The day has come for your new website to go 'Live'. After tweaking this and changing that you are finally ready for the herds of potential clients to bombard your website with promising loan applications. While you sit by your email program for a few hours waiting for that first application to come through, you realize that there is more work to be done.

The first step that should be taken is setting your short term and long term goals. This can be as simple as writing two sentences on a sheet of paper. Try to determine what would be a realistic number of leads to achieve per day and what that number of leads would cost you if you where to purchase them from a mortgage lead company. Take in to consideration that the leads from your site are not only exclusive, but also in real time making these leads as good as gold. Try purchasing exclusive live leads on the Internet and you will see that they can range in price from $50.00 to almost $75!

Lets say that your company spends anywhere between three to four hundred dollars a day in mortgage leads. If it cost you only $50 less in advertising to obtain the same amount of leads per day, you are still ahead of the game. You may find that you can cut your cost of leads in half, it all depends on how you use your marketing budget. Two exact websites with the same marketing budget can achieve two very different results.

I had a client that I was selling leads to about 5 years ago who decided she was going to start her own lead generation website. I wished her well on her venture and off she went. Several weeks later I received a somber and humbling phone call from my client who told me that she put up a website and was spending $200 a day in advertising and was only getting 1 or 2 leads a day. I was almost in tears at that point. I asked her what form of advertising was she doing, she replied with "Keyword advertising with a well known company". At this point I was still confused because I strongly recommend keyword advertising as a primary source of exposure. She told me that she was paying close to $11.00 per click for the term "refinance". For those of you whom do not YET know what that means, every time someone clicked over to her site, it cost her $11 Bucks. So for her $200 she would receive only 18 visitors to her site! Now figure that only 1 or 2 of those people actually applied.

The point of my story is not how much you spend but how you spend it.

Your long term goals should focus on such things building link popularity, Getting a good position in search engines and creating some good public relations with your site. These goals for the most part are less expensive but take time to implement to be successful. Be prepared to wait at least a year before you site actually can be seen in the search engines with a good position.

(Your site will be searchable within a few weeks but you may be the 400th result for 'Refinance in Nome Alaska')

In conclusion, 'You need to spend money to make money' and 'Good things come to those whom wait' Although cliché, They still apply.

Anthony Urso is a leading freelance consultant and designer for the mortgage and lending industry for the past 10 years. A graduate of Johnson And Wales University with degrees in sales and marketing, he has help hundreds of brokers and lender realize their marketing goals.