I honestly believe we are at the start of a massive transference of ad dollars from offline to online. There are billions in offline spend in classifieds and newspapers that are waiting for an easy way to move SMBs over. I believe what we are doing at Reply! and lead generation in general will be that catalyst.

Anyway — go Hurricanes … (who?)

Regarding quarterly numbers, you will be happy to know we have consistently beat our quarterly objectives for over a year by driving more search volume – that is very high quality traffic and is great for all buyers.

To me, what matters most to a seller is their ability to maximize yield. We can guarantee that you will never have to park a lead with Reply! unless you find our bids to yield a higher ROI than all of your other alternatives. We understand that publishers have choices, so unless Reply! is able to provide better yield, we won’t earn a publisher’s business.

Here is why we believe our model is better than LeadPoint:

Not every exchange has every buyer and not every buyer has the same bid. So as a seller of leads you want to be able to maximize your revenues for every lead. That’s why we want you to ping us as well as competing exchanges with every lead and only sell your lead to the highest bidder. We are confident we will earn your business and maximize your revenue.

We look forward to earning your business.

For transparency, I am the Chief Marketing Officer for Reply.com and am responsible for both product and acquisition marketing. I can ensure you and your readers that the system Reply! built does not favor our inventory over any of our sellers / publishers in our exchange.

Being a sophisticated, direct online marketing company has material benefits. First and most important, we have tremendous liquidity in our exchange, which is not the case with LeadPoint. It is nifty to build an exchange and claim you are in multiple categories and it is another point all together to create usable inventory that people want to transact. Launching any successful vertical exchange requires liquidity and quality. To make my point, look at LeadPoint’s failed entry into the auto category.

Second, being a lead generator we understand the technology, systems and margins associated with consumer acquisition and we do not require publishers to dump all their leads into our exchange. LeadPoint claims they do their best to monetize publisher’s inventory but what if their best is just really bad? Reply!’s approach is simply more sophisticated and based on running a multi-category lead business for +8 years. Using the Reply! exchange, a publisher can “ping” our infrastructure to see if Reply! can beat their other options for monetization and never give us control over their inventory unless it makes financial sense to do so. This gives our publishers ultimate control over their inventory and allows them to control margins and revenue on a lead-by-lead basis.

Third, Reply! was first to market with a transparent quality system and we consume leads the same way our advertisers / buyers do and our retail network is the a fantastic litmus test for quality. We get real-time feedback from thousands of buyers on the quality of traffic and make changes to algorithms, terminate publishers and improve quality constantly.

Last, we enhanced our offerings with a Click Marketplace. It allows any company the option to liquidate either clicks or leads with Reply! through an exchange. We use the Click Marketplace ourselves as both a buyer and seller and so do many of the largest lead generators in the industry. Reply! has the most comprehensive online marketing solution for SMBs seeking to get into Internet marketing and ways for lead generators to maximize their revenue. For more, please check out http://www.relpy.com.

I look forward to your thoughts and feedback.

Brian

Keep up the blogging. Some of us are legally barred from entering casinos.