So I’m at the tail end of LeadsCon, getting ready to go home.

To me, the best two sessions were ‘Keynote Address: Lessons From the Leaders’ and ‘Uncovering Local Lead Generation’

The first was an interesting story - how things were done, how much FreeCreditReport.com cost (hand regged!), and so forth. Personal stories of success and development are always good.

The second was interesting in the sense of mechanics - the background work required to make local lead generation work. What is expect from businesses, and what is expected from consumers, and match the two.

The rest in the middle, while executed well (I much prefer talk sessions than podium preaching), was boiled down to two core issues:

1. Teeth gnashing at what meanies the FTC are and how they hate us
2. Teeth gnashing at the mortgage industry explosion, and looking forward to the housing market coming back

It was, in my opinion, far too retrospective, when it should have been more forward-thinking. What I got (and remember, this is my perspective), was that the only new thing was lead scoring.

My intent in coming was of course locally-oriented - local lead gen, while a tougher nut to crack than the traditional ‘financial’ categories (mortgage, debt, loans, financing), is also potentially far more lucrative (higher margins, repeat customers, word of mouth effectiveness). Yet every single established company I talked to had the same boiler plate answer - we think it’s great, it’s on our list of things to do, but not in the year 2008.

It reminded me a lot of the domainer industry. All those PPC companies are basically the same (their ads come via Google or Yahoo), and they all sell the same services. Instead of trying to evolve the market in new ways, it seems like everyone is content sitting on their laurels fighting each other for the same leads, instead of trying to work on new areas where there is no competition.

Yes there were most definitely some individuals who want to try new things, who are looking at new types of leads. But the local space requires scale and operations - a one man operation won’t make much of a dent in local lead gen.

At the end of the day, this just elucidates the level of disconnect happening between some of the major industries I travel. Local companies should be interested in domains (readymade traffic - just look at Marchex), and should be interested in getting the most money out of a consumer (lead gen!). Yet I saw almost zero local-oriented companies. Domainers should love local (’unlocking’ the potential of their domains) and lead gen (leaving the Google/Yahoo duopoly) … but again, few domainers. Lead gen should love domainers (source of traffic) and local (higher margins, new areas) - but again, little interaction.

I almost feel like a trailblazer trying to connect the three - anyone else actively participating in these three areas?

Just some anecdotal evidence.

We released a site some three years ago. It sat on our oldest server for the first 18 months, and it didn’t do so well in the search engines. Did around 8000 pageviews a day, with revenue at a partly $25-35 a day. Nothing impressive.

Then when we finally got our new server configuration up a while ago, we moved it. Instantly traffic went up a little bit - the site was faster, the search was faster, etc etc. Google also went crazy, crawling a *lot* heavier, and also sending more traffic.

Yesterday the site did 22,000+ pageviews, and over $170 in revenue (admittedly a little bit high, usually with that many pageviews it does roughly $125 on average).

Just as interesting is that (now) three of the top five (and the top two) are searches for the brand itself. That was not the case when it was on the older server.

Its taken me roughly four months to get here, but three days ago my notebook finally arrived.

I looked for a long time for a notebook with the following:
1. SSD
2. 13.3″ max screen / < 4 lb (basically not too bulky).
3. Docking station
4. A powerful enough gfx card that wouldn't choke on powering dual 20"+ (1600 res) monitors.

Lots of notebooks came close, but unfortunately none sealed the deal. Turns out to make the notebook under 4 pounds requires removing the circuitry that allows you to dock - oh dear. And USB docks are horrible - never get them.

So the specs (click):

So now its all nicely tied in. I can undock my notebook, and all my work is with me. I come home, pop it in, close the screen, and I have a 21″ + 22″ widescreen, with my speakers, printer, mouse, keyboard, keyboard (yes I have two connected, don’t ask why heh) all connected and ready for use. Pop the phone into the cradle and voila contacts notes all synched (I do have bluetooth I just haven’t tried using it yet). I’m not even using a wired connection into the dock - Wireless N powers me here - so bringing it with me into the living room is absolutely cake.

Oh and if you travel, definitely get the ’slim-adapter’ (if they over it). So much less bulky and (with Dell at least) a lot more connection options (airplane, car, etc).

I’m also trying to get used to Office 2007, odd little creature it is.

I always found Brand Power ads to be super-cheesy, but always intriguing. I pride myself on ‘turning off’ of ads, but I actually respond to those ads.

Turns out I’m not the only one.

Just like sites like Craigslist and 37signals do well due to their emphasis on simplicity (while others go ga-ga over complexity), looks like the simplicity concept works well in TV advertising too.

Has anyone noticed that more than half of the ads seem to ‘hide’ the product until the last 2 seconds? What is up with that?

We would have failed. Miserably.

As I emailed our in-house designer (the amazingly talented Elena of Design Disease) the fifth design for iBegin Source (since incarnation), it hit how much we had evolved since our launch. I had the original idea for iBegin in October 2005 (while showering of course). The entire idea behind iBegin Source hit me in October 2006. And the plans for harnessing that data for something bigger hit me in October 2007 (odd recurring theme eh!)

I was talking to my lead programmer, and he was very angry at the old startup he had worked at. They had burned through something like $6 million, and had recently launched something he had worked on. Except they had botched it. Badly. And he was railing how if they had spent the proper time it would have come out right.

I just shook my head and smiled.

When we had originally launched iBegin, I think about a dozen VCs came to us in the first 3 months or so. They all liked the idea of local social search, and wanted to expand on it. Quickly. Yelp was gaining steam, and with Judy’s Book and InsiderPages all growing too, they were convinced that untold amounts of money was to be made.

Thankfully, I had a philosophy, and I stuck with it.

And it became clear relatively quickly that the sales channel and the review channel did not mesh very well. A vice-versa catch-22 - if a business had good reviews, why bother advertising? If a business had bad reviews, why bother advertising?

By not funding and deciding to take my time, I was able to re-assess without having fire being breathed down my neck. Heck I even went on a one week vacation to clear my head.

And so iBegin Source came out. But we knew it wouldn’t make a big profit for a long time. We knew that it would take time to lay the groundwork to establish with potential customers. With potential partners. Not months, but years. And we had the luxury of not needing to meet annual forecasts as dictated by someone else. No need to bring immediate profit.

And boy am I thankful. Yes we have had our share of headaches. And yes sometimes its been nice to think “this would be so much easier with a couple million behind us.” But the reality is at the end of the day, the millions would not have made a difference. We would have been well on our way towards oblivion like the other review-based sites.

And we have much more up our sleeves. Our little ‘innovation’ house should be launching in the next 48 hours - nothing ground breaking, but interesting enough to maybe spark a few brain cells. And our long term plan is executing beautifully - even slightly faster than I had anticipated.

I love it when people cover companies that organically grew into something very notable. I hope to join those ranks in the next three years.

City-data.com. Look at its Compete.com numbers - estimated 3 million US visitors last month! Pretty close to Yelp.com, and well above of InsiderPages.com.

The site in itself is quite simplistic. Take (what appears to be public) city data, condense it nicely, and put it up. We had done something similar roughly 3 years ago (and City-data.com was around then too), but we never had as much data as they did. The site was getting roughly 10-15k uniques a day when we sold it off.

Interestingly, City-data.com was also one of the few sites (back in the day) that had Wikipedia content and ranked for it.

The owner himself uses this same approach to great success elsewhere. His Web Hosting Ratings site used to be #1 for ‘web hosting’ on Google - but he seemed to have stopped updating it and it has slid a bit. He also owns Faqs.org, a site I believe he purchased. That site has 209 DMOZ listings and 57 Yahoo listings (it used to have well in the thousands of DMOZ listings - getting a listing for every single RFC it published). These other sites of his were used to spread authority and google juice to his city-data.com website … which then took off and gained a lot of links.

City-data.com now has an astounding 1484 DMOZ listings, 1 Yahoo listing, and an insane 48,945 pages referencing that site on Wikipedia.

And don’t forget the forums - Threads: 203,075, Posts: 2,539,326, Members: 248,761

So there you have it. Another local-oriented site getting a lot of traffic, a lot of pull, a lot of stickiness (via its forum) … and being completely ignored by everyone in the local space.

So I got back today - I made a little bit of a blunder and we left the airport … when the flight was leaving in an hour. So we rushed through, cut the lines everywhere, and had time to grab a coffee before we got onto the plane.

I get home and Jacob from Bloggy Network is excited. Turns out Yahoo did some feature on ‘top us jobs’ (on the front page) and linked to search results for that phrase. What came up at #2? None other than one of our sites - Life Spy.

So the site ended up making an extra $1500 (give or take a bit) that it would have otherwise.

What really stunned me was the ‘quality’ of the traffic. The front page feature/search link sent us an extra ~45,000 pageviews. But the CTR on that page was around 15% - giving us a yummy CPM of roughly $35.00! To compare, the normal CTR/CPM are less than 1/4th for each.

So there you have it. One link made us over $1500 in just 12 hours. Looking forward to Yahoo doing it again (and I can only imagine what #1 would have done).

I am so sick of people either deluding themselves, or trying to pull in big words in hoping to get you to look at their [for sale] listing.

Classic example: ‘MV-M.COM a premium name for sale’

In what reality is ‘mv-m’ a premium domain? Hell the domain was registered just over 10 days ago - are you telling me premium domains are for sale like that?

I’ve been a long believer that the easiest way to differentiate between serious and dumbass is price. SitePoint has sort of gone that way - adding a ‘Premium Sites for Sale’ category. The problem is that it still only costs $40 to list there. You still end up with stupid sales like Torrentaholic.com. If the site BIN is $500, that isn’t premium. Quite the opposite - certifiable crap.

Same rule applies to any other marketplace - from DNF to NamePros to WebHostingTalk.

I wish one of the forum operators would be willing to take the flak and create a premium listing that requires $500 listing fee. These are established sites. They push a lot of traffic. They have generated millions in transactions. Why not?

Oh an addendum too - provide an Escrow service.

So - SitePoint, DNF, NP, WHT, etc - please provide us with a real premium listing service, and also a built-in escrow service. You have the traffic and brand - it seems to be an obvious extension.

[I’m good friends with the new DNF operator - I will try to get his response here.]

No other way around it really - sometimes you do things that don’t work out. Sometimes you have to change your tracks (after you already changed your tracks).

The recent ILM:07 was fun. I still have about 3-5 posts to write on it. And I will.

But for now - we’ve placed a moratorium on our city sites.

I’ve talked previously about exploiting Digg to get links and so forth. All links in the ‘who blogged this’ and ‘comments’ area are direct links - no nofollow or anything of that sort.

Now - what Digg does is hide old comments from old stories. But what they do do is show new comments for old stories.

So - you find old stories that were heavily dugg, and throw in your comment. Easy as pie!

Observe our friend Card Warrior going at it.

Check out the Google Cache copy of the first post he commented on.

And a ton more links - all from Digg.