Intro

[EEwing]

Hello - thanks to Greg for introducing me to the community. My name is Ethan Ewing and I manage a new start up internet business Bills.com. A brief personal history - I've been in the mortgage industry since 1992, both in the secondary marketing side and retail. I ran a small retail shop up until 2000, when I came west (Baltimore to California) to go to a work for an online mortgage originator, iOwn.com. I managed the lead acquisition for the 50+ seat shop and this was the beginning of my experience in the online lead generation space, working closely with LendingTree, GetSmart, Loanweb, CFN and others. For the next four years with Experian Consumer Direct, I developed and negotiated our online partnerships with Yahoo, MSN, AOL and many others to sell our online credit reports. I launched an online lead generation business for Ameriquest in 2005 (SavingsPath.com) and then was fortunate to meet the founders of Bills.com and take my current position as President. My experience in both mortgage originations and online marketing give me a unique perspective on finding and meeting mortgage customers online.

A bit about Bills.com - we are a content and information for consumers who are looking for more than just shopping for rates. A key for us is to constantly generate new relevant and timely articles to help consumers get a better grip on their personal finances and make good decisions. We also encourage our site visitors to apply for loan products and we match them with a maximum of four lenders from our lender network. In addition to the content we also drive consumer traffic to the site through paid search marketing and will begin our banner advertsing campaigns in January (when the online ad market cools!). Take a look at the site (www.bills.com) and it'd be great to get feedback from the community, or even ideas for new articles.

Thanks and I look forward to talking to you all through the Forums.

Ethan

[Erik]

Hi Ethan - welcome to the site. So Bills.com is sort of like BankRate meets LendingTree, correct? I took a look at the site and it looks really nice.

What does it take for brokers to get signed up as part of your network?

[Greg]

Welcome! Nice to see ya stop in and register. I took a look at your site too and it is done very well. Is it producing anything for you? Are you getting traffic?

I am going to suggest a banner on here. A member by the name of Carlo has one for getleads and says it drives decent traffic and he has closed some deals from it. Your site has a lot of services.

Hey is Bill a real person? (Ask Bill)

[EEwing]

Hey Greg and Erik - thanks for the feedback on the site. That's pretty close to it (Bankrate meets LT), though we are really looking to provide content and relevant articles for all consumers, rather than just the rate shoppers (Bankrate's niche). In '07, we'll build in a community element. We're driving ~150K unique visitors a month, which is a good start and our page rank is increasing quickly. On the lead side, we're getting good traction with both mortgage and debt leads, though 90% of that is driven by our paid search campaigns. We'll open up the network (currently have around 20 lenders) again in a month and brokers from the community can just contact me directly at eewing@bills.com or 650-393-6203. Erik - we're interested in a banner spot as well.

Thanks guys and looking forward to the community (won't always be so long-winded!). And Bill is a real person - one of the two founders who personally answers the Ask Bill questions - try him out Greg! askbill@bills.com


Ethan

[Greg]

That is sweet. I will but I am planning a good question for him. Want to link exchange Ethan?

[EEwing]

Throw him a really tough mortgage question - and it'll likely end up with me! Sure thing, I'll talk to my Search Engine Optimization guru about the link exchange. He keeps a pretty tight reign on what we do there, so I'll let you know. Enjoy the day