Followups seem to be a bit of hot topic right now.

Dave Pyne's President Club interview is one of my personal favourites.

In it Dave states:

"I know that when I started, it was difficult to develop a follow-up strategy."

also

"Working together as a Team we have developed a fantastic follow-up series of letters we send to our new affiliates. "

You can read Dave's interview here:
https://www.sfimg.com/Leaders/PyneProfile.sfi...

The whole point of free ads is they are free - hence the word.
Pay for them in any way - even for a submitter - and you are paying for advertising.

As stated above - if you have a spare 100 bucks, invest in proper paid ads or PPCs.

The same goes for buying credits on TEs - the money is best spent elsewhere.

As for these submitters, we're pretty sure a lot of the sites that accept them are worthless because everyone uses submitters so no real people go...

The sites that accept submissions from packages like that are never looked at by real people. Everyone is just using submssion software -no-one goes there to read the ads.
Most of them are just FFA sites anyway, not class ads, which is why you get the spam.

You have to do the work to post the ads and do the work to whittle down to the ones that give you constant returns. The idea you can buy a package that will do that for you is attractive, but is a scam based on people's laziness...

It is something well known in martial arts – keep an empty cup so it can be filled.

But I would like to take the "water bottle" analogy further.
Yes you must open your bottle, take the top off before you can fill it.
You also choose to hold the bottle under the faucet, to fill it with clear clean water.

Now what if you came to a sewage outlet?
It would be a good idea not to put the bottle under the faucet and keep the lid firmly screwed in...

There's that story about the sculptor who created a great statue (think it was originally attributed as Michelangelo with David). When he completed it everyone said what a great statue he had created. His reply was that the statue was always there - hidden in the rock - he just chipped away the rough edges.

That's probably the same when you mentor a leader.

Nobody "creates" a leader - they were always there, you just mentored and trained them and cleared away...