA's to streamline the process. Outsourcing the prospecting stage is a great way to save yourself time, although this does make the process a lot more expensive.

Smart Outreach and Giving Extreme Value

Stage 2 is reaching out to your prospect list in the correct way. Depending on the niche you are in, will depend on how you contact these business owners. Our prospects list was very wide as we can essentially help any business that needs to generate more customers, so the reach out method was relatively simple. If you're in a different industry don't be afraid to get creative.

Reaching out to the individuals on a forum is very easy, but you have to come across extremely personal and genuine, otherwise you will be reported and banned. Message your prospects using a very short semi-personalised script. Our script looked something like this: "Hi , after our discussion on I wanted to check if you need any more help as I'm currently looking to gain positive testimonials for , maybe a full website audit for <>, cheers, Tom.

The outreach for the print or Google ads prospects was very similar although instead of we mentioned how we found the business but didn't see them ranking on the search engines themselves.

After the initial response, which was usually positive, I would generally gently push them into the SEO audit, gaining their email and phone number in the process. This was 100% free and outlined exactly what was wrong with the site and how it was holding them back. I also included estimates on how much (in a monetary figure) they were losing as a result, this is essential, as most business owners don't know how much they would make if they ranked for keyword X or Y, but if you can put a real monetary estimate on this, suddenly the dollar signs appear and they take note to what you are saying.

Follow Ups & Sealing the Deal

Although I had a relatively good response rate for both the emails (email stat screenshot below) and forum direct messages, I had only generated 1 client by day 22 of this case study, although that was over £600 ($850), I had put a lot of hours into the process and wanted to at least break the 4 figure mark.

The key to eventually doing this was following up and what I call "sealing the deal" or gaining a "yes". After I had an initial response from a prospect I knew they were at least interested, if I didn't receive a response within 3-4 days I would email or DM them again asking if they received the last message. This simple follow up technique led to another 7 audits (one of which went on to be a client.)
Once I had conducted the audits, the next stage was to get the prospect on the phone to "go over it", again your main focus should be to help them as if you are truly offering a good service they will benefit from doing business with you anyway. This step is key to getting the "do you want to just do it for me?" style questions and this is what I was looking for from the start and then going on to close the sale.

Breaking the stats down – The results.

1. 1,566 prospects across the 3 research methods.
2. 209 responses from these, after following up twice. (Approximately 13%)
3. 77 audits delivered, very easy to get that first "yes" when something is free. This was about 37% of the individuals who responded initially.
4. 21 calls – A frustratingly low number but many "didn't have the time right away to go over the audit, so following up on this section is essential too.
5. 3 monthly paying clients – As a result within 30 days we landed 3 new clients. 2 x £300 per month and 1x£600 per month client. = Approximately $1700.

Although $1,700 is rather low based on the amount of hours that went into the project, this strategy landed 3 clients without any testimonials or case studies that will continue to pay us every month as long as we deliver on what we promised (which we will.) The conversion rate from the initial 1,566 prospects was (3/1566 = 0.19%.) And it should be noted that we are still in talks with a number of other prospects from the original list.

Strategy Outline – TL;DR

1. Research your prospects that are already spending money on advertising, or are actively looking for information on how to improve their business.
2. Individually reach out to these prospects with a personal and relevant offer.
3. Provide an extreme value, this can be in any form but it must be considered valuable by the prospect.
4. Follow up and seal the deal by offering to do it for them.

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