My Game Plan for Starting in the Lead Gen for Offline Client Market - Critiques & Comments Welcome!

If you do start generating leads, charge for them. Don't give them away for free.

People just won't value them if they're free. We've seen this over and over in threads like this. The leadgen guy (you) gets frustrated and quits.

So spend your energy on people who value what you bring to the table. If they won't pay for it, you don't spend any energy on them.

ESPECIALLY since you can "only spend 3 hours a day" on it. Value your time.

I've always been against just selling the leads. My recommendation is instead of selling it on a per lead basis, rent out the website for a flat monthly fee. You have a slight advantage when you do that, you're giving the business an exact amount they expect to pay, regardless of lead volume, and you can also budget better knowing the exact amount you're going to receive.

Low budget, is not a problem, 3 hours a day is not a problem. Developing the site, and doing SEO assuming it is relatively low competition, will be a breese. Your biggest issue, and most time consuming will be to find a buyer.

When it comes to renting out a site, I'd recommend not starting under the $300/mo point.

You didn't mention anywhere in your game plan how you plan on getting those leads for your customer. You need to plan that out as well. Don't give away free leads; makes it seem pointless. With only 3 hours a day / you want to outsource tasks that are cookie cutter.

Best of luck with your endeavors .

As far as I can see, the tactic generally used is to simply to push any organic visitors into making a call, and using call forwarding to send that on to the client (with a whisper saying where it came from).

The question I have for anyone experienced is - surely x amount of these are sales calls? Have you ever had a client get annoyed by the sales calls coming through your system and, if so, how did you get around it?

And now for a question out of left field:

Creating quality leads is the bread and butter of any business. If you find you are exceptionally skilled at generating leads, would you consider moving into that industry yourself?

When you sell leads, you have to do two types of sales and marketing. First, you have to market to get the leads, then you have to market to sell them.

As you scale up, these costs increase.

I'm not telling you what you SHOULD do or advocating for a specific course of action...but...

What if you pick an industry that you could see yourself enjoying...and begin working on generating the leads...and selling them to get started. But your long-term goal is to move into that space and totally crush the existing providers.

If you can really generate high-quality leads in an industry, you will be able to outperform most of the people in that space.

EDIT: I just read your post more closely. I think you are making a classic mistake in your current plan. You have been in recruitment in the past, and plan to get back into it in the future. Why are you messing around with construction leads?

In the future, if you are going to be successful with your own company, generating business will be a KEY part of your success.

So...you are going to build this system to learn how to generate construction leads...learn the lingo...get really good at it...then walk away and go to another industry?

You have spent all this time getting good at recruitment...learning the lingo...and you are going to walk away and market for construction?

Personally, I think you should start exactly where you are. You understand recruiting. Start generating the type of leads you will need in the future, and sell them to existing companies.

Then, when you are REALLY GOOD at getting leads, you stop the flow of leads to the other firms, and start taking them yourself. Double whammy.

Instead of taking the small money which others can afford to pay you for the leads, you will get to keep the full amount on each lead you generate, AND you will actually END UP WHERE YOU WANT TO BE.

I can use some good leads. Send me a PM so we can chat more about it.

@Dan McCoy

I'm working in recruitment at the moment. So first I wouldn't feel comfortable generating business for another company in the same niche as the company I am getting a salary from.

As for would I do this full time? Possible, I'd never rule anything out - and if I can generate a full time income on part time hours then I would be VERY tempted, if only because it gives me more time with my son. But it would be a tough call; recruitment is very lucrative, especially to the business owners. I was on a stag do last weekend (Marbella in Spain, something of a stag/hen do hot spot it seems) with a chap who set up his company 10 years ago, the money he makes now is eye watering.

Now it could be that construction leads aren't quite right. This actually came as a bit of a coincidence. I was considering some EMDs that were for relatively simple keywords, and one was for the construction industry, and thought this made sense.

EDIT: Dan, I've been thinking more about what you have said, and it makes a lot of sense. I still plan on moving into recruitment but my target market when I do move is mechanical design recruitment (I'm in environmental niche now, but again would feel uncomfortable dealing with companies I deal with now when still at my current firm). So your logic (which makes perfect sense to me) would have me move into the industrial manufacturing niche, which I would eventually move into from a recruitment point ofview, allowing me to learn the lingo, how they do business, make relationships ahead of time, etc.

Seems a perfect bit of "synergy" with my current and future plans, cheers for that

OK, so as stated my next site is going to be in the industrial manufacturing industry, I'm hunting keywords at the moment. But as I had the domain and the first 2 articles written for this one I'll plow ahead for now as something of a test case with a new site targeted to be done by early next week.

Right now I have Wordpress and various plug ins added, and 2 articles posted targeting keywords. The next step is a few more articles and then some SEO.

Quick question - how "deep" do many people do these sites? Thinking about 10 pages should avoid the paper thin problem of micro niche sites, but it may be more? My SEO knowledge, on and offpage, is a couple of years old now...

Nick, the first thing I wanted to mention is the fact that you are starting one business that is new to you in order to start another business that you are experienced in. That sounds odd to me, especially since starting up the second business will pretty much take over all of the time from the first business to render it dead. I know there is a conflict of interests in going into the recruitment market that your current company works in, but there has got to be some market sectors that your company does not currently work in that you could do recruitment consulting in. Since this industry is where your current expertise resides AND it is where you want to be in terms of running a business, it only makes sense to move into this sector in some fashion to fund your new business venture.

In terms of doing a lead gen business that is there to get you seed money for your new business venture. I would just go about it in the simplest way possible so that it can be easy to either sell or maintain after you start your new venture.

To do this the site leasing method will be your best bet since there is no worry about conversions, traffic, lead numbers or quality. All you have to do is to find the lowest of low hanging fruit for keywords and niches, get a property ranked (website OR video) at the top of Google and start your funnel to get someone to lease it from you for a monthly fee.

You do not even need to worry about setting up virtual numbers. Just rank the site/video, find someone to lease it and then place their number directly on the site in a image or annotation/title/description if a video.

Since you are not looking to grow a long term business with this internet property leasing venture, do not worry at all about finding clients that will pay $2k a month for a site.

Just find a niche/industry that wants leads, internet exposure, etc. It has at least 3-4 pages of results in Google that are legitimate businesses for that niches main, highest search volume keyword. Then find a secondary keyword that revolves around a single service, concept, etc in that niche that gets at least 10 searches a month in Google and has at least 3 Ads in Google. Figure out a clever domain name that would appeal to the businesses you are targeting. So if it was roofing in London, www. LondonRoofsDoneRight .com as semi weak an example. Put up a simple 1 page wordpress business landing page that looks professional with simple content and calls to action, with a place to put the client phone number as an image in a few spots(header, sidebar, content). Rank it in Google for some low hanging but appealing keywords, which should be fairly simple if you have some SEO knowledge.

Then find someone to lease the page at a nominal rate of £125/month. The reason why I state such a low price point is because you are not in this venture to build a business, you are in it to get money for little time/effort. There effort in the creation/ranking of the sites but there is also an effort in getting a client to lease the site. If you build simple sites for a simple price, the effort in both creation/ranking and finding clients is much less. If you were going to build a business out of leasing site, then I would do what iamnameless said and not lease for under $300 since you would be in it for the long haul.

So what ever traffic, leads, emails(if you set up form), etc that the site generates all go to the client. Do not worry about getting leads coming in, just sell the business on the fact that you have website or video #1 in Google for this keyword (and maybe a handful other longtail or easy ones). This property will get traffic and calls organically, do they want to lease it for the nominal fee of only £125/month, which is extremely cheap for any internet marketing. This can be an easy sale for a business that is on page 2-5 of Google for the main keyword or a business that does not even have a website yet.

You can easily bang out 5+ of these sites a week with very little effort and set-up a nice little sales funnel to connect with businesses that would be interested in this service that is semi automated. If you were to get 10 ranked a month for these easy keywords and convert 5 of them to paying clients a month. At the end of 6 months you would have 30 paying clients for a total of £3750 a month. All from simple 1 page sites that bring in traffic and possible calls.

The reason why I say, not to worry about the calls is because the actual lead gen portion opens up a ton more cans of worms that will only bog you down with more tasks and cause you to spend more time/money.

Thanks for the advice guys. Cagey, that's pretty close the plan. I intend to get a few more than 10 or so leads - London searches for my keyword is about 1k, with a lot of related, and sell at a bit higher price point (around the £300-£400 mark, so about $500 or so).

As for leads in the recruitment sector. Frankly if a recruitment consultant has to buy leads on jobs in this market then they probably don't have the money to buy them. Recruitment companies do sort of buy leads, specifically they buy job advertising and cv databases. A long term project of mine is to build out an authority site in my target niche that I can post to and use, and charge other companies to do the same. But the competition in the job advertising market is pretty large so it is a LONG term plan.

The plan for the next site is to more target towards my future plans by selling leads to companies that will be my clients, so I can start adding value and building relationships to those companies.

But I have decided to pursue this one in the construction field for now as I had done keyword research, domain, etc.

UPDATE

So far I have added 6 articles, put in and edited a Wordpress theme, ordered a logo and as of just now, sorted out a company for answering the phone. Initially I am not doing call whispering but am paying a company on a per call basis to answer the phone, take down the name, number and address of the caller and ask a couple of basic questions.

Not yet in Google for anything but just getting started and done no SEO.

Just thought I'd add an update on this game plan.

1. I have a list of keywords to target for my next target industry (synching it up with my longer term plan of recruitment into manufacturing).

2. My site is now at #20 in uk for it's target keyword and one other keyword, and between 30 and 60 for a few other targets. Only link building has been one hubpage (pointing to an inner page) and one "PBN" style affair, purchased an expired domain with good backlinks, and created a mini site which links to my "money site" amongst others.

Just sorting out a number now (have a company but hadn't set up as of yet), which I'll get on the website in a day or so. Some SEO and article writing to be doing to try crack the top 10, plus the main part - finding buyers for the leads.

Not sure if I should update this thread or not, but figured people would be interested in knowing if this technique works. Will update on finding buyers/when leads start coming in.