RateState.com Advertising Suggestions - Best Advice Gets $100

Discussion in 'General Marketing' started by mgustav, Dec 22, 2006.

  1. #1
    Hi everyone,
    I'm pretty new to these forums but it seem clear that many of you are very good at what you do. I know people are willing to give advice for free but I'll pay $100 to the person who gives the advice that I implement. (Sorry, I can only pay one person. :))

    I'm looking for some advice for a site of mine that I'm trying to promote and monetize. I'll tell you what I've done and what hasn't worked.
    The site is http://www.RateState.com. It is a variation of what you've probably seen many, many times on the web. The user fills out a short form and gets contacted by up to 4 lenders. Because of how many people are out there doing this it's difficult to cut through all the "noise" from the competitors. In theory this can be a very useful service for someone who wants to get the best deal on their mortgage so I still believe in it.
    I have a good source of lenders who are quality and trustworthy who buy my leads at aggressive prices. This could be a great moneymaker if I could generate leads consistently.

    I've used PPC, CPM, Opt-In email lists, CPA search engines, Pop-Unders, In network advertising (Metrics Direct / Zango). I've had various results with these methods but mostly resulted in not-so-good results.
    Often, when I partnered up with vendors who had "lists" it resulted in really crappy traffic or fraudulent leads. When I allowed a network to host my forms I often received "filler" leads that were clearly generated by bots. (Thankfully I have a really good quality control system that catches that stuff).
    When I used PPC I couldn't get sufficient amounts of traffic because the key words were so stinking high that generated the most amount of traffic. I tried to advertise using a lot of less competitive keywords but still couldn't really generate much traffic.

    Here's what I need advice on:
    - What method of promotion will give me a set CPA (Cost Per lead Acquisition) that I can really grow aggressively? I'd like to keep it at $20 or less per saleable lead.
    (In my experience this would come from a good affiliate network or paying approximately .03 per click or less)

    Ultimately I want organic traffic. By this I mean I want traffic to my own hosted forms.

    I'm also open to working with anyone who could provide this solution on a partnership basis.

    Thanks for your advice.
     
    mgustav, Dec 22, 2006 IP