Lead scrubbing is an important step to maintain the integrity of any offer or lead generation campaign.  It basically just means removing leads or sales that contain bogus, inaccurate, or incorrect information.  These leads are useless and kill the ROI for any campaign. There seems to be a lot of confusion over lead scrubbing.  Some affiliates think that it involves a network stealing leads from them after they have been reported,  but that is usually called lead shaving.  Lead scrubbing is a necessary step to make sure all leads or sales going to the advertiser or client are valid.   Without valid leads the advertisers doesn’t make money and closes the offer, and everyone loses.

Typical scrub rates vary for certain industries.  Mortgage leads usually average about a 15% scrub rate, while certain free offers can run 50% or more. Everyone wants to keep scrubbed lead rates as low as possible.  So how can you reduce the percent of leads scrubbed?

From the perspective of the affiliate:

Much of the lead scrubbing is done on the actual offer page, which is out of the hands of the affiliate.  But there are several things you can control to affect scrub rates of your traffic.

1.  Pre-qualifying your clicks is very important to weed out random clicks.

2.  Accurate demographic targeting is another.  By closely matching the  demographic of the person to the offer, you increase the chances of valid information.

3.  Correct GEO targeting.  If you send traffic from outside the accepted geographic area, the leads will be scrubbed.

4.  Using quality traffic sources.   Pay per click traffic will always yield lower scrub rates than un-targeted display traffic.

From the perspective of the advertiser or local lead gen:

If you are running a local lead gen or private affiliate offer, you want scrub rates as low as possible since you are paying for each lost lead.

Form validation is your first line of defence against bad leads.  There are 2 basic methods of form validation: client side (Javascript) and server side (PHP).  I prefer to use a mix of both.  The key is to validate every field as much as possible to not leave anything to chance for the user.  Check for blank fields, invalid entries, phone numbers, credit cards, invalid email addresses, URLs, invalid field lengths, numbers only, etc.  Basically you need to think of every possible way someone could mess up a form and get them to enter it correctly before they hit submit.   Proper form validation can make the difference between a successful offer and and failure.  It really is that important.   If you are running your own lead gen campaign, you also need to look at your traffic sources, as discussed above, to reduce scrub rates.

You can never get rid of scrubbed leads completely, but by setting up the forms correctly and sending quality traffic, you can greatly decrease scrub rates.

I’ve been talking about local lead generation for a while now and the topic always generates a lot of interest. One of the best decisions I ever made for my company was moving away from CPA network based offers and creating my own direct offers with businesses. I was doing pretty well on various networks, but local lead generation took it to the next level.

Local lead generation can be great, but the biggest problem is that local can mean small markets and limited profits.  What really kicked my company into high gear was what I call direct lead generation. This is basically local lead gen on a national level.   To do this, we seek out companies that have a large regional or national footprint to partner with on private affiliate offers.   This allows the company to have a much larger advertising/marketing budget than a local mom and pop type business.

The ideal company to find would be a smaller national company with a limited online presence and no affiliate marketing program.  There are actually still a lot of companies like this out there.   Most of the time they are new to the whole performance based advertising concept.  It could be product based CPS, CPA, or straight lead gen, depending on the company.   You approach them just as you would a local business, but just on a larger scale.  It’s best to have proven case studies and a solid track record before approaching a large company.   They tend to go for hard data, not promises and hype.

Here’s a tip:  If you aren’t good at sales or just don’t like it (me), consider hiring a sales person to contact companies that you have targeted.   If you outsource design, coding, accounting etc, why not contract a sales guy?   A good sales person can be a huge asset to your business.  All you need is that one large account to take off.

There are obvious benefits to having an exclusive affiliate contract with a national company:  large budgets, national advertising reach for targeting, big volume, total freedom of advertising, etc.  The downside is that they are hard to find and take a lot of up front legwork to get established.    Up front work that you are not getting paid for…

But the rewards can far outweigh the risks and time investment.

So if you ready to take local lead gen to the next level, think national and go after some big fish!

One of the biggest mistakes I made early on was trying to run too many offers. Its easy to get pulled in many different directions with affiliate marketing. You might even have some success with in a particular niche and think it would be best to try to duplicate that success in other niches. But I have found the best thing is to pick a niche, and stick with it as much as possible.

A great strategy is to pick a certain vertical market and scale that market until you have tapped every traffic source, researched every possibly converting keyword, optimized every site, owned tons of domains, and basically became the #1 expert on marketing that niche on the Internet.  If you look at many of the really successful guys in our industry, they heavily invested in one vertical.   Sure you always want some diversification in case it completely dries up, but you can spread the risk around by having different offers and clients in the same vertical.

Here’s an example. Say you had an interest in chiropractors. These guys spend a ton on advertising (check out the back of a phone book), and are in every city. You could find local chiropractors in your area and set up local lead gen or CPA offers for their business. Once you honed your techniques you could branch out to other areas in the state, then region, then nationally. Travel to all the chiropractor trade shows, set up a booth, advertise in their publications and journals, etc. Eventually you could become the #1 “go to” Internet Marketer for that field so any chiropractor who even thought of marketing would think of your company.  This is a long term business strategy that is very profitable.

The great thing about become a dominant expert in a certain niche is the longer you do it, the cheaper your costs are and the more profit you can make.  This lets you dominate your competition even more and is a powerful snowball effect.    So if you are struggling to find your way in affiliate marketing, maybe its time to stop trying so many different things and stick with just one.

Let me preface this post by saying I am not a lawyer this is just my personal opinion. You should have a lawyer review your agreement template before you start using it.

Since I started writing about private affiliate offers last year, a lot of people have asked me how to set up your private affiliate contract.   Here are the general things I would recommend including:

1. First of all, define the parties involved in the agreement.  It should be clear who are the actors in the agreement and their roles.

2. Who pays for what.   Clearly outline who pays for advertising, design, hosting, the leads etc.  Don’t leave anything to chance.

3. Lead exclusivity.  I only work with exclusive leads, but either way its good to note it in the agreement.

4. Lead scrubbing.  Define how leads will be checked for validity.  Who will pay for partially incomplete leads, or leads that don’t match your accepted parameters?

5. Information exchange. The process of transferring the lead to the customer needs to be explained.  Email, secure login, database for example…

6. Term of the agreement.  How long will it be in effect?

7. Changes of the agreement.  What is the process if you or the other party wants to amend the contract?

8. Lead/Action fees.  This should probably be its own section.   Spell out exactly the cost per lead in any scenario and volume.

9. Payment.  Clearly lay out how and when you need to be paid for your services.  Most business are used to Net 30 terms.  How will you be paid? Check? Wire?

10. Define the lead or action. In complete detail its important to specify exactly what the lead or action includes.  Example: Name, Address, Phone, Email

11. Geo-targeting.  What exact locations can leads come from?  Be sure to work with the customer before hand to get this in the contract.

12. Legal stuff. Confidentialy, imdemnification, and complete agreement clauses.  These are where a lawyer comes in handy.  But there are some good templates you can find out there, and just modify them to suit your needs.    I would definitely include these items though.

These are the bare minimums I would include before starting a working relationship with a company.  You may have to add many more sections depending on the complexity of the situation.

Good luck!

When you are working with a company on a private lead generation campaign, the company will sometimes need to receive the leads by phone calls.  Obviously its much easier to track online leads, but call tracking is not as hard as you might think.  There a variety of paid services available to track and log phone leads, but now you can do it for free with Google Voice.

Here are the steps to track phone leads with Google Voice

1.  Set up a Google Voice account for the campaign.  The phone number you choose is the one you will advertise in your ads.

2.  Set up the forwarding number to the business.  This will automatically forward calls from the Google number to the business phone.  You can also set up groups if the business has multiple phone numbers or departments to take the lead calls.   Be sure you turn off call screening so the call goes right through.  Your call conversion rate will drop if customers have to listen to the Google Voice prompts.  You want a seamless call for the end user.

3.  Start the campaign.  The company will now get their calls directly from the ads, and you can track each call from your computer in your Google Voice account.  Each call will generate a log entry in your call history section along with the time, date.  Each entry is essentially a conversion.  Assign your CPA price for each call.  Then you can export this for your reports and billing invoices for the customer.

Some businesses might want to use the voicemail option after hours to capture calls when no one is on staff to answer the phone.  Those can be transcribed and read from the Google Voice panel.   You can do things like offer the customer a reduced CPA rate for voicemail calls to still capture some revenue on those leads.

This might not be the most robust method as far as analytics, but its a solid way to track all calls generated from an ad for billing purposes.  You don’t have to rely on a busy company to track their incoming calls manually and report to you the totals.  The data is all in your control from your Google Voice account.  Best of all, its free!

I have been posting a lot about the benefits of running private offers lately. That may have given the impression that I think there is no value in running network offers.  But there are definitely positives and negatives to both types of affiliate marketing. Which one is best for you? Let’s take a look 7 main criteria for running an offer.

Upfront work:

Advantage - Networks.  Running a CPA offer on a network is as simple as picking the offer and setting up a campaign.  They have negotiated everything with the merchant, the landing pages are set and ready to go.

Backend work:

Advantage - Networks. They handle all the lead or sale tracking, lead scrubbing and confirmation, and merchant billing.  Everything is taken care of for you.

Types of offers:

Advantage - Private offers. Network offers are mostly limited to the same type of offers on all the networks.  A lot of re-bills and other low quality offers are common.  With private offers you are unlimited in the type of business you want to promote.  As long as you can find a company and sell them on your affiliate services, you can enter virtually any niche.

Payouts:

Advantage-Private offers. This is one of the biggest benefits of running your own offer.  There is no middleman to take a percentage of the profits.  You negotiate and set your own payment which is usually higher than a network can offer.

Longevity:

Advantage-Private offers. Offers on networks can have short life spans due to many factors beyond your control.  Offers that you have privately set up can be more stable and long term.

Competition:

Advantage-Private offers. With the ease of start up and almost zero barrier to entry, network offers have tons of competition.  Private offers (especially locally targeted) often are much less crowded.  This leads to lower bid prices, and higher conversion rates.

Risk:

Advantage - Networks. CPA networks assume most of the risk with running offers.  You will almost always get paid by a network, regardless of the payment status of the merchant.  They also assume some of the legal risk for you.  When you are running a private offer, you take on more risk.

Summary

Your choice to run network or private offers depends a lot on the amount of work you want to put in upfront and on the backend.  It also depends on your risk tolerance.  Both types of affiliate marketing offer the chance for great success.   Its just a matter of what fits best with your business style and plans.  Often, affiliates will start on network offers then transition to private offers.  But the choice is up to you.

Local lead generation is still not widely talked about on  most affiliate marketing blogs, and one topic that I have never seen addressed is how to get these local customers.   As with any business, finding customers is the key so how do you find local businesses interested in your lead generation services?  Here are a few ideas:

• Your blog or website. Not all of us are lucky enough to have a widely viewed website, so this probably won’t work for most people.  But if you do have a website you can advertise your services there.
• Weekly mailers.  Sometimes called value mailers or coupon shoppers, these are the little 20 page junk mail flyers you get every week.  There are always tons of companies offering things  like carpet cleaning, house painting, dentists, flooring, etc.  These companies are shelling out a lot of money for a very low return form of advertising.  They are desperate for new customers.  All you have to do is show them how much cheaper your performance based advertising is, that is also fully trackable and more effective.  These are a great source of new customers.
• Referals.  Satisfied customers like to tell their friends.  If you are doing a good job for a client, encourage them to tell their colleagues.  This can spread like wildfire throughout a local community of professionals or businesses.  Everyone wants to get in on a good thing.  Soon you can come to own a certain business niche in your community, and the more work you do in it, the better you will become.   You really only need one good niche to make a great living doing online lead generation.
• Trade shows.  Instead of going to Internet Marketing trade shows only, branch out and go to a trade show for the niche you are promoting.   If you are doing well promoting plumbing services leads, go to the national plumbers trade show.  Sure, it might not be as fun as say an Affiliate Summit, but this is about business.  Talk to the attendees and tell them about your services.  Maybe even rent a small booth and hire some people to hand out information for the day.   You could launch your lead gen business to the next level from just one show.
• Professional Organizations.  Most types of businesses have a local professional organization.  You can usually advertise on their website or get a list of members to contact.  There are also networking events you can attend, which are a great place to get the word out about your services.

These are just a few of the many ways to get customers for your lead generation business.  Do you have any creative ideas for finding customers?

Affiliate marketing definitely has its downsides. Crowded niches, low payouts, offers ending, etc. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could use your internet marketing skills to promote your own “offer” in a niche you created? Well you can.

One of the very successful techniques we use is our own lead generation websites. It became very clear to me early on that the skills learned marketing CPA offers can be leveraged with your own lead capturing websites. I’m not talking about running lead generation offers on networks, I mean creating your own site to capture leads then reselling them to local business. These sites can be built in virtually any niche where businesses need new customers. Some of the advantages of creating your own lead sites: you have total control, conversion tracking/analytics are a breeze, PPC campaigns have great quality score, you collect exactly the data you want, make your own landing pages, and set your own prices.

Many companies are used to buying leads. Real, estate agents, lawyers, financial planners, are all buy expensive leads. Those are very competitive niches, even locally, so I wouldn’t suggest them. But virtually any business can be sold leads. One of the first small niches we tried 2 years ago was personal training. We ran a site that captured local leads for people searching for personal trainers, and offered discounts for training services. The leads went to a local personal training business who paid us a per lead basis, and allowed the customers the discount our site promised. It was a win win for everyone. We pushed traffic to the site through local PPC, social networks, and SEO.

Do you have to keep it local? Of course not, you can sell leads to companies wherever you want. Its usually just easier to use your local knowledge and proximity to clients in your area.  If you live in a decent sized city you probably have access to more business than you can ever handle.

Getting customers:

This is probably the hardest part to get started. Expanding into B2B lead selling will take you out of the comfort zone that you enjoy as an Internet marketer. You actually have to contact businesses and sell your product to them. Again, you can probably use your online marketing skills to get some customers, but you may have to resort to old school techniques. Once you have a few customers in a certain niche though, word of mouth can quickly spread among business owners and professionals.

Pricing:

Customer acquisition costs are high and most companies know what that average cost is to them. Once you research the going rates for leads, you can usually undercut the established rates due to the low cost of operating online. When you are setting up your contract with the company buying your leads, everything is negotiable. You can sell leads at a flat rate fee, a percentage of sales from lead, by monthly subscription, using a sliding scale based on lead quality, etc.   Just make sure everything is very clear in your contract.

This topic is so huge its a whole industry in itself.  I haven’t even scratched the surface.  My point of this post was only to get the ideas flowing and let you realize you probably already have the skills to do this.  If there is interest though, I can dive into this topic more in future posts.  Good luck!