[JayBallentine]

We all love the phones, we live and die by them. The phones are not going away. But companies need to take a more balanced attack when it comes to lead generation; the internet. No, I'm not just talking about dumping $20k a month into ads. Develop a comprehensive long-term strategy that's designed to reduce your customer acquisition costs while generating high quality leads. If I were a medium sized ISO with a reasonable budget, these are the things I'd be doing.

1. Video - Absolutely a must. See why here: http://blog.kissmetrics.com/product-videos-conversion/
2. E-Mail Marketing - Capture their e-mail address. Don't even bother sending them the funding application first. Send them a piece of high useful and high quality profit and loss information via your auto responder. Make them call in to request the application. Don't just push it in their inbox every chance you get. Give them a reason to WANT to work with you. E-mail marketing is central to internet marketing.
3. SEO - There's a lot of competition for the topline keywords. I'd compete for those, but focus on the stuff no one is interested in.
4. Blogging - Posting high quality, useful content. Save the self promotion.
5. Social Media - Facebook, Twitter, G+, to be frank I'm bearish on G+ and FB, but Twitter has been proven to be a tool from which leads convert. How much does it cost to tweet?
6. Site and Landing Page Optimization - AdvanceME is optimizing you guys under the table. Look at their site! It's a damned conversion machine. When a merchant gets to the site, what do you think the merchant is doing? Entering their damned info, which is exactly whats supposed to happen.
7. Give them a reason to come back - Find pain points within a vertical, then develop communities around that. No reason why you shouldn't have a forum, like Daily Funder. You keep coming back here don't you? Why do you keep coming back? Because you find it useful. You don't think a community of business owners sharing info with each other on your site can be useful?
8. VIDEO SEO - The first person to have their video appear in Google search results above the fold will have the lowest customer acquisition costs in the industry.
9. Niche Domination - Focusing on dominating one vertical, maybe two can be huge. That probably makes you cringe. I would. That sounds really uncomfortable. But I'd rather be the "plumber funding company" than the "we fund anything company" because at least I will have brand loyalty, and be buzz worthy.

None of this stuff can be done overnight. But it must be done. Merchants will soon have tons of options for funding, less time for sales calls, etc. Big funding companies will continue to dump tens of thousands per month in PPC... Building relationships via social media and PARTICULARLY e-mail list building are key. If you can get to a list of 20,000 merchants over the next year, just by function of math, you're going to get 20 deals a month - minimum. How do you get there? You offer something of value! Via Web and via Phone.

It's only 80 merchants a day! 10 per hour. Call them, offer value (high quality info, stories, video links, tutorials, etc), they join your list. Keep delivering value until they need funding and call you up. Be sure to plant stories (real stories) of some of the things folks are doing to improve their businesses and expand their marketing. Plant those seeds in their minds. That's how you get high quality, high value, non desperate, growth minded merchants calling you up.

Here to help... That is all...

[MCAVeteran]

the larger funders already are on google spending plenty of money on PPC/SEO. I see this being more of an issue for smaller ISOs and Resellers to compete against the funders. It was bound to happen though- The funders can utilize their inside sales to offer lower rates/longer terms and cut the commissions to brokers out of the equation and on renewals, really control that relationship.

[JayBallentine]

This is exactly what it's important for ISO's to focus on brand building - aggressively.

[Sean Cash]

its kind of like the big banks vs. the small community banks.