Generating traffic costs money – in the short term for pay-per-click campaigns, in the longer term, to implement an effective SEO strategy.  Depending on the competitiveness of the site subject, the latter may never materialize at profitable levels.

Marketing professionals should always also consider traditional marketing channels in evaluating the best ways to convert marketing cost-center dollars to profit dollars.  For many subjects, radio, tv, bench, billboard, press, and flyer advertising campaigns can produce effective results at lower conversion costs than Internet campaigns.

At the same time, a professionally managed online lead generation campaign can be predictable and cost-effective.  The advertiser must simply keep all options on the table …

Pick The Right College: example online advertisement

It is a well-known fact that high-quality inbound links to your primary online properties are a key differentiator in successful search engine optimization (SEO).  It is also still a fair assumption that the search engines rank high-quality inbound link highly in promoting your site up in the search result return pages.  The challenge is actually building high-quality inbound links (unless you have a large marketing budget), a tedious long-term endeavor that is never finished.

Pick The Right College blog

You can of course engage an offshore content/SEO company to help with link development (costly, someone does the work), or you can pursue the popular approach of writing articles for blogs and e-zines that contain links back to specific landing pages relating to your web properties, to which you wish to drive traffic (less costly, more work).

The latter approach involves substantial effort and only works if your blog and e-zine articles actually attract traffic and are therefore ranked well by the search engines you target.  They will only do so if your posts are worth reading: this is a labor of love that will only bear fruit over time (unless you are again willing to accelerate the process by driving traffic to your blog and e-zine content using pay-per-click or email campaigns).

This author currently generates about fifty 500-word articles per month in support of organic search rating development, and positive results have shown to build slowly, but consistently.  Companies have found it expedient to hire college/university interns with English or journalism majors to help write content for their sites as well as for their blogs and e-zine entries.  However, this appraoch is only as good as the content these young folks without experience can generate.

Like any effort in Internet marketing, longterm the companies that will prevail are the ones that follow industry best practices and avoid cutting corners:  if your content is excellent, if you meet your clients’ needs optimally, if the paying end-user is satisfied with the services acquires as the result of your lead generation, then your reputation will carry you across any rough spots.  The opposite is true now, and will be true more so as regulations are tightened, competition increases, and search engines revise their algorithms to foil illegitimate ranking manipulations.

Blog posts and e-zine articles that receive traffic because they are of high quality and satisfy their readers constitute a much higher barrier to entry and sustainable competitive advantage than meaningless filler posts that no one reads or ever returns to.

• San Diego Adult Education Examiner
• San Diego Internet Marketing Examiner
• San Diego Neighborhood Photography Examiner

Adults going back to school by the thousands

Hundreds of thousands of Americans (and Canadians) are going back to school: connecting them to colleges and universities wanting to enroll them is a substantial Internet marketing business.  This particular domain is attractive for the following reasons:

• High-value leads: the colleges pay well because student contact leads translate into very substantial long-term revenue, often secured by federal student loans.
• A large population across North America, is “in the market,” both in terms of prospective students, and colleges and universities.
• Well-established, professional aggregators like CollegeBound.net take the complexity out of the lead generation process, even for less experienced lead generators.
• Education sites provide real value to prospective students, given all the difficult decisions that students have to make in picking programs, institutions, financing, and long-term learning planning.

Sites like www.PickTheRightCollege.com provide services to prospective and enrolled students by advising them in their decision-making processes.  At the same time, they provide high-quality leads to the educational institutions, when students make specific school- and program choices.

This win-win situation can only be preserved if the services of the education portals are of genuine, truthful, long-term quality for the students using them.  Despite their relationship with the education providers, the education portal must ensure that they provide accurate, useful, and legitimate information with reasonable independence and intrinsic quality control.

Lead Generation Life Cycle

Lead generation falters if the advertised products or services fail to meet the needs of the customers who express their online interest in them.  Obviously, it also fails when the cost of generating a lead exceeds its commercial benefit: it is therefore important to calculate and communicate to the buyer the total cost of acquisition and sales conversion, so that the lead generation life cycle is optimized for all stakeholders.  It is equally important to track the success of the campaign, as the Internet marketing domain is highly competitive and therefore dynamic: what works today lags tomorrow.  Constant vigilance and consistent optimization is the ticket to long-term success.

As the Internet marketing industry matures, improved targeting to more, and more relevant, parameters is a differentiating factor for the leading providers.  Buyers will favor those suppliers who optimize their cost-benefit by delivering highest-quality leads at competitive prices.  In the end, what the buyer wants is an eager customer who will buy his service or product at the right price.  The online lead generator who best generates this conversion will grow his business most successfully and will maximize his profit margin in the process.

A good illustration at the current time is the red-hot adult education market:  hundreds of thousands of adults are actively enrolling in colleges and universities across North America to counter the impact to them and their families of the Great Recession. Connecting prospective students to these institutions of higher learning has developed into a major lead generation market, fueled further by the Federal governments encouragement and lose availability of Federal student loans.

Those lead providers who deliver leads that convert prospective students into committed students more effectively than their competitors will ultimately prevail, even though at this moment, lead quality may still play a subordinate role to volume, given the size and strength of the market (currently, schools can often convert less than 5% of their paid-for leads into paying students).   In the long run, lead providers with the best communication and nimble execution processes and fair business practices (including a customer-oriented refund policy) will continue to grow, while the others will flounder.

This blog examines online marketing best practices, presents current lead generation news, addresses changes and issues in the requirements for legitimate lead generation, and helps business and consumers maximize their respective benefits from online marketing.

This blog examines Internet marketing best practices that ensure ethical activities and outcomes for all stakeholders.

Executed properly, leads that are generated productively connect a prospective client or customer with an offered product or service.  This age-old principle of sales and marketing retains its core value in the Internet domain.