You may have noticed the Home Gain Buyer Link Sponsor Ad. For those who do not know what Buyer Link is all about (myself included), I decided to ask the honchos over there for the lowdown. Are you helping agents or what? Apparently, they’re helping.
Here are a few things Louis Cammarosano told me about Buyer Link (after 10, I had to ask Lou to stop).
1. Agents are not forced to subscribe to the program (gee, I thought they threatened them with that gorilla).
2. Agents choose the amount of their monthly contract. (you mean the ape doesn’t decide?)
3. There is no long time contract.
4. The process is all done online.
5. The agent does not have to worry about selecting and managing keywords. Agents select only a city (or cities).
6. The leads come from 300 different sources and are distributed evenly over the period (so you don’t get 30 one day and 1 the next).
7. The lead conversion rate, based on Home Gains’ past history, is about 15% which is twice that of Google, Yahoo or MSN. (Now that’s a surprise.)
8. Home Gain checks the agents’ website every night to make sure leads are being received and not sent to a dead link.
9. Contact these agents to see if it’s all a bunch of hooey.
10. Home Gain buys the search engine traffic from Google, Yahoo and MSN. As a result, millions of folks visit Home Gain every month.
Here’s a reason good enough for me to check out Buyer Link: Linda Davis, a real estate professional I’ve met and respect says it works for her- 25 extra sales a year for her team (Gee, I shoulda started with this and saved myself some typing.) Linda points out that a quick response to consumer leads is a must.
Real estate marketing is about attracting clients. Real estate agents use various tools to accomplish this. Buyer Link is one such tool.
Take a walk over there and check out Buyer Link (no gorillas will harm you).
Technorati Tags: homegain, buyer link, real estate marketing
How much is it per lead? How does it compare to doing your own PPC campaign?
Sounds interesting, but I would do a comparison before buying in.
I have been using buyerlink for some time now, and its costs for traffic are comparable with PPC campaigns, but calling Buyerlink traffic “leads” is more than a little misleading. I’m sure the real estate 2.0 crowd has no problem understanding the difference, but your average joe schmoe is going to expect a name, email address and/or phone number.
Their traffic is no more a lead than the IP address you got on your website report from the guy who visited your site after seeing your yard sign. You would, of course, need some sort of sign in page for a visitor from buyerlink to accurately be called a lead.
Just signed up.
We’ll see.
Let us know Jesse.
Jacksonville Real estate
The buyerlink cost is not on a per lead basis but rather on a per visitor basis,
One advantage of Homegain’s buyerlink over your own ppc campaign is you don’t have to manage it and we smooth the traffic out over the course of a month so you don’t get any surprise spikes or drops in traffic.
Also our clients tell us that our traffic converts up to 2x of that of traffic bought directly from Google and Yahoo.
feel free to email me with any questions at louis@HOMEGAIN.COM
We purchase visitors from many sources (Google, Yahoo, MSN, HomeGain and others). Ours is a very Internet centric model. We understand online lead generation and we subscribe to it. I can’t tell you that buyer link traffic is going to be the answer to your prayers. But, I can vouch for Luis’ claim that conversion rates with Buyer Link traffic are much higher than with other sources. Month after month our buyer link registration rates are higher than other online lead sources. Now, our team works each lead diligently. We contact each consumer within minutes in most cases. We do that with all leads and then we measure results. Buyer link traffic is great - as long as you work it!
I’m going to check it out thanks for the update.
I love when we discuss my favorite subject…traffic! If you have read anything I have been writing on here, you know that I’m a big buyer link fan. Believe me, when I first got that phone call, yes the dreaded phone calls, I was a non-believer. I was running my own pay per click campaigns and having a lot of success. My cost per click was around $2 and my click to lead conversion was right around 7%. My lead to sale conversion rate was about 2.5%, just a little about the national average. I was pretty proud of myself. Not only were we generating lots of leads, we developed great lead to sales conversion techniques and were going along quite nicely.
After listening to the Homegain sales rep tell me how good they are (sound familiar) which was the same pitch I had heard from every other lead generation company…except this was different. I said to him, “basically you are going to just give me traffic to my lead capture page and you are only going to charge me between 79 cents and 99 cents per click”. Now I’m no rocket scientist, but remember I was paying $2 per click. Still not completely sold, I decided it was worth a test. After all, if I could create more clicks for the same money then I would create more leads.
Well a funny thing happened the very next day. My lead flow doubled. Yup! That’s what I thought? I was like “What the heck?”. I know this stuff better than anyone I know and they do it better than me. I decided this was worth a serious test to be sure I wasn’t making any mistakes with my numbers. I’m a big stats guy…I don’t do anything unless the numbers make sense. No emotional buying here! I tested $1,000 of my $10,000 a month budget on a couple of keywords. To my pleasant surprise a few things happened:
1. My click to lead conversion went up to 16.5% (now between 15% and 20%)
2. The lead quality was better than I was getting on my own (probably the fact that the consumer has to click three times to get to me.)
3. My costs went from $10k a month down to $5k (although I am now back up to over $12k between my two offices (We feed over 35 Agents leads daily)
4. I no longer had to spend 2 hours per day managing my 500 keywords
5. I got some sleep finally!
Am I unique? I don’t think so. I have talked with many Agents who use buyer link very successfully. The reality is, most Agents either don’t spend enough on their marketing to generate enough leads, or they have no system in place. More often than not it’s the lack of systems that create the failures.
We use the 100MPH Marketing system, which is a lead conversion system that works. Ok, I should disclaim that I own the marketing company but it came out of the need to develop a way to convert these tons of Internet leads. Our new software is coming out in April (at least that’s what my tech guys say) however, you don’t need any computer skills (besides the ability to email and type leads into a database) to have a very successful lead conversion program. The key is developing systems and having proven systems that work. Does that mean you will get a 10% sales conversion rate? Most likely not. My two year or longer Agents are getting between a 4% and 5% conversion rate. That’s double the national average of less than 2%. Last year my office alone did 193 transactions with 14 Agents (4 new). My better Agents were in the 20+ sales and my newer Agents were 10+ sales. Of course this is in the worst real estate market we have had in Florida in a heck of a long time.
With all that long winded stuff out of the way, if any of you that have any doubt that buyer link is a scam or is taking advantage of Realtors, please call me and let me help you. I give a ton of my time, free time, to Agents and brokers around the country. We own the Internet in Brevard County Florida and we have grown to 22 Agents (in my office, 13 in the other office) with each Agent getting between 2 and 3 leads ever day. That is about as many as you want an Agent to work. If an Agent gets more than 2 or 3 per day they tend not to work them as strongly.
Just one more thing to ponder. Keep in mind that 50% of the leads you get will have either no phone number or a bad phone number. DO NOT THROW THE LEAD AWAY! I can’t tell you how many people I talk to that discard their no phone number leads. 25% of the sales I get come from leads with bad numbers. Many people in this day and age do not like phone calls. Personally I never give my number out of the net unless I really want them to call me.
I think I have said enough. I can be a little long winded. I get frustrated sometimes listeninig and reading about Agents that blame everything for their failures. This is a business, if you don’t treat it like a business you will not succeed. If your marketing budget is $200 a month, it’s going to be tough. However if you truly want to succeed in this business you have to take the bull by the horns and do what is best for you. Sales is all about lead capture and lead conversion. It doesn’t matter what you sell, if you have no leads you have no business. Buyer link gives you a great opportunity at a very reasonable price to generate leads.
Last point. I will be talking on Thursday, the 20th, at 1pm est. about lead generation and conversion on the Homegain Conference call. If you don’t know how to access it, ask your rep. I will be going over most of what I am talking about here.
I think on line lead generation is a winner but I wll be there are so many skeptical agents that complain “that wont work” yet at the same time complain about how bad the market is. The key issue is working the leads and working them quickly and working them well (actually having phone sales skills to convert leads into appointments).