How To Generate Mortgage Leads Online

Many people neglect this all important step.  Doing so can really ruin your lead generation campaign, by wasting your time and your money.  So don’t skip it!!

Seriously, I have made this mistake before and even made the mistake of choosing a keyword to target after just looking at the “broad match” in Googles keyword tool.  Well, 2 months later Im number #1 in Google and guess what?  No leads.  Yea, turns out a broad match of 14,000 searches per month was really an exact match of about 60 searches.  I just wasted all that time on a keyword that gets virtually no traffic!! That was way back in the day and I never make that mistake anymore.

Keywords are important for getting traffic, but they are also extremely important for SEO.   Having an exact match domain name GREATLY increases your chances of getting to #1 and it also makes it much easier.  So, if you want to generate mortgage leads for Orange County, CA – you would never want to use ABCrefispecialists.com! Instead, you would do your keyword research, find out the top traffic getting keywords for that county and try to get an exact match domain name like refinanceorangecountyca.com, or .net or .org.  I never use .info.

For most businesses, this is the single biggest mistake they make.  By having your main keyword in your domain name, you are already telling the search engines “hey, look at me! My website is about what these people are searching for!”.  By having a domain name like “lowratesforless.com”, you have no keywords, no location and nothing giving you an advantage for SEO.  Low rates for what?  Where are you located?

Also, if you plan on doing any PPC maketing, having the keyword in your domain name boosts your quality score and saves you tons of money in clicks!  I had a client getting clicks on a mortgage related site I built for them at 5 cents a click before!  Im sure other people were paying $2 plus for the same traffic!

So, just to make it clear – You need to find the keywords that people are searching for to find what your business offers and then use them to create your domain name in a .com, .net or .org.   If the exact phrase is taken, try hyphens.  Such as, Orange-County-FHA-Refinance.com or something like that.  If all the .com, .net and .orgs are taken of those too (which is pretty unlikely), you can add a small word to the END of the domain such as: OrangeCountyFHARefinanceNow.com.  Always have the keywords in the beginning of the domain name.

Now, how do you do the keyword research?  I use a free way and a paid way to do this effectively.  First, just go to Google External Keyword Tool.  You can type in variations of the keywords relating to your business type and see how many people are searching for this per month and how much competition there is.   Play around with this for awhile until you find a good keyword without maxed out competition and good monthly search volume.  Remember to use click the “exact match” tab so you can see how many people are searching for this exact phrase in Google.

The second way to test is by running a small adwords campaign for a day or two.  Once you have a good keyword (or a few) you are thinking about, you may want to find out for sure how many people are searching for this… You can simply make a web 2.0 blog for free or write a good article (using the keyword in the title or course!) and then run an adwords campaign using the keywords you want to test.  I suggest using a bunch of them.  You can also make the Ad have a description that people would not want to click on to save money.  Like :

“Refinance in Orange County”  We are pretty good at doing refi’s and we might be able to help you!

Add the conversion tracking code to the page they land on after you get a lead.  Usually this is a thank you type page or it can also be an Aweber page if you are using Aweber to capture leads.

Set your budget high enough so that the ad will run all day long.   Use the “exact match” setting as well.  Then, let it rip!

The next day, you just go back into your adwords account and check out how many impressions each keyword received during that time period.  If you got any coversions, note which keywords converted.  This step can take much longer than one day generate enough data, but it’s essential for targeting the right keywords that actually turn into leads.

Sometimes, it’s shocking how many people will search for something with an “s” at the end or without an “s” (like program instead of programs) and which keywords people are really searching for.  Now you know exactly how many people would see your website if you targeted that keyword and got it to #1.  If there is traffic, you will get leads!  That simple.

I hope you actually take action on this section of the tutorial!  Failing to do the proper keyword research will doom your project from the start.  Why waste time and energy on promoting a site that may never be profitable???

That’s it for this one, remember to subscribe to my rss feed (get updates every time there is a new post) and bookmark my site so you can find it again!

Sorry, it’s been awhile.  I’ve been working like crazy.  It appears refi’s are about to make a comeback…so you better pay attention to my blog!

So, you have your landing page all set up and all you need to do now is get traffic to it.  Well, there are so many ways to do this I can’t cover it all in one blog post. But, I will start with the fundamentals of SEO.

Assuming that you listened to me and made your domain name your top keyword, you should now have a title and description for that page with that keyword in there as well.  This is you MAIN KEYWORD.  The big boy that you want to be number 1 for.  You should also have a list of many related keywords – maybe long tail keywords that pertain to your niche that also get some good search traffic each month.  I always take the main keyword and a few long tails and start from there.  But first…

You need to get your new website indexed…so it shows up in Google at all.  If it’s not indexed, it’s not in Google.  This is really easy.   If you have a twitter account, just make a twitter post using your websites sitemap URL.  A sitemap is just a page that tells Google and the other search engines all the pages in your website. If you Google “XML Sitemap”, you’ll see a free sitemap generator on there.    Take that URL, such as howtogeneratemortgageleads.net/sitempal.xml and post it on Twitter.  You can write “Here’s an update of my latest mortgage site – URL GOES HERE” or something like that.  Google is crawling Twitter all the time (and was even showing real time tweets) and this will help Google find your site.

You can also use a really cool free site called BulkPing.com .   Here you can get a bunch of free backlinks, create an RSS feed, submit an RSS feed, etc. that will get your site indexed in “25 minutes flat”.  It works…

You’ll know your site is indexed in Google when you do a search for your domain name (such as http://howtogeneratemortgageleads.net) in Google and your site pops up.  If it comes back no results found or just links from other sites, your not indexed yet.

If you have a wordpress blog on your site, go to plugins –> add new –> search plugins and type in google xml sitemaps. Install this plug in and activate it. It will create an xml sitemap of your website (all the pages of your site) and let the search engines know about it. This helps get your site indexed fast too. You should also update this plugin every time you add new pages/posts to your site, so the search engines find those too!

Since you have an exact match domain name (or close to it), you should be in the top 100 websites already.  You won’t get any traffic or leads from that until you get to the first page of Google…more specifically the top 3.

To get your site there, you need backlinks.  Lots of backlinks.  Submitting your site to Digg, Mixx, etc. gets you good backlinks, but those don’t have anchor text. An anchor text link is a link going back to your website that uses a word or words, like: how to generate mortgage leads.  The more links that have that phrase pointing back to your website, the higher your website is going to rank in the search engines.  But, the backlinks have to come from good sites… not bad ones.  The good sites, in Googles eyes, have a higher PR. Page Rank.  I usually go for sites with a PR of 1 or higher.

For your first lesson, the easiest way to get anchor text backlinks is from submitting articles.  Coincidentally, it is also a great way to drive traffic to your site.  You  write articles and in the authors bio you drop your anhcor text links.  Some sites let you put them in the article body, but for most you need to use the authors bio.  Just look on Ezinearticles.com and search for something related to your niche.  You’ll see how they write an article with the titles based on LONG TAIL KEYWORDS and then put anchor text links back to whatever site they are trying to drive traffic to.  I use the main keyword (the one in your domain name) 50% of the time and the other times I switch between a few different long tail keywords.  You are allowed to put 2-3 links in the authors bio, so I just put 2 links in there.

There are thousands of article sites with 0 Page Rank and a handfull of them with good PR.  The good ones, like EzineArticles, ArticlesBase, GoArticles, IdeaMarketers, etc. show up in the search engines and tend to rank really well.  These are the sites you want to use for your article marketing and building your first backlinks.  Why waste time putting links on sites that pass no link juice back to your site and will never be found in any search engine?

To save time, you’ll want to use an article submission software.  This will submit your articles to several different accounts at once.  It’s save a TON of time. You can spin the articles so they are all different as well.

I use Article Submit Auto.  It only posts to the top article directories (the ones with good PR and actually show up in the search engines) and it’s based off of WordPress, so it’s real easy to use.  It’s pretty much like making a blog post.  Once you set up the article accounts, you just load them into your ASA account and it will post to all of them each time you submit an article.  It also will post the article to your own blog and another article site blog as well!  It’s an extra bonus and more links for you.

In addition to this, it converts your articles to PDF’s and posts them to the top PDF sharing websites for even more backlinks.  These sites aren’t used by many people and work really well.  They surprisingly get a lot of traffic.

So, go out and start writing some articles related to your niche.  Remember to make the titles and the topics of your articles revolve around the keywords you want to get visitors from – so the articles show up in the search engines themselves.  Then, put your anchor text in the authors bio so that you can start improving your websites rankings in the search engines.

This is one of the most basic, but most effective, ways to drive website to your website or landing page.  It works!

If you don’t want to write the articles your self, you can outsource them at Iwriter.com.   I wrote a post about that service on this blog and how to find the best writers.  Check it out HERE.

Next time, Ill start talking more about ways to build backlinks to your site… or you can read my SEO software reviews right now.

AFTER you have done your keyword research and have decided on the best keyword for getting the most traffic, it’s time to get a host and then buy your domain name.

A hosting company pretty much does just that, hosts your domain on their servers.  What most people don’t realize is that not all hosting companies are created equal.  Some hosting companies are fine with adult sites.  Sites like this are not looked upon favorably by Google (they usually use black hat techniques to get ranked and they don’t like that!).  If you are on the same server as a bunch of adult sites your site is going to suffer even if it is all about furry bunnies.

Some hosting companies don’t have cpanel, some don’t support php, some have horrible customer service, etc.  It’s hard to find a good host these days.

I always use Bluehost  now.  I have 4 different accounts on different hosts and my Bluehost sites always rank very well in the search engines.  Besides that, they always respond to my support tickets in minutes.   But my favorite thing about them(besides the fact it’s $6.95 a month and you get a free domain name) is that you log into your cpanel account once you set up your domain name, click one button and you have a WordPress blog.  You don’t have to configure a database or anything like that.  It’s the Fantastico button, by the way.

hosting company

You can set up a blog on your domain and make your site a full blog like mydomainname.com OR you can type in the directory you want and it will create it for you automatically.  So, you can type in “blog” and it will create a WordPress blog in the “blog” directory.  So now, you can have a regular HTML website and you can just put a BLOG link on it and that’s your blog.  Such as:  mydomainname.com/blog.  Easy as that!  I put WordPress blogs on nearly all of my sites.

When you sign up you will get a free domain name for life.  Remember to read my post on keyword research before you choose your domain name.

Steps for success:

- Visit Bluehost Now.

Create an account, get a free domain name

- Get Socrates, a premium WordPress Theme.

-Get Aweber, to capture leads AND keep emailing them

Take your domain from bluehost, install WordPress on it and log in.

Go to themes, click Install New, and install the Socrates theme.

Active this theme, choose your title, description and make a custom header.

In the widgets area, add in your Aweber form code.

In five minutes you have a blog that is ready for content and ready to capture mortgage leads! They look awesome too!

Alright! Hopefully you have followed all the steps BEFORE you jump into the domain name buying.  If you haven’t done that, you are most likely going to lose money.  Even though domain names are super cheap, you could end up spending all your time promoting a domain name that gets little or no traffic.  That would suck! It does, trust me I’ve done it.  So, now I’m passing on that knowledge to you.

Ok, when you finally have that keyword narrowed down to your favorite one, what’s next?  The goal is to get an EXACT MATCH domain for that keyword.  This GREATLY increases your chances of being number 1 in Google and if you follow all my SEO advice later, it will help you keep it at number 1.

We will imagine your are a mortgage broker in California.  You like the number of searches per month that “Home Mortgage Loan California” gets.  I’ll save you the trouble…it gets roughly 1000 searches per month for that exact phrase in Google alone.   Not so many you think?  Doesn’t sound as good as “Best FHA Refinance Rates”?  Well, for one thing.  People searching for “Home Mortgage Loan California” are going to be interested in buying a house in CA, so they need a loan.  This means the traffic is very targeted and the conversions will be much higher.

Second, the competition is nothing compared to a fha refinance keyword!  Check this out:

Checking Out A Keyword

You’ll notice doing the search with quotes ” ” around the keyword brings up the number 51,900! That’s hardly any competition at all.  Easily a number 1 traffic getting candidate here.  And look the search results.  I don’t see any of the domain names that have those keywords in the domain, just a few mentions in some titles and descriptions.   This means you can easily rank in the top of Google for this keyword and get good, targeted traffic.  Try ranking for a generic term like fha refinance rates and see how long it takes to get some traffic…

Back to our guy! So, this CA broker reads my blog and says to himself “I need to register a domain name for this keyword!”.  He goes to Bluehost, signs up for a $6.95 a month hosting account and gets a free domain name.  He enters in “HomeMortgageLoanCalifornia.com”….. Dang it!  Taken… The same thing .net…dang it! Taken.  Then HomeMortgageLoanCalifornia.org …Bingo!  It’s available.   He adds it to the cart and pretty soon this dude will be raking in the dough generating free mortgage leads online.

PLUS, if this guy wants to run a PPC campaign (Adwords) to get traffic to his website right away, he will pay less than the other advertisers bidding for that keyword. He has the keyword in his domain.

Now, if the EXACT keyword is not available, you then try hyphens, such as: home-mortgage-loan-california.com.  I only use .com, .net and .org.  I have not heard of much success with .info domains, so don’t risk it.  If all those combinations are taken up, then just add a small word to the END of the domain, like homemortgageloancalifornianow.com.  You want the keywords first in your domain name.

That my friends, is how you do it.

Damn, right now I’m thinking I should have charged for this info!  Or at least made you opt in with your email address! If you are thinking the same, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed and get updated every time I make a new post.  You don’t want to miss any of this!  How to make a landing page and SEO is still to come…

Visit BlueHost now to sign up for your hosting account and get a FREE domain name. I use them.

Ok, you registered your domain name and are ready to rock ‘n’ roll.  What do you do now?

Well, the easiest way to generate mortgage  leads online is with a landing page.  This is a page that is designed to capture your visitors information.  The lead capture form should be located on the visible part of the page when visitors first land on the site.  Usually, the upper, right hand corner.

I’ve seen many pages that are cluttered with info and flashing text ads, which makes it hard for the visitors to even know what to do.  You should make it as easy as possible for them to know how to get more information.  Don’t clutter your website up with all kinds of information.  Just pick the top 3-4 reasons people should use your company, highlight those and put them next to the form.  If you have a FREE BONUS to give to visitors to make them enter their personal information it always increases conversions.   Try giving out a free report on the top 10 mistakes first time home buyers make when it comes to getting a loan or something like that.  It works!

Now, if you know how to make websites already, great.  Chances are, most people don’t know how to do this correctly.  Especially creating a nice looking form that instantly emails you when a prospect  enters their information.  And remember, if your website looks like crap people will not trust you and it will be harder to get them to fill out your form…if not impossible.

Here is the EASIEST, CHEAPEST way to build a lead capture website:

1. Visit Bluehost Now.

Create an account, get a free domain name

2. Get Socratese, a premium WordPress Theme.  SEO optimized and very easy to set up and customize a full website.  I have made 20+ with this and can set them up in 5 minutes flat.

-Get Aweber, to capture leads AND keep emailing them.  You get a custom form code from Aweber (you can use a free WP plug for this, but you wont be able to email the leads) and you just copy and paste this code into Socrates.  You capture leads, get emailed when they come in and keep emailing them with pre set emails so YOUR COMPANY is infront of the customer over and over again.

Take your domain from bluehost, install WordPress on it (one click!) and log in.

Go to themes, click Install New, and install the Socratese theme.

Active this theme, choose your title, description and make a custom header.

In the widgets area, add in your Aweber form code.

In five minutes you have a blog that is ready for content and ready to capture mortgage leads! They look awesome too!

With Socratese you can make your own headers and customize your background.  I will post a review here soon on where to get professionally made headers (you just upload them right into socratese) for $11!

Now, click on the giant RSS button at the top right of my blog and subscribe already!  You’ll get updated when I make a new post! The marketing info is MUST READ!

You have your website ready and can’t wait to start generating leads and making money, right?! Well, where’s all the leads? For the leads to come in, you have to have traffic. Lot’s of it.

The good news is, generating leads is WAY easier than selling products on the internet. All you need to do is make the site look good enough for people to fill out the form and capture their contact info. Hopefully, you followed my advice on how to make a LANDING PAGE and you have a good looking site by now.

Trust me, having some crappy site that is hard to navigate and cluttered with information is a great way NOT to generate any leads.

You should have already started writing articles, which are great for traffic and backlinks to your website.

Well, here is another way to generate traffic to your site, local traffic.

You may notice that when you search for something with a location attached to it, a box pops up in the search results listing all the local businesses that match your search engine query. If you google “Orange County CA Refinance Rates” you can see that box that comes up with the local business results. You definitely need to take advantage of this!

When you are in the local listings, the people searching are in your area. That means you already have something in common with them. Who would you rather go with for a mortgage loan/refi? Someone that lives near you and you could possibly visit their office, or someone 2,000 miles away that you’ll never see? It’s easier to close a local lead for sure.

To get listed in this box is not hard at all. You can go to each search engine and fill out all the forms OR you can do what the pros do. This is one of the best secrets for local listing domination.

We use a tool called Universal Business Listing. For $30 per YEAR, you go on their site, fill out all your company info one time and they will sign you up to all the search engines local business listings automatically. It saves you hours of BORING work. But that’s not all. They also submit your info to all kinds of other sites, like yellow pages, onstar, business listing sites, etc. This gets your website tons of trusted backlinks and helps you rank better in the search engines too.

The trick is, when filling out your listing you need to put KEYWORDS in the description of your business. Do your keyword research and find out what the top LOCAL keywords are for your mortgage business. Pop those in your listing description.

The second trick is, use an address that is in the city/location that you are targeting and put that address on your website somewhere. When you submit your site to Universal Business Listings and use your business address (it can be a PO box too), search engines like Google will cross reference the address you put in the listing with the address on your site. IF they match, your site will jump up in the rankings and you’ll get more traffic!

Also, once you start building backlinks to your site using my methods, your listing will also increase and hopefully jump to #1. I have had some listings that were 3 packs (three websites were listed in the results) and once I used these methods (it takes a couple weeks for the business listing links to get indexed and recognized) the 3 pack turned into a 1 pack…just my website. That’s like a giant free ad for my website right there!

Local listings are much easier to obtain than nationwide search engine rankings, so you should definitely start with this method in the beginning. It’s always nice to start getting some leads and making some money, so that you can then further invest in your website and kick it up a notch.

This is the #1 method all those Local SEO Guru’s use to get top local rankings. They charge you and arm and a leg and then go pay a mere $30 to get you listed and boost your rankings.  This is the best $30 you can spend for local leads!

See you next time!

Hey there lead chasers!

It’s about time I revised this page and put some real good info on here as to what Im currently using to rank my websites and get traffic.   There’s pretty much 3 different tools I use right now as far as SEO software goes.  They aren’t the most expensive ones, but they get the job done…

1. Link Wheel Bandit – This is an amazing little tool that will create link wheels with your spun articles.  This is running all the time on one of my computers for sure!  Great serp improvements if you do it right… You need to have the Best Spinner and catchall email accounts (you can create those with Bluehost domains easily…)

2. Sick Submitter – This will get all different kinds of backlinks easily… Profiles, Bookmarks, Article Sites, Blog Comments, Blog Networks..etc.  Whatever you want for $20 a month.  Can’t beat it!  You will need the best spinner and private proxies to make it work properly…

3. EZ Article Link – Great post panda links using articles that get submitted on thousands of other peoples sites, for a diverse backlink portfolio.

4.  Outsource your backlinks so you do nothing but post good content on your website!  I use a guy for my main money making sites that does all the work for me to get them ranking well, for a reasonable price.  Ill ask him if he can take on any more customers and put his info here shortly if he can.  It ranges from $150 – $350 a month for a few different url’s and 5 keywords.

How to get custom articles for your website, blog posts and article submissions to explode your SEO and leads!

Now that you know how to do your keyword research for your website, you can apply the same thing to your articles and blog posts.   You did have the Elance guy/girl put a blog on your site, right?

Basically, you take all the keywords that get any worth while amount of traffic (start with the highest besides your main keywords and work your way down) and write articles on those topics.  You then take these articles and make blog posts out of them (using the keywords in your blog post title and throughout your post) and then submit them to the article directories.  Of course, I use the software I talked in the previous post on driving traffic to your website.

I use spin syntaxt to make each article unique on each article site.  You don’t have to, but I think it works better.  Here is an example:

How To Generate {Mortgage Leads Online|Internet Mortgage Leads|Leads For Mortgage Loans}   

which would come out like:

How To Generate Mortgage Leads Online or How To Generate Internet Mortgage Leads or How to Generate Leads For Mortgage Loans.

You get the idea.   This makes the titles and the article bodies unique for each site.  Well, creating articles and then spinning them really stinks.  Who has time for that?  Heck, I barely have time to update this blog.  If you are a loan officer trying to close deals, you don’t want to spend the time it takes to write one spun article per day and submit it each day…you want to be on the phones talking to your mortgage leads!

Well, here’s what you do.  You go to Elance.com and create your account if you didn’t already use it to make your landing page (you should have… a crappy website does not convert traffic well AT ALL).  Then, you post a job request for creating custom SPUN articles for your website.   Tell them you want the original article without spin syntax as well.  All you have to do is check the people articles who respond (many will!) and find a good writer.   This should cost somewhere around $5-$7 per article.

I would start with 5 articles to make sure they come out good and you have found the right person.

Then, you go into the Google Keyword tool, find the good long tail keywords that pertain to your website and pick the best 5.  All you have to do is give these keyword phrases to the people and they will write articles with those phrases in the title and the body of your article.

Once the articles come in, you just take the unspun article (the one without the {word|different word|different word}) and use that as a blog post on your blog.  You take the spun article and load in into your article submission software and submit it.  You use 2 backlinks in your authors resource box when you submit the article.  One backlink that goes back to your main website using a keyword and one backlink that goes to the url of the blog post you just made. 

This builds backlinks to your main website, your blog post and drives targeted traffic to both. 

Say you do 1 article 5 days a week (you can set the article submission software to post 1 article per day in advance as well).  That’s 20 articles per month.  20 blog posts per month.  2 backlinks per article – 20 articles submitted to 40 article directories = 1600 backlinks per month just in articles.

This is very hard to do on your own.  It is EASY when all you have to do is copy and paste your professionally written articles into your blog and article submission software.  If you keep this up it is only a matter of time until your website ranks #1 in Google.  Especially if you followed all my other advice so far.

So, go to Elance and find yourself a good outsourcer to work with.  Then use those custom articles on your blog posts and submit them to article directories.  You don’t have to do 20 articles/posts per month – you can start with 10 or so… But I would do 20 for sure.  20 well written articles (with good seo keyword placement) will not cost that much money.  

I have a guy on Elance that does awesome articles for me.   I order 15 per week, every week.  I just send him the keywords and he does the rest.  They come spun and ready to submit.  Since I order regularly, I get a price break.  Im paying less than $5 an article right now.  If you search in google, most good articles for websites are minimum $10 each.  Some are $30.  So, Im getting a great deal.  Plus,  if I were to type these articles week after week I would get burnt out and stop.  I hate that kind of stuff.

20 articles is going to cost me less than $100.  Im going to generate tons of unique content pointing back to my site from article directories and my blog is going to grow like crazy.  This means more traffic and more leads each and every month.  Now, take that same $100 and create a PPC campaign anywhere you want -Google, Bing, Whatever…  Which do you think is going to be the greatest return for your money? 

To answer that, just take a look at just ONE of my article accounts online with ArticlesBase.com.  Here are the stats:

There you have it.  That’s an average of 1000 views per article submitted to just ONE of my article directory accounts.   Those people are reading the articles and clicking through to visit my websites…

Now get to Elance and find a good custom article writer for your site!

UPDATE*  – Instant Article Wizard is in the pre-launch stages and you can now test it out for FREE! You just click the link, enter your name and email and you get to download the product instantly.  It’s going to go on sale sometime in the middle of January, so I would get this now and get as many articles as you can done!   With Instant Article Wizard, you can type in the topics (keywords) about the articles you want to write about and it will go out and grab all the content for you.  Then, you just highlight the paragraph you want (or sentence) and click it.  It will put that in your article.  You pull some content from a few different sources and in seconds and you have a completely unique article ready to submit!

Check it out –> Instant Article Wizard

In the next post, I’ll show you how to set up your blog to automatically generate more backlinks each time you make a blog post – exploding the number of backlinks from 1600 to ??? 

Stay tuned! Ill make a video of that one.