#1 on Google, What is this Worth?

I've previously sold a domain to a lawyer in a smaller city than Chicago, but before I made the sale I turned it into a lead capture site so that I could guage how much money I could make.

What I did with the leads that I captured was to contact local lawyers and find out how much they would be willing to pay for hot leads for their business.

What you'll find interesting here is that most of the businesses I contacted new exactly how much a new client was worth i.e. not only would that client generate $5k in fees, they would come back in future and would recommend their family & friends, therefore each being worth an average of say $10k over life.

So I found one lawyer that was willing to pay $100 per lead, an I sent the leads I recieved through to them for a couple of months.

Then I re-approached them and told them that I was willing to sell them the site that they had been paying for the leads from. In each month, I had send through an average of 1 lead a day, costing the client around $3000 a month.

So for them to buy the site from me, I worked it out on the cost of the leads for a full year - so we agreed on a price of $36,000 for the site. I was happy with that price, but you could charge up to 5 years x the value they would be payting you - afterall, they are buying an asset.

Lawyers are great to work with because they generate alot of money, and business is competitive so they are willing to pay for new clients.

This is just my experience with this one, but I hope that it gives you some sort of idea about how you can work this out

Thanks for the input. That would be great to get that kind of money for the site. But here's the thing...

The site was set up originally so that people could ask questions and get them answered by attorneys in Chicago. When they posted a question, they were given the option of having a Chicago attorney contact them (check box). virtually everyone who asked a question checked the box giving permission for an attorney to contact them. So they were "leads" in a general sense.

I'm not an attorney, so I recruited a few attorneys to answer questions as they came in, in exchange for the leads.

The response from the attorneys getting these leads was pathetic. They basically weren't interested in free leads. They answered some questions, but eventually they lost interest, as a result questions would go unanswered and the leads would go to waste basically.

I even had a page with their attorney bios, links to their sites, etc. and they still lost interest.

I'm not sure if the leads that I sent them sucked, or if they were just too busy to deal with it or what. If these attorneys weren't willing to accept free leads, I'm wondering if there are any that will pay $100 for them.

Maybe chicago attorneys are just cheap.