The best advertiser is one that can take leads from anywhere in the world.
An example of this advertiser would be one that offers online courses, software, or eBooks.
You should send your first 50 leads to yourself to determine if they're qualified leads that would turn into business for your advertisers.
Then personally send these leads to your advertisers.
If the first 5 leads turn into business for them, and the next few don't, it won't matter to them if they pay for some referrals that didn't work out. They know that overall your referral program works.
They will be loyal advertisers for you forever.
Talking to your visitors also gives you the added advantage to tweak your content and referral forms to provide the best kind of qualified leads to send to your advertisers.
Your Income Activator referral program also allows you filter leads geographically and by trigger questions.
For example if you're sending leads to dentists in Toronto and Burlington that are offering different services, your visitor could select which location, and which service they're looking for; i.e. a dentist specializing in teeth whitening or a dentist specializing in dentures.
You can also set your forms to capture a lead even if it's not an area you service. You can set your referral form to ask your visitor for their location and what they're looking for. When this visitor enters in their info into your referral form, they're sent to a page saying "Sorry we couldn't help you this time."
You also can set it up so that you're emailed this lead and you can contact that visitor and help them try to find what they're looking for. This gives you an opportunity to send this lead to a potential advertiser, while expanding your referral network based on your visitor traffic.
For local advertisers you need to be extremely careful that you send them leads inside their geographical area.
Sending a visitor referral to your advertiser that's hundreds of miles away from them, that they can’t service, will upset both your visitor and your advertiser.
A Good Example - Of A Bad Referral
Let’s say a painter in Toronto agreed to pay you $10 per lead.
Day 1 The 1st visitor lead you send them was from Windsor. Your advertiser has to take their time to explain to that person that they can't help them because it’s a 5 hour drive to Windsor. The visitor is thinking that this is a useless referral program and will never use it again, and certainly NOT recommend it.
Day 2 The next day you send another visitor lead from Montreal to your Toronto painter. Your visitor speaks French, your painter doesn’t, and it’s a big mess.
Day 3 The 3rd day your advertiser gets a lead from India, now they’re really mad and they’re calling you because they know you've billed them $60 for what they consider harassment.
You apologize and take the leads off their invoice.
Day 4 The 4th day you sent a Toronto lead to your Toronto painter, but they don’t get the business. You can be sure that they will be on the phone to you, knowing you can take this lead off their billing. Of course you do, because you don’t want to lose them as an advertiser.
You have now trained your advertisers to know that all they have to do to get out of paying their bill is to complain to you, and that they’re only going to pay you when your lead turns into business for them.
If you had 20 advertisers, all getting leads they can’t service, that’s 20 mad calls to you, 80 leads you’ve had to delete, and 80 unsatisfied visitors bad mouthing your service.
Plus, your lead program has just turned into a sales based revenue stream, where you’re dependent on your advertiser’s ability to sell, and their interest in reporting their sales to you for billing.
I once sent 5,000 leads to an advertiser based on a split of commission, and they reported zero, none, natta… sales to me. When I put them back on my pay per lead program, I was shocked they stayed on, and ended up billing them $1,000's of dollars a month for my leads. I was even more taken back when they made a play to buy my referral business!
When your advertisers are local, they will know each other, and will talk about their bad experience and your referral program will begin to crumble.
In the meantime, someone seeing what a good idea you have, but what what you’re doing wrong, might decide to start their own referral business.
They then send leads to businesses in their geographical area, even approach your advertisers, and their business takes off, while yours dies off.
A lot of people starting a referral businesses spend a lot of time getting advertisers and them blindingly sending visitor leads to them.
When I started InsuranceHotline.com, sending leads to brokers, I began with one broker in Toronto that could handle the majority of my leads. It wasn’t until I was billing them over $60,000 a month that I decided to get more brokers to take my leads. In fact, brokers were calling me to sign on.
To Begin
You’re far better off, creating your lead program, for your local area, and begin by sending all your leads to yourself.
Then contact an advertiser you want to have on your referral program and sending them these leads after you've talked to these people and determined that they would be a good lead as potential business for this advertiser.
Only then will you know the kind of visitors you’re getting, what they're most interested in, and if they would be good leads to send to advertisers. Now you have a business.
With InsuranceHotline.com I found that 90% of my visitors wanted a car insurance quote and that 80% of these people were form Toronto and the GTA. From just that visitor traffic I was able to generate $50,000 to $100,000 a month.
I also provided referrals for home, tenant, life, travel, boat, and commercial insurance for all of Canada, the US and the UK. And all this work was a complete waste of time and distracted me from what the majority of my visitors really wanted, and where I was making money from.
You need to test your referral website by getting your own leads, understand what your visitor traffic wants, and geographically where they're coming from. Only then will you know what advertisers you will need to build your referral revenue on.
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