What are everyone's favorite lead gen services? I like Tiger Leads but it is taken in my area. There are a few others I'm thinking of. It's a big decision to spend the $1K to $2K a month so I want to be cautious... Anyone have any suggestions? Thanks!

Check out Boomtown

How do you like Tiger Leads if you are not using it? I looked into this company and Zurple and both appeared to be scams.. maybe not though.. just by the fact that these glowing reviews came in on Trulia everyone arguing about which one was better.. every person in the convo had only posts in the thread about Tigerleads and Zurple.. fishy... to be honest it seems that if they do anything all they do is sell you IDX + Adwords + Drip Campaign w/ Tracking.

I am going for is Organic IDX Traffic & Zillow/Trulia Leads + Drip Campaign.. seems a lot more cost effective than $1000+ month Zurple & Tigerleads charge.. not sure about boomtown.

Why don't you just go and register your own website ($10) and get your own hosting service ($10 / month).

That way you can run your own Adwords campaign, adjust the amount of money you want to spend each day, and keep all the leads you generate.

$1000 - $2000 a month sounds crazy for something you can do yourself without much effort and a lot cheaper.

Agreed. I run my own campaigns, and I can get a pretty good ppc. I'm running at about $.58. What do you get from Tigerleads?

bad advice trying ppc on your own..
the learning curve is too steep and you will get eaten alive..
trust me..I know..
if you dont know which keywords to bid on..
how much to bid..
and wether or not or at what rate your website is converting..you will get hosed..big time..
to start use homegains buyer link program..
you can get more targeted visitors
for way cheaper than google ppc..
buy 100 visitors for .59- 1.59 a visitor..
see how many leads convert..
if you get 5-15% sign ups..you doing good
if you get 1 signup out of 100
google ppc will eat you alive in a hurry..

i had zurple , and know very well tigerleads..
neither is $100 a month..I assure you..
the zurple leads i got were garbage..
i suspect from non targeted content network traffic...
but then again . some people say they had success with it..
I was on zurple 300 a month package and they did NOT deliver what they promised...
I was promised 30 leads a month..I was getting 15..
plus the lead quality was horrific..
again..i suspect content network..non targeted traffic..
Tigerleads is very expensive..Very..
but the leads are decent quality..
and the conversion rate hovers around 10-15% which is amazing..
zurple site was concerting at 1-5%..
which makes ppc..too expensive..period..
if you cant get a site to convert better than 5% dont do google ppc.. the cost per lead will kill you...
when i started ppc in 2008 the clicks where like .50
i just looked in adwords for those same keywords
$3.36 a click on the top converting keywords
like my area
real estate
condos
homes
homes for sale
if i just throw up a site and it converts at 1%..
the cost will be $336 a lead...

I'm gonna have to agree with Steve on this one. Unless you know exactly what keywords are hot in your area, try it out first on bing. Max your bid out at .25 cpc and watch for impressions. Once you have a pretty good grasp of what's hot and have some spare $$ try google cpc. I'll tell you it's way more expensive. Hot keywords will cost $4+ if you want prime position. Plus your CTR will be much higher in the prime position on google versus bing and yahoo. I think it cost me bout $500 be I realized how much higher.

Like Steve said, on bing and yahoo, I'm at .50 to .60 cpc and I'm
getting way more quality leads than other refferal sites I've either tried or researched. Of course I'm still realitively not to RE but not new to CPC.

How much per month and how many leads did you get with tiger leads? I'm curious about the cost.

I haven't done true PPC for years, but recently I did some Trulia ppc. It worked fairly good as did Facebook PPC a year ago, but looking into Facebook PPC recently I think they make you point your PPC ad to your Facebook page not a website and I didn't like that. I'll agree with Realtor DC's plan. $1000-$2000 a month seems like a lot for a PPC campaign. I also used Homegain's buyer link a few years ago and I think that was the best driver of leads to my website that I ever did. But still organic is the best. I rarely ever click on any ppc websites that come up when I search online.

If you're going in completely blind, yes, you will get burned. I learned from common sense, trial and error, and later on reading ppc books. If you make sure to cap your daily budget, learning won't be as painful. Here are my stats for the last 3 months on adwords:
Clicks Impr. CTR Avg. CPC
1,634 30,323 5.39% $0.55
I'm not going for small words either. I'm going for the expensive city real estate and city homes.

- --- --- --- ---------- --------------- ------------- -----------------
-
I used to rely on ppc and made a lot of money from it. A simple trick to get leads and save money is to set your bid at a low price where you will show up 5 or 6 or 8 down the list.

the idea is that the ads on top will run out of budget money by the end of the day and as each one of those accounts shuts down for the day your ad moves up in placement. by the end of the work day your ad should be up in position 1 or 2 and you will pick up the evening leads. Evening is a good time for leads.

bigtoe, thats an excellent trick,..
google ppc is too steep for a novice..the landscape has changed dramatically..
1.way higher minimum bids to get your ads to even show up...
2. quality scores...
3. other more well funded competitor novices willing to bid up keyword prices
on my area homes for sale, homes and real estate there were 42 adword competitors...
4. traffic plus conversion equals profit..if your page isnt converting your done..

start with homegain ppc..more targeted and you dont have to worry about quality scores, keywords, ad copy etc..
get that page converting first
no conversion..no profit

a lot of good replies.

I have been using Google adwords for 18 months or so, I hit at least $1k each month on targeted PPC, so have a little experience with this.

CONVERSION IS THE KEY!!! For example, I pay $3-$4 PPC. I get maybe 40-50 conversions per month. BUT, of those conversions, I list 80% as short sales(my specialty). I am thinking of upping this to $2k/month so I can double my inventory(currently at about 45 short sales listed). Just one of my closings paid for an entire year of PPC at 1k/month, so my return has been very good.