Revenue sharing with contractor/handyman?

I found a partner! You live in NJ?

And let me ask you a serious question, where did you hear about this idea?
Because its a carbon copy of what I am doing right now, and there is A LOT of money in this market.

I don't think people really understand how CL works, and what the competition actually looks like. 95% of these contractors have NO IDEA how to market on CL, and thats why its easy for a marketer to swipe right in and steal up most of their work.

If you really study how some of these contractors post, they do not test timing, they don't split test ads, they don't target right (often they target OTHER contractors), they don't post enough, and most importantly they don't know a thing about copywriting.

If you want to get something serious going on buddy shoot me a pm! I've been looking for a NJ partner for a while because what I'm doing now can be scaled up a lot, and even on a small scale its profitable.

You can ask questions here if you want, but make sure you pm me at some point. If I can find someone to help me with what I'm doing right now, we can make a killing on CL and thats no bs.
I've wrote out the math in other threads, but theres a lot more money involved than most people understand. ESPECIALLY when you target high contract jobs like these.

-Rob

Some of you guys are giving so many GOLDEN NUGGETS with these posts....and I thank you so much for all of the wealth of info.

What you have here is the lead gen model. You sell leads to the contractors (either a percentage, or a flat fee of say $60). This model has been very overused in the dental, lawyer and plastic surgery niches, but underused in construction I'm moving to this model myself, which why your thread caught my eye.

Service Magic sells leads for $50-80 for contractors, and they do over $2 BILLION a year in sales... They are strictly an online construction lead gen company. There's tons of money in this.

Peter Humleker is the guy who's turned me on to the whole concept, he has a WSO that you should check out called Construction Lead Gen (I'm not an affiliate, and have no monetary benefit for posting this link just to be clear)

Best of luck to you!

Yeah, I can see the potential pitfalls of doing this. Just curious, did you get leads and then just throw them at anyone who wanted them?

I was thinking of getting a few contractors that I felt comfortable with, meeting them in person, getting their story etc...basically not working with anyone who I felt was sketchy.

If you wouldn't mind can you just elaborate a little more on what your experience was like?

Thanks

good luck with it guys... revenue sharing is definitely the way to go!

For some reason I mistook your post for someone else, my bad man!

Sometimes I do that when I'm in a rush.

Certain CL sections are gold mines that people are just scraping the surface of. Especially Skilled Trade...where it's blue collar guys..against us. We know copy, sales, and we can use a call to action. I feel bad for anyone competing against my ad campaign on CL.

Iamnameless is right. I bought a washer and dryer and the owner said the State of Tennessee hit him up to start paying his sales taxes.

Interesting idea presented in this thread. Sound like we just have to check the local laws before implementing.

Does the danger only exist if you revenue share or also if you sell the leads? What about site rental then?

I agree with what Nameless is saying.... 100%
Make sure your business is legit
Make sure the client is legit
Check ALL laws before doing anything. Federal, State, Local

Some laws require that you put your license number in everything.
So you can't just advertise for a service and then sell the leads to the highest bidder.
You have to have your clients license number in the advertising.
You need the client first, get their license number, then advertise.
You are liable, since you are acting ON BEHALF OF them.

In some cases, require your business to be listed as a policy holder on the E&O insurance.
There is a spot in the lower left hand side for an additional insured, usually costs $25 if anything.

This is similar to Adrian Browning's brokering method. Instead of selling them the leads at $80 - $90, why not use your marketing skills to find these contractors high paying jobs and then take a percentage of the total fee.

Depending on the size of the jobs that you find, you can probably scrape in a large chunk of change.

Out of curiosity, I checked a "skilled trades" section in Seattle area and found it to be 12 pages long... :-) Years ago, only the adult section on CL would get that long (not that I would ever used it.. lol).

Iamnameless, sirthomas and others are correctt on this. Major fines liabilities etc. Are waiting for You. Just hit up your states licensing board they are happy to speak with you. Talk with the state r local Home builders association they can help you as well.

Service Magic charges for leads even if they are dead - buddy of mine uses them for carpet cleaning and 1/2 the time he gets "I have no idea what you are talking about" from the leads!
I throw some work to a handyman and he always gives me %10 of the job. They are word of mouth leads though.
I gotta think you could call yourself a marketing consultant that gets paid on a performance basis?
Redshifted - I am in NY just over the NJ border - hit me up if you need help. I do lots of work in NJ.

I'm going to offer another reason to not do this.

Most handyman work cheap. It is the only way they get business. Thus they will have little to no money to pay you even if you get a percentage of sales.

Let's say I see your ad. I hire your guy for the day for $100 bucks and he gives you $20. I don't see how it is worth your time and effort.

Now you add in the legal question and it's a no brainer. It's not worth the effort.

Now if a licensed company wants to pay you up front go for it. But none of this revenue share stuff. You guys need to realise a lot of these companies you want to revenue share with make way less than a lot of us do. And the people and companies that make more can pay us a fair amount in advance.

Most of upstate ny doesn't require a license either to do most trades. Some cities will require one (like Buffalo, and areas down toward NYC), but for the most part it's like the wild west here.

So true, the big money companies need an infinite amount of leads. There's tons of great tradesman out there who turn work away but those are the guys working their butts off for middle class pay because they're limited to their own personal labor.

Look at the top 500 remodeling companies who do $2 million to $300 million and ask any one of them if they don't need leads any more.

Hi all,

This thread caught my eye because I am also doing some lead gen for local contractors. I had been doing SEO on sites that I had built for this purpose, but now I am exploring generating leads using CL. I was going to try and do the posting myself, but it seems complicated and time consuming, so now I am considering outsourcing it to a CL specialist.

Can any of you make any recommendations? Do you do your own posting, or do you outsource it?

Thanks for the great thread!
BJ

/\ Doing it yourself is not that complicated or time consuming. Well it is, but its not the posting so much that is time consuming. Its learning the process the right way. How everything works. There is software out there that will login to your CL accounts, and auto renew your ads while your away from your computer. So once everything is setup, there is not much left to do.

However, using CL the right way on a large scale, involves a lot of blackhat. Which is why you rarely see technical discussions about it on here. You need the right proxies, the right proxy source (I only know of 1 proxy providers who's proxies actually work on CL - does't mean they're the only one but it took me some research) a technique for verifying accounts, how to set up the ads, how to automate the posting, etc etc.

Or alternatively, you can pay someone who has a copy of CladG. Which is what I do now.

But make them prove their system first. Make sure the ads get through on a smaller scale before making any larger investments.

Make sure your ads have great headlines, and find the best time of day to post using image ad tracking (like imgur). As far as where to go for this type of stuff, WF isn't the best place. But there are tons of discussions about this on BHW. You can clearly see what types of proxies aren't working, where CL posters are getting ones that work, how they're registering accounts, what tools they use to automate the posting, etc etc.

But to explain it all on here would not only break a lot of rules, but it would take a lot of time to explain how its all done. My #1 suggestion would be to start researching on BHW. Experiment with a few different footprints and you'll find tons of recent/related threads to see how people are doing this.

Good luck - Red

ps - Here's a tip. If you can merely find a proxy provider selling proxies that work on CL, and you see people consistently buying those proxies to use for CL, leaving feedback that they work (they typically won't sell these proxies to scrapebox users or other seosoftware, otherwise the proxies get killed fast and it ruins it for everyone), all you have to do is start pm'm those people and asking questions.

I say that if you have an idea and you want to know whether or not it works....Try it! If you run into obstacles along the way, you might figure out a better way to work around them than others have done in the past. Don't let the failures of others stop you. Every situation is different...we learn by doing. Good luck.