Mortgage Web Site Marketing

I get quite a few emails about proposals for mortgage website advertising and finance companies looking for mortgage leads which is great although not really the purpose of this blog, so for the benefit of those people I'm going to list some of the quality resources on the web for promoting mortgage services.

A few places instantly came to mind although I thought i'd find a few more and discovered a lot of junk and a few gems for the mortgage website marketers. One thing I did notice is that there are lots of brokers with their own websites, which having a site is a must for any business, although it was easy to see that many had spent very little resources on either development or marketing of the site. Another thing I noticed was the common use of generic templates in the creation of their site and similar if not the same content. According to most of the commentary on SEO ( search engine optimization) and SEM (search engine marketing) this is a big no no, uniqueness is a great quality to have.

There was also one stand out atrocity common to a lot of sites - audio, as soon as the site loaded I was hammered with some music track or some person welcoming me to their site and telling me how great they were! Audio, or a podcast, can be a great addition to a site to provide more info but let the user decide to hear it or not.

Now, let's get back to promoting mortgage sites with a list of what could be classed as the more authorative sites relevant to the mortgage & finance industry. Some provided by me and some provided my freinds in the SEO/SEM arena:

Mortgage at Business.com
Probably one of the most trusted sites on the web relating to business and finance. The site contains over 500,000 pages of information and business related listings and over 400K people link to it. The site has a large user base in the B2B feild. They have a range of advertising packages including pay per click options and annual listings see: http://www.business.com/info/advertisewithus.asp

Mortgage Information
Site provides an interesting concept in that the listings are categorised by city although worldwide making it a behemoth in the mortgage feild. Getting listed is more than affordable and I would be suggesting that it probably won't remain so in the future. The listings for US appear very accurate and their looking for quality not quantity going by the guidelines see: http://www.mortgage-information.info/directory/submit.php

Yahoo Directory - Mortgage
The Yahoo Directory is probably one of the older more highly respected general directories on the web, the link above takes you directly to the mortgage category. The cost for submitting to the Yahoo directory is $299US and is also non refundable so take a close look at the guidelines see: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/suggest/submit.html


My Finance Directory
A smaller niche finance site with a directory of financial related services. The sites listed are of good quality and known in financial circles so getting into this site is keeping good company.

www.pfblog.com
The Personal Finance blog is a journal of one persons road to financial success and always an interesting read and it's read by many. The Personal Finance blog has also been cited in some highly regarded press outlets. They also offer an advertising programme with many options see: http://www.pfblog.com/ratecard.pdf.

Mortgage at Best of The Web
Another one of the older and more trusted directories on the web. The directory is well known and stood the test of time. The link above is to the mortgage section. For submitting see: http://botw.org/helpcenter/submitcommercial.aspx

These would be my top choices and another recommendation would be to also check out and submit to Google local, Yahoo local and TrueLocal search engines and also investigate local Chambers of Commerce and portals/directories relevant to your region.

As my freinds tell me it's stands true on the internet as it does in the real world in that quality beats quantity. Build a quality site focused on the users and don't participate in short term tactics that may end up only giving you bad will and poor results ie. spamming blogs, link swapping with non related sites (when my freind told me about this I didn't get it and he explained 'would you ask a butcher where to get your car fixed, or would you more likely trust the guy at the auto parts store' ...ok I get it!) - quality beats quantity.