marketing
Merchant Cash Advance Now In-Depth
December 1, 2014For quite possibly the first time ever, Google has blessed merchant cash advance with its own array of In-depth articles. What are In-depth articles? Why, they’re featured stories at the bottom of the normal search results. The In-depth feature launched in 2013 and has only worked for certain keywords.
Today it appeared for the very first time for the keyword merchant cash advance
Since Google experiments constantly and shows different results to everyone, it’s possible that you’ve been seeing this for some time already.
I had this to say about the feature 16 months ago:
If you’re wondering how websites can prepare themselves to benefit from such rich snippets, I published Schema.org Markup and Rich Snippets for the Little Guy back in August 2013.
Businessweek, NY Times, and Forbes… I’m not surprised that they’re the chosen publications. Truth be told, there may not have been enough written about merchant cash advance to implement this feature until now. Consider this a milestone.
The Funding Calls That Won’t Stop
November 23, 2014“Your business has been approved for a loan…”
Last week, Chicago Public Radio (WBEZ 95.1 FM) investigated a trend in the small business community, the use of merchant cash advance financing. The station called me in advance to answer some questions about merchant cash advances and I gave my best explanation of the industry and its products.
Of the discussion that lasted more than 30 minutes, only about five of my sentences made it on the air. While I clarify some of my positions below, it was sobering to learn the context of how they were used, as a defense to real life merchant complaints.
The satisfaction rate with merchant cash advances are pretty high and I say that mainly because it’s so rare to hear complaints from anyone other than journalists that can’t believe anyone would accept rates above 6% APR. And while there are indeed bad actors in the industry (as there are in any industry), the gripe one merchant had about phone solicitations that just won’t stop is a recurring theme.
It’s happening to me too.
As an account representative in 2010 calling real time leads sold to five parties at once, I did what anyone would do, I pretended to be a small business myself and inquired through the website that we bought leads from and entered my cell phone as the point of contact
Ring. Ring. Ring…
Within a half hour, representatives from four companies called me, and I learned exactly who my competition was, how they explained the product, and what they would say to win me over. Two of the four were really good and one even referenced my name personally, saying something to the effect of, “If you get a call from Sean Murray, his rates are worse than mine.” Obviously he had already done what I was doing now, which was pretend to be a small business so he could prove to the prospect he was well informed about the alternatives. He had heard my pitch already and was now throwing me under the bus by planting the seed that I was going to offer something more expensive even if it wasn’t the truth.
In the end none of them won because it was all a farce. One never called me again after the first call. Another kept at it for a week and the remaining two followed up for a month.
And then it got quiet…
I had been marked as a dead lead and forgotten about until three months later when one company sent a follow up email. “Smart,” I thought. But then a call came six months later, and then more emails, some from companies I didn’t originally engage with.
And they continued at regular intervals, every couple of months an email or call. Was it interesting? Yes. Annoying? No.
Until this year.
The volume of emails have slowed but I’ve somehow ended up on robo calling lists. “Press 1 to talk to a funding specialist or press 9 to be added to the Do Not Call list”
The press 9 option doesn’t work for me. Sure, I might be removed from that marketer’s list, but it in no way removes you from anyone else’s list. I knew that already of course because I’ve been on the other end before.
The first time I got one of these calls, I was excited to tell the sales representative who I really was, level with him, and explain that it was a really good idea to take me off the list. But much like other business loan robo call complaints, the representative wouldn’t tell me anything about himself or his company.
I got yelled at.
Every time I tried to ask a question, he’d get louder, insisting I tell him my monthly gross sales volume for the “cash advance I wanted.”
A rogue actor maybe, but I’ve since gotten additional business loan robo calls and have made no progress in getting myself removed. I just hang up now.
Call it sweet irony perhaps. Or maybe a wake up call (pun intended). I applied on a website once four years ago and the rest is history.
My experience with repeat solicitations is marginal compared to somebody that has actually used a merchant cash advance. With the filing of a public UCC-1, anyone in the industry can easily access that data and convert it into a marketing list. And they do.
Brokers that scorn UCC marketing acknowledge that these businesses could be getting called 5-10 times a day. My own clients had reported repetitive calls back when I was an account representative. And while UCC marketing is very cost effective, in today’s market where more than a thousand companies are offering similar financial products, it’s probably safe to say it’s overly saturated.
And if 5-10 calls per day were even remotely accurate, I’d surmise that level of volume is marring the industry’s reputation as a whole.
I could argue though that when customers have a great many options to choose from, they win. With more than a thousand companies offering merchant cash advances and business loans, it’s truly a buyer’s market. Play all the companies against each other and you should end up with the best possible terms. It’s a great time to seek capital.
Except we’ve got to do something about those phone calls, or at least the robo calls.
Every angry robo dial recipient becomes one less person likely to speak positively about the the nonbank financing industry. Aged leads, UCCs and phone calls might be inexpensive, but the cost to undo negative preconceived notions is immeasurable.
Do you want to be known as the company that helped small businesses or the annoying people that won’t stop calling? If merchants are taking to the air waves to complain, it will only be a matter of time before the FTC and FCC become interested.
—
Regarding my comments on the radio about APRs and daily amortization, they were pulled from a conversation that compared daily payment loans to purchases of future sales. I DO believe bad actors exist and every business owner should have an accountant, lawyer, or savvy third party review any contracts they enter into, financial or otherwise.
Why Your Deal Got Stolen
September 16, 2014
Back in April, I presented the idea of trigger leads coming to the alternative lending industry. In subsequent discussions about that blog post, many folks particularly in merchant cash advance questioned whether such a concept could possibly exist or would even be legal.
For those not familiar, this is the methodology behind trigger leads using a hypothetical scenario:
- OnDeck runs the personal credit of a merchant using Experian.
- Experian sells the contact information of that merchant to OnDeck’s competitors immediately after credit is pulled.
- Competitors solicit that merchant and convince them to go with them instead.
Again, the reaction I get to the above scenario by most people is, “yeah, right. I don’t believe that could happen.” But if you look at the raw amount of ISOs complaining their deals got stolen, it’s evident that perhaps there is something else brewing than just the usual assortment of rogue underwriters and shady funders.
Most ISOs are convinced that if their client is working with them and only them, that a shady business dealing has taken place if that client is randomly called out of the blue with the knowledge that they’re pursuing funding. To them, the only conclusion is that their deal got backdoored.
And while backdooring does seem to happen out there from time to time, another culprit may very well be trigger leads. Credit bureaus and big data aggregators are selling credit pull data in real time. UCC-1 leads are leads after the funding has taken place. Trigger leads are leads before the funding has taken place. But do they really exist?
Elsewhere in alternative lending, trigger leads are the backbone for how companies tailor their direct mail campaigns. If a consumer’s credit was pulled today by a mortgage lender, companies like Lending Club and Prosper will make sure that consumer receives a mail ad for a home improvement loan tomorrow.
Today at the Apex Lending Exchange conference in New York City, Ron Suber, the president of Prosper, referred to this trigger methodology as “getting to the right borrowers at the right cost.” In their sector, trigger leads are marketing 101. In merchant cash advance, it’s perceived as a pipe dream. Odds are that whoever is taking advantage of trigger leads in this industry would want to keep all the other players in the dark about it.
As much as you might hate to believe it, all of the backdooring paranoia that’s been rampant lately might actually be caused by the credit bureaus, not the funders. The lesson here is that as soon as your merchant’s credit is pulled, the clock is ticking until your competitors find out even if that merchant talks to nobody else.
I know ISOs want to believe that their merchant is only theirs, but in the age of advanced technology and big data, your merchant belongs to the cloud. As soon as your relationship with the merchant interacts with technology, somebody else will find out about it. And that’s why your deal got stolen.
Is Awareness of Alternative Lending Still Low?
July 4, 2014
Prosper’s President Ron Suber and LendingClub’s CEO Renaud Laplanche have previously explained that there is still a large opportunity for growth because most people still don’t know non-bank lending options exist.
As cited on LendingMemo, Renaud Laplanche admitted the reason they are even considering an IPO is “to use it as an opportunity to raise awareness for the company.” He continued by saying that they don’t need capital so the purpose of their IPO aspirations “is a lot of free advertising.”
In casual conversations with business owners, friends, and new acquaintances I’ve asked if they’ve ever heard of merchant cash advance, p2p lending, or companies like OnDeck Capital and LendingClub. The answer is almost always ‘no’.
That means there is still a lot of work to do.
In this CNBC interview Funding Circle acknowledges that many business owners aren’t aware of alternatives and explains what makes them different.
What if there were Trigger Leads?
April 27, 2014
Just recently, a user in DailyFunder’s forum complained that a deal of his had been poached by a competitor. There’s nothing new about that story, but it is what followed that drew interest. He was in the process of renewing his client for additional funds, when out of the blue popped up a competitor that called his client to tell them not to sign the contract they had in their hands until they heard his better offer.
As it was suspiciously timed and curiously specific, he decided to reach out to the alternative lending community for their thoughts. One possible conclusion offered was that the competitor was being fed trigger leads.
Trigger leads?????????????????
Forget UCCs folks. UCCs detail transactions that have already happened and we’ve all seen what they’ve done to the merchant cash advance and alternative business lending industry. Companies are scared to file them now. But what if all of your competitors were notified every time one of your deals was submitted to underwriting? You get the app signed, you submit the file, and the next day 10 companies have called your client to offer them a better deal on funding than whatever terms you were about to offer. What gives?
Popular in the mortgage industry, the credit bureaus can actually sell credit inquiry data to lenders. So imagine every time credit gets pulled on a deal, the merchant’s info is sent out to your competitors for a fee.
Dave Sullivan explains Trigger leads below:
There was no way to tell for sure if that was what happened in this situation, and I’ve yet to hear of trigger leads being used in the alternative business lending industry but if someone was getting them, I’m sure they’d want to keep their source top secret.
Can you imagine what kind of chaos would ensue if this became commonplace in our industry?
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Your Merchant Cash Advance Press Release May be Hurting You
August 8, 2013Part of keeping up with the merchant cash advance industry means reading up on the press releases published online, but it’s not such an easy job. Legions of funders, ISOs, and lead generators are competing for valuable real-estate in search results and they’ll use every trick in the book to get it. It almost always comes with a price and these tricks don’t always work. By tricks here, I’m referring to using optimized anchor text in press releases as a way to build backlinks.
Have you ever seen a press release with thin information but lots of embedded links that say something like “best small business loan companies”? There’s a reason for that. These companies are trying to manipulate PageRank, a Google search ranking factor that calculates the value of the page the link is on, calculates the value of the website it’s on, uses the anchor text as a signal of what the page is about, and then passes that value onto the destination page. PRWeb has a solid PageRank of 7 out of 10 and last I checked, they don’t nofollow the links. That means a webpage can gain some serious ranking points by using optimized anchor text in a press release. But that’s just on PRWeb’s domain. Consider the fact that press releases are usually syndicated to tens, hundreds, or even thousands of other websites, most of which will keep the links intact, and multiplying the value being passed to the destination site.
One press release could result in hundreds of powerful ranking signals for the keyword, “best small business loan companies.” Now if there were on-page signals for that keyword and additional external factors at work, then there’d be no reason for that page not to rank high in search results for best small business loan companies. And so anyone not totally asleep at the wheel has been using that method for months, if not for years.
There’s only one problem. Google’s Director of web spam (yes, this is a real title) had said back in December of 2012 that links in press releases shouldn’t count.
The Internet went wild over this statement especially since his choice of words implied that there is a chance they did count, he just wouldn’t expect them too. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) diehards decided this was a battle worth fighting and optimized anchor text in press releases became more used than ever before, that is until Google decided to take action.
Wouldn’t expect was apparently proven to mean definitely does. The fact is that links in press releases were passing PageRank and the sites on the other end of them were getting valuable ranking signals. That’s why to this day we see merchant cash advance releases read like an itemized list of keywords on PRWeb…
The best merchant cash advance company has announced a new program to help provide bad credit business financing to restaurants in need of a fast cash loan.
If you’ve stopped reading the article at this point, you’re in trouble. The gravy train is no longer running express. Less than two weeks ago, Google conceded that optimized anchor text in press releases works and are a form of cheating the system. That means that overuse or quite possibly any usage of a keyword rich anchor in a release means your website is at risk of a rankings penalty. Google advises that in order to be safe, webmasters should nofollow the links. There’s just one problem with that; Credible wire and release services do not under any circumstances allow companies to code in HTML attributes in their releases, rendering this feat impossible.
That means the burden of nofollowing the links is on the release services and syndicating websites, something that isn’t likely to happen anytime soon. Release services have not been shy about the potential SEO benefits they can provide, with some going so far as to offer paid consulting services to clients on how to optimize their anchor text for search engines. To them, a crackdown on links in releases means a crackdown on a very profitable portion of their business model.
Watch Matt Cutt’s explanation of links in advertorials:
Google offers the following guidance on link schemes:
The following are examples of link schemes which can negatively impact a site’s ranking in search results:
- Buying or selling links that pass PageRank. This includes exchanging money for links, or posts that contain links; exchanging goods or services for links; or sending someone a āfreeā product in exchange for them writing about it and including a link
- Excessive link exchanges (“Link to me and I’ll link to you”) or partner pages exclusively for the sake of cross-linking
- Large-scale article marketing or guest posting campaigns with keyword-rich anchor text links
- Using automated programs or services to create links to your site
Additionally, creating links that werenāt editorially placed or vouched for by the siteās owner on a page, otherwise known as unnatural links, can be considered a violation of our guidelines. Here are a few common examples of unnatural links that violate our guidelines:
- Text advertisements that pass PageRank
- Advertorials or native advertising where payment is received for articles that include links that pass PageRank
- Links with optimized anchor text in articles or press releases distributed on other sites. For example:
There are many wedding rings on the market. If you want to have a wedding, you will have to pick the best ring. You will also need to buy flowers and a wedding dress.- Low-quality directory or bookmark site links
- Links embedded in widgets that are distributed across various sites, for example:
Visitors to this page: 1,472
car insurance- Widely distributed links in the footers of various sites
- Forum comments with optimized links in the post or signature, for example:
Thanks, thatās great info!
– Paul
paulās pizza san diego pizza best pizza san diegoNote that PPC (pay-per-click) advertising links that donāt pass PageRank to the buyer of the ad do not violate our guidelines. You can prevent PageRank from passing in several ways, such as:
- Adding a rel=”nofollow” attribute to the < a > tag
- Redirecting the links to an intermediate page that is blocked from search engines with a robots.txt file
You can watch John Mueller, one of Googleās lead Webmaster Trends Analyst answer questions to Google’s new link policies in the hangout below:
There are other purposes for publishing thin releases as both Google and Bing can decide to display a snippet of the release on the first page of the results for the keywords used in the announcement. So no, it’s not just about links, at least that isnt’t all of the SEO benefit to be gained.
These news snippets can last up to a week, helping companies that might not be ranking well jump to the front of the line for exposure.
Link Removal
We’re not going to call anyone out by name but ever since Google Penguin 1.0 was released, many merchant cash advance companies and payment companies have hired link removal experts to identify bad links for them and are paying them to have them taken down. The only way to take down a link is to ask the webmaster hosting the site to take it down. Unfortunately, this has led to some companies finding the cheapest link removal service they can find, resulting in a poorly qualified consultant setting off to remove 100% of a site’s links instead of just the bad ones. We know this firsthand because we have had no shortage of e-mails from people claiming to be the hired link removal representative of a merchant cash advance related company.
The e-mails usually look like this:
Hello sir,
I am contacting you on behalf of Cash Advance Funder ABC and recently we have been instructed by Google to remove all of our links to have a penalty removed. Therefore we are asking that you remove our spam link from your website. We appreciate your immediate assistance in this matter.Sincerely
sfahfdspfu547@spamlinkremovalservicecompanyseobest.com
A great way to make sure your website never ranks ever again is to remove all your good links too. We can assure you that links on this website are not bad.
So…
In conclusion, if your hired SEO consultant is still banging away on optimized anchor text in press releases, there’s a good chance now that they’ll be causing damage over the long term. Press releases are for the purpose of making important company announcements and Google is on to anyone using them for any other reasons.
Your press releases might be hurting you with Google. Bing on the other hand…
Other SEO related articles on Merchant Processing Resource:
- Is Google Your Only Web Strategy?
- Google Penguin Kills Survivors
- The SEO War for Merchant Cash Advance Continues
- The SEO War for Merchant Cash Advance
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