Easy and Cheap Internet Marketing Tactics For Reverse Mortgages
UPDATED 5/11/2018
There is no doubt that competition online for reverse mortgages is pretty darn fierce. Pay per click advertising is not for the faint of heart. With clicks at $20 or more, it is not a world where the uneducated want to play. It can get very expensive.
So, what are you as a loan officer to do? How do you get in front of people looking for a reverse mortgage in your city or state online for a reasonable cost?
Parasites!
What is a parasite?
It is basically any authoritative website that you can get a page or profile on. This could be anything from Zillow.com, Homes.com, Facebook, Twitter, Blogger, Squidoo, Hubpages, Tumblr, Weebly, WordPress and many more.
The beauty of these sites being authoritative is that they can take quite a bit of abuse. What do I mean by abuse? I am talking about spam. You can spam the crap out of them and they react well to this treatment and rank better in the search engines for terms you want to target. And I have to tell you, spam is a lot easier than trying to build “natural” links to your profiles. It is way cheaper too.
Now, you would never spam your main site. But it is okay with these types of sites. Here is the way I look at it. These profile pages don’t rank well and never will unless you build a ton of links to them. So, if you spam them and they get removed from Google’s index, who cares. Nobody saw them in the search results anyway.
Why would you want to do this?
There actually quite a few reasons to do this.
First, as you know, getting found on the internet when someone is searching for you is half the battle. The great thing about using these parasites is that you can get found in more ways. But you have to do a little more than signing up and adding information. More on this in a little bit.
The second reason is that you can own multiple spots on page one of the search engines when someone is looking for a reverse mortgage in your state or city. Having multiple spots increases the chances of getting clicked on and getting that phone call. You do want more leads and calls don’t you?
Third, you are getting citations, which the search engines love. Creating these parasites and claiming directory listings is showing that you, your business and company are legit.
Fourth, you are creating back links to your website, blog, and other social media which helps all your other web properties rank better.
And finally, it creates legitimacy to your potential borrowers. If you don’t think your potential clients are checking up on you online, you are greatly mistaken. When a client types in your name, what are they going to find? For me, they find a good solid two pages of results. Which includes social profiles, directory listings, reviews, blog posts, videos, seminar listings, press releases, articles I have been mentioned in and more.
To prove to you that this works I ran a test and did screen capture of my rankings for my Zillow profile.
Here is my Zillow profile in 2/21/2016. As you can see, I only had one ranking in Yahoo. Not very exciting right? The crazy thing is that this profile had been up for almost a year before I took this screenshot.
I decided to run a little test to see what would happen if I spammed my profile. I have been waiting patiently to see what the results would be if I did something like this so I could share it with you.
As you can see below, a whole lot changed after I did this. This is my rankings as of 3/25/215.
Pretty impressive if I do say so myself.
Update 5/11/2018
Yes, it has been over 2 years and I decided to take a look at where I was ranking. I used a different tracking service to see where my Zillow profile was ranking. Also, I couldn’t remember the exact search terms I used last time, but I am probably pretty close. Once again, this is pretty impressive. My Zillow profile is showing up on the first page of Google for every search term. The rank tracker I am using is free and only shows Google search results.
Remember, the more internet properties you can get ranked in the search engines the more opportunity you have to get phone calls and reverse mortgage leads.
I spent a whopping $15 on this test. The links were all built from a private blog network service that I found and was highly recommended on a blackhat marketing forum. For $15, the service provider scrapes and spins an article about your topic, in this case reverse mortgages. He then creates blog posts on 150 blogs that he owns with backlinks to your site. You could accomplish the same thing with Fiverr. Just go to Fiverr and type in PBN and you will find plenty of services where you can get 50 to 100 or more blog posts for just $5.
Most of these providers will allow you to submit multiple URL’s and anchor text in spin format. In the case study above, I only used the one URL to my Zillow profile. But I did provide varied anchor text in spin format.
For example:
{reverse mortgages|reverse mortgages state|reverse mortgages stateshort city|city reverse mortgage|reverse mortgage zip code|reverse mortgage loans in city state|reverse mortgage lenders in city stateshort|best reverse mortgage company in city|Zillow|Zillow reverse mortgage city state} etc.
What happens is the software will randomly choose one of those words to create an anchor text link with and thus diversify the keywords that are linking to your profile.
Having the varied anchor text is important for two reasons. First you want to diversify your anchor text ratios. In other words you don’t want all of your anchor text to be the same thing. Secondly, by diversifying the anchor text, it will help you rank for more search terms.
If you are going to use this method here are the things you need to do to make it successful.
- Make sure your profile is completely filled out.
- Add as much text to the profile as possible. In other words, don’t do what most people do which is about a paragraph of text telling people how awesome they are. Write about the benefits of reverse mortgages. Make sure to include your state in the text multiple times. I also include at the end a list of the major cities in my state that I work in.
- Add links to your sites home page and inner pages where it makes sense. I have four different links in my profile description to various pages of my main website. I want to drive any traffic from my Zillow page to my home page as soon as possible.
Here are some other real estate related parasites you may want to sign up for and use.
http://reversemortgageagents.com/
