I see my future in lead generation in being able to get inbound leads. What I mean by inbound leads are leads finding me by my websites or referrals, not me going out and actively marketing directly to a batch of people. It just makes so much more sense to me. There is a passive nature to it that I just love the thought of.
Over the past couple months I’ve been slowly working on building my online presence. I’ve signed up with Trevor Mauch and his Investor Carrot websites and have been very happy so far with the quality of the product. Now even though the websites are great, it takes time and effort on my part to rise up in the search engine results. Since getting the websites, I’ve done very little outside of going through the sites and personalizing them a bit more.
My Ranking Rise
My Seller Lead site started out on about the forth page of Google for my keywords (Sell Your NJ House Fast, We Buy NJ Houses, and We Buy Houses NJ). That was three months ago and I’ve done very little to the sites since then.
One component of page rank however is your sites Age. The longer your site is around the more inherent credibility it amasses in the eye of Google. With that being said, lets take a look at where my site ranks today.
Just in case you are wondering how you find out which page you are on, there is only one way and it’s literally by typing in the keyword phrase and scanning the results.
Send Me Some Leads
I was not expecting much of a rise in my search engine rankings, so when I suddenly started getting some leads in my inbox it peaked my interest. Over the past 2 weeks I’ve gotten 5 new seller leads. That may not sound like a lot, but it was 4 more then I’ve gotten in the first two and a half months of the website. So I went and checked the traffic…
Disappointingly the traffic from the search engines hadn’t really picked up that much. I’m sure that is because I’m not in the top few spots of the search results with any keyword, and not even on the first page for the highly searched ones. The one I am on the first page for Sell Your NJ House Fast is not a widely searched term, so it’s not going to bring in a ton of traffic.
So where was the extra traffic coming from?
The bump in traffic has come from a referral link that I had put on my NewJerseyProbate.org site. Remember that is the site that some how had risen to #1 in google for the term New Jersey Probate. What I had done was replace the Opt-In box on that site with a backlink to my Seller Lead squeeze page.
That backlink has produced 21 click throughs to my squeeze page since I made the change. This is a great example of the power of backlinks and referrals. Also it demonstrates how building a network of sites can really go a long way to directing leads to you.
Keeping Track of my Leads
The website from Investor Carrot keeps track of the information that is entered into the site by leads, but I don’t depend on that to organize things. When I get the you have a new lead email from my site, I’ll take the information from the email and enter it into Si Lead Manager with the tags Website and SellYourHouseFast. This allows me to easily call up all leads I’ve gotten through the web and also from which site it came from.
What I can also do now that its in my lead management system is to setup a follow up email campaign. I haven’t created a follow up letter just yet though. I’m thinking of either a nice thank you letter, or a more sales pitch type of letter. I’m sorta leaning towards a thank you letter with a small call to action to try and get them to call me.
That is about it for now, but to help you out I’m going to start including a resources section at then end of my posts to sum up any of the tools that I have used as well as list some great links where I learned about some of the things that I’m doing. Hope it helps…
Resources
Keep track of traffic and SEO using Google Analytics. This is the best tool out there and it’s free. I will admit it is a bit complicated because there is just so much you can do with it. Just use what you can figure out and leave the rest for another time. I just use it for seeing how much traffic I am getting, where my traffic is coming, what keywords users are using to find my website and which pages on my site are the most popular.
Manage all your leads using SI Lead Manager. I developed this software for my use and decided to give it away for free while it is still in beta. Over 500 people have downloaded the latest version so far and many have said that it’s crucial to their business. If you do decided to try it out let me know what you think.
I use InvestorCarrot (affiliate link) to get all my inbound leads. Here is an example of one of my squeeze pages that I use that has been sending leads to my inbox….Example Seller Ssqueeze Page. Once I start doing some SEO work for my sites they should REALLY start sending me leads. I can easily imagine getting 5 to 10 a day if I can get to the number 1 spot on google for my keywords. That would be 300 leads to my inbox every month!!! But hey, I’m only at about 2 to 3 per week right now so I have to hold back my excitement a bit.
Learn about the topics in this post more…
- Seo In 2013: What to do (and avoid like the plague)
- Inbound Leads Cost 61% Less
- About Google Page Rank