Profiling

The internet is awake and so are most who live in and around it, while it’s rare to find a high ranking site not monetised with Adsense or the like there ways to buy websites and advertising that not may strike as obvious.

Competitive markets like insurances and debt management look like they will thrive in 2009 while the mortgage market suffers, approaching a top 10 ranking website for debt management will NOT provide you with a cheap gem to buy but that doesn’t mean traditionally difficult markets are to be avoided. Thinking outside the box can offer cheaper inroads to high paying niches and the example I will give can be applied as always to many ideas and markets, for this one let’s presume you want to tap into the high paying debt management market.

Liken your task to that of a profiler who works for the police, if there had been a complicated murder and the police call in a profiler to get a profile of the murderer they expect to be given an overall picture with accurate behavioural detail. The profiler won’t tell the police to wait until there is another murder and then you’ll find them, instead behavioural patterns are given to try and find the offender and narrow them down through everything else apart from the murder, so work, social life, habits and hobbies.

Take this back to your debt management leads, worth say £50 a pop, people who are heavily in debt have a profile, finding them at the top 10 ranking sites for debt management would be expensive, as it would for finding them through Adwords. You can however find these people at other cheaper places through profiling, cheaper websites and cheaper advertising places that have a direct correlation to your desired lead can give you great profit with albeit a poorer conversion rate. People get up to all sorts online and a great many of them fit patterns and profiles.

About Scott Jones

Scott hails from the north east of Scotland and started earning online at the end of 2000 building websites for local businesses during which time he won an award from Lord Alan Sugar for Excellence in Enterprise. After having quite a bit of success with domaining Scott mainly runs educational evergreen websites which generate over 3 million visitors per month but is always on the lookout for a fresh thinking out of the box way to turn a buck. Follow on Twitter.

Comments

  1. Great advice. I’ve often used this tactic before. I rarely try to compete “head on” and fight with the big boys. Rather, I try to convert “cheap traffic” into “expensive traffic” using methods as described above.

    Food Delivery Chicago’s last blog post..Late Night Food Delivery In Chicago

  2. Great article. Right on the money, Al. I’m encountering this situation with FreeBestDeals.com. At first I thought that I would market to the younger, social networking crowd, like MySpace. But I’m finding out that most of my visitors are a little bit older, have families, and are looking for bargains. So now, I have to shift my marketing and target the bargain hunting, money saving websites instead and try to imagine how they think. Just like profiling.

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  3. Really good way of doing that. I think you´re right.. debt management companies are going to be big news this year and I think also in the years to come!! Maybe we should all try and tap into the market, since it´ll be so popular! Profiling seems a lot cheaper and is definately an alternative way of reaching the target audience!

  4. Have you any experience sending leads to lawyers for different practices? From what I understand you can’t charge for leads in Canada unless you yourself are a lawyer. I’m wondering if there’s any way around that.

    Justin Cook’s last blog post..When digital theft is a good thing!

    • Seems a little unfair Justin, no idea on the laws so can’t help.

    • We have the same rules here. Lawyers cannot pay introducer fees7referral fees. The Spanish law assoc. deems it unfair practice.
      it does go on though. I know quite a few lawyers who will pass on a referral commission “under the table”
      But, as tempting as it is to make money this way, I don´t think I really want to refer my clients to a lawyer who will break his own associations rules for a bit of extra business - double edged sword I suppose. There is a law firm here that does offer to pay a proportion of their fee on one of there “no win-no fee” products - but only once a successful claim has been settled - so they wont pay for introductions.
      I presume the rules are more lenient in this respect but it would mean setting up an agreement now which would not bear fruit for quite some time. Could still be worthwhile though.

      • I think its ok in the UK…my other half worked as a PI Paralegal for a few months…they had rude boys from a local car wash sending claims their way and getting £500 a pop…they certainly were not regulated in any way shape or form!!

  5. Excellent and very relevant post (certainly to me).
    Being in the mortgage industry I know only too well about how difficult it it to compete for and share the paltry amount of quality leads at the moment.
    I managed to find a keyword phrase that gets 3 times the traffic my main keywords do. It is absolutely linked to my industry but something I didn’t think of for months!
    I now rank 3 in Google and it brings me more traffic than anything else.
    I also put together a property purchase package where we offer due diligence, deposit guarantees and “anti-sales-patter” training to purchasers, whilst splitting commission for introducing clients to estate agents. I realised that many were coming to me to source a mortgage before they sourced a property.
    Excellent opportunity to increase income per client and hammer the crap out of all the terrible estate agents over here. Going good guns at the moment and means I don’t have to compete head in on with the very competitive “tenerife property” sector.
    Will probably make as much out of property commission as I will out of mortgages this year - effectively doubling my income.
    At least until my passive income from my websites catches up in oh… 30 years time!

  6. There’s a lot of detours to such “grand” niches. You just have to think outside the box, like you do 🙂

  7. I think pretty much any site that can provide users advice/help financially will thrive over the next couple of years. Now I just to work up my new money saving site and get some ads on there 🙂

  8. Interesting stuff, particularly in the current economic climate, I like the idea of using other sources to get those kind of leads which otherwise might be a lot more expensive.

    I have a couple of sites (well domain names) that I should get to work on and test this out on…assuming I can get round to it! 🙁

    Zath’s last blog post..Google Latitude - Locate Your Friends!

  9. I agree any site related to mortgages and other such things will do great with adsense because so many people will be looking online for solutions. It will be a great niche to get into in the coming years

  10. Ok, I’ll have to admit that I didn’t fully grasp what this post was about. Are you talking about spotting trends, or as an example aiming for a more niche KW like “paying back credit cards” to try and capture leads for “debt management”?

    PS - notice that you can now add your twitter name to comments, nice touch.

    John Essex’s last blog post..Preparing for a Loft Conversion

  11. Better profit, albeit with a poorer conversion rate seems good to me, although if it is pay per click you surely could still end up coming short?

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