How do you generate quality leads for them?

I agree 100% that selling them legitimate leads/new business/money in their pocket is the easiest sale you can make. It's also great because you can form an ongoing relationship where you sell them once on the idea and then just continue to provide the leads and pocket the cash.

The hardest part though is getting the leads.

I'd love to know exactly how you do it.

Thanks

My partner and I tried to build a local lead gen site and had the largest issue with ranking...we abandoned that particular one but your suggestion of creating a company name may work better.

I know people don't often like to but I figure ot doesn't hurt to ask...any chance we could see a example of a site you have build and had success with?

Thanks for the info...nuggets like this will always come in handy.

Adrian

I have never done that to protect myself from spam callers .... My clients have never been spam called either..

I do use images sometimes because it is easy to replace and i am lazy when it comes to building websites...

This is a very cool idea, and is something I have always wanted to explore. There is a lot of professionals that would pay top dollar for high quality leads.

My question is twofold...

1. What is the opt-in style for the lead? Do you have them give out name, email and phone number and do you tell them you will be calling them? Or what's the offer for them to give their info up?

When I was doing all 3 in another niche, I saw only a 2% conversion from it, but never really played around with the design enough.

2. How does it work selling people's information like this? I know in many scenarios privacy laws say this is a big no-no, even though I understand this style is white hat. Do you need to put in some kind of disclosure?

Look forward to the answers!

@alnodeya, Bawls beat me to it, but imho you're better of selling the leads, it isn't more then a headache then renting it... and it is a much easier sell, if you give 5/10 free leads to a business owner and you have good leads... you'll be in forever and making much more that a $150- a month

I started with renting out websites, and i rented them for about €200- a month, the niche was wood rot repair a subniche in the painter and carpenter niche.. the guy didn't want to rent the site anymore as he was steering away from wood rot repairs and become more of a indoor painter (something with the weather here).

Anyhow the site became free again an i decided to sell the leads one by one, we didn't have twilio just yet in Holland (thank God we do now) so what i did was i opened a skype account, bought a phone number and forwarded that phonenumber to a prospect.

As of now the site steadily makes about €450/€500 per month on selling leads, you see the difference here between selling leads and renting?

Think about it...


My guess is that this is just for one keyword? If it is then your math is correct but your thinking is wrong.

First let say that your niche is plumber + city and you will get 500 exact match visitors according to Google, when you have a top spot under Google Places your site will receive 10% that is indeed 50 visitors. 10% of that is 5 buyers per month...

But that is only for the keyphrase "plumber city" but how about you use all the services plumbers do as a keyword, like sewer + city, gutter + city, leaking faucet + city etc etc. and then you have all your little villages and suburbs around your tarted city, how about if you mix those with the main keyphrase and the service keyphrases.

You could get a 10 extra leads per month, that is 15 leads, if you can sell them for $25- per lead (and for good converting leads in the service niche, that should not be a problem) you well get 375/400 dollars a month.

Just saying

One of the best threads on WF, for real sustainable, protectable business. One other thing to add is keep an eye out for closing businesses, especially at auctions etc... Most of the time they let their customer list just sit vacant. You can offer them a few bucks up front or a %commission if they give you their list. You can also network w/ liquidators/auctioneers who are in contact w/ these businesses before they close and before their domains expire and work a deal for their customer list. A great source of some golden glengarry leads to resell to others in the niche. Another good source would be attorney's that deal in bankruptcy etc...they'd funnel you several businesses that would be interested in monetizing their customer list. If they knew how to do it themselves, they probably wouldn't be going out of biz in the first place, and they'd look at it as free money.

Good info here thanks!

One thing that has always stopped me doing this is that I've never worked out how I could ever create a google local plus listing for a fictitious company? This is the key part of local seo.

How do you get round the verification process?

You can have your site in Google places, if you're lucky (or good) even in the 7 box, the only thing is that you can't claim the listing and update the page, but you can get in with phonenumber website and have reviews to...

Look at all the places that are not claimed by the owner, they got in their somehow, and i really don't think there is going to be a big difference in traffic in a claimed or an unclaimed page...

Yes I suppose that's true.

So would you still create a fictitious local address for the bogus company. Surely google will want to see that to treat you seriously?

Well when i am done with building a site i do use a fake address to promote it on business directories, i always use some address in a industrial part of the city i target, never had a problem...

I see my sites pop-up in a lot of these boxes, i can't claim them, but i can maintain them with more and more citations and third party reviews. And if you do your job well you will be staying up there, claimed or not claimed...

And even when you don't get the 7 box, you will get the traffic and links from all those business directories, so see it as a bonus when it happens.

Thanks for your replies its really quite interesting what you are doing.

When you choose an address do you choose a real address of an existing building or do you create a fake one. For instance say you choose kiln road in the industrial area and there are genuine buildings/businesses from numbers 1-10 kiln road, do you choose one of these or do you create one at number 11? Do you see what I mean - or am I thinking too hard here?!

I use a real street name and a fake building number (that's why i love Google street view ) when the numbers go to 50, i will use 51a or 52b or something like that, never a real number of course...

Hi there,

One of our clients in America uses Pak-Mail for a street address. $19/month and they only keep it as long as they need to confirm their Google places listing.

Might be an idea to try.

All the best,

Sasha,

Hi All,

Great thread...

My business partner and I also sell leads in the US. We wrestled with the address thing as well - and decided to just avoid it.

We miss out on the Google Places listing, but are ok with that and just focus on ranking our sites organically. We are able to do this just fine without an address.

Also, we would agree that getting ranked for suburbs and multiple keywords is the way to go.

Ah tracing phone calls with like a 1-800 n umber then? Or something along those lines?

That seems like a legit setup. When you first start off how do you do it? As in say you setup a dentist website but you do not have a dentist office yet as a client. Do you have that number just go wherever so you can track how many calls you are getting/leads and then use that number to sell to the dentist on the idea?

Another couple questions...

1. How much do you typically sell the lead for?
2. Any advice on doing local keyword research? Or just using common sense like if they were a locksmith in Columbus Ohio, ranked for "Columbus Ohio locksmith"?

I build small sites for the suburbs within wordpress with this plugin, the categories are the cities and i use the tags to connect one group of service keywords and suburbs/vilagges if that makes any sense.

So this group of keywords would go into the category Bridgetown

And this group would go into the category Keywood

Then i make one set of content for all the keywords and just spin it to about 30% uniqueness and use that for all the internal mini sites. You don't have to be afraid for dup content as there is no such thing.

When you do the connection right, people that land on your site would not have a clue, and no it doesn't have to look spammy at all. Having all those keywords doesn't mean you have to create content for each and every one of them. You can use them in tags, in your title and descriptions of your SEO plugins, you can use them for your images and videos... Use your imagination

How do you handle VERIFICATION if you ain't have a physical address yourself in that area?

G.

Callfire works great - fairly cheap - local numbers - great reports and whisper feature.

@yellowgreenmedia - thanks for the PM - great help to me!

This is definitely something I have been thinking about. If business owners lack the understanding of how having a online presence can really help their business, instead of trying to educate them, simply offer them leads.

Though I would target high ticket items with a healthy margin like real estate brokers and insurance etc. As I am pretty confident I could charge them more for a qualified lead then the local plumber who has to only replace a couple of washers on a tap etc.

I prefer to use a real building number and add a suite. I'm sure its not hard for google to see if an address is a fabrication so this way is better. I also have been able to phone verify g places listings this way if they have sat awhile and I have done enough citations before I attempt to claim and/or create a listing.

Come on now. Lets be nice. This is a great thread so lets not butcher it up. A lot of great information here.

My question is would it be easier to sell each lead or to have a set monthly price. $30 or $40 per lead or a flat monthly rate regardless of the number of leads?
And for businesses such as plumbers/carpenter/contractors/painters what would a reasonable flat rate be?
Thanks.
-Jeff

I would like to get started in this area myself, and I'm wondering about the Service Magic part, where you said you sort of scope them out to see what Service Magic charges for a lead, then add $10. How do you do that? Is there a way to look at Service Magic to figure out a good niche to start out with as well?

That PDF is a great resource, not only on price but also for your niche and keyword research

Yes generating leads for these companies can get you a lot of money because I use to be a contractor myself. These leads can cost anywhere from $30-$60.

Question:

How much do you charge per lead?

Better question: How do you figure out what this price will be?

Also: do you actually charge X amount PER LEAD, or do you charge X amount PER MONTH, or ???

Thanks!

I have packages of 10, 25, 50 and 100 leads... the higher the amount of leads the cheaper the leads per lead gets, that is something that i do to sell the bigger packages

Wow!, a lot of good information here. Thanks. I recently attended a webinar that promoted the Pay Per Call format. It sound much like your system in some respects. With the pay per call system, they actually transferred the calls from the owners website to the potential client's phone for 7 days, at not costs, and then after seven days, if the client didn't want to continue getting and buying the leads, the calls stopped. The system's developer says it makes a ton of money and has many people currently using it. It sounded interesting and cost about $500. I have so many other things I am pursuing at this time but might give it a shot if offered in the future, depending upon whether or not I call afford it then. Good luck!

The only thing I am not understanding is how to capture any leads without yet having a client to direct them to. The incoming calls would need to go somewhere...

Bawls and Dave thanks for all your knowledge in this thread. Bawls I signed up for your Mastermind and Dave I am planning on signing up for your WSO. I do have a question for all those reading this thread.

Is there a reputable company that you can outsource all of this to? I am looking for a company that will build the lead gen site and do the SEO for it as well. Through searches on here I have found members that will build the site and others that will rank it but I haven't found 1 that will do both. Can anyone recommend someone to do both of these?

Thanks.

John

How long would it take to rank one of these sites for a low competitive keyword?

Twilio is very cheap, i pay $1- per phone number €0,03- per minute to landline, and €0.10 per minute to mobile, and recording the call is €0,01 per minute i belief

Not that expensive if you make sure that you forward to a landline

Have any of your customers got back to you on the quality of leads? From what several of my customers tell me, the quality such leads is not that great. It is the same case with bought lists for email newsletters. Bought lists are much worse actually.

Great information guys!

A couple of questions.

1. For the phone leads, I presume that a customer might bookmark a site and call the same number after their initial contact with the company. So, how do you handle these potentially 'duplicate' leads?

2. Can anyone give me an idea of how many sites you have and the ballpark number of leads that you sell in a month? Just trying to get an idea of the number of sites I might need to reach specific goals.

thanks!

Yep this is what I've been saying for a while now. Lead gen is ridiculously profitable.

I have the luxury of my brother being a contractor, and being friends with dozens of contractors/business owners in my area.

When I first got involved in lead gen, I was merely trying to generate leads for my brother. And I'll be honest, if you don't know a thing about local marketing, its a nightmare getting started.

I didn't even have any idea how profitable it was untill I was generating calls. After about 6 months I was generating 8-12 calls a week. My brother would sell 3-4 jobs, and cut me about $500 per job. So I was making $1,500-$2,000 a week and he was making about double that for himself.

But mind you, this started out with family, and on a commission basis. Not selling individual leads to strangers or doing any cold calling. So I had a lucky start in that respect.

Its to the point where my method is refined down perfectly now. I am able to outsource so many aspects of my funnel, so efficiently, that I've reduced my workload to roughly 1/4 of what it use to be. Not only that, but I've also reduced many of my expenses down to dirt cheap. Although I still do the sites myself, it only cost me about $500 to get my funnels started. I typically invest that money over the first 3 months, after that point the sites become self sufficient and start generating revenue. Then I continually reinvest 20% of my profits to keep the funnels growing.

Whats happening now is my brother is finding/connecting me with more contractors, I'm setting up more sites that I control 100%, and I'm branching out into niches I don't know a thing about. I do verify all my local listings and use the contractors address for that. But the numbers/tracking is all under my control.

I'm not sure what my end game is as I'm only 3 sites into this right now. But I want to create more sites, and consider selling them off 12 months down the road. Then I may stop and invest all that money into the biz me and my brother run. My goal will be to hire more salesman, better management, and sit back and oversee everything with my brother. I already have a cousin who owns his own landscaping biz, works 2 days a week and pulls in a nice 6 figures a year. So I know its possible and I ultimately value my time more than money. I'll never stop working, I just need the time to do what I want in life (spend time with family/travel/workout/eat/sleep/play music) without going broke.

-Red

This sounds pretty interesting, anything thoughts on combining with a marketing platform so you're selling both leads AND a platform to push their marketing out as well whether its via SMS, Email, or Social Media.

This way you can truly maximize your sale

That is where you have to educate your client, make sure that he gives the prospects his direct phone number...

About the lengths of the calls from my experience the average call is about 7/10 minutes, just calculate those cost in your lead price if things get out of hand.

Thanks, Dave.

Riz, I'd hardly put questions that relate to business cost into the analysis paralysis bracket. As you can see, by asking that question I got workable information about the average call lengths Dave's been seeing and a good idea to chew on regarding educating clients about that Twilio number, something that hadn't been mentioned in this thread before. That "whopping" $1.80 could become $3.60 and then $7.20 and then $9 if the customer keeps calling up that Twilio number every time he needs to talk to the contractor. If the lead is $10, that's a cost to be aware of.

My father was a contractor, and I can tell you, when a client is putting thousands of dollars into a job, the likelihood of such long conversations is very far from next to nothing. There were some clients who would call him every day with new questions, new worries, new ideas, last minute changes and the like as the job date approached! "Okay, that color we discussed... okay, I'm thinking of going with the red rather. Or maybe the... no, the red. The red's fine... I think. Do you think the red's fine? Let me ask my husband and I'll get back to you on that tomorrow. Okay, and those lights we decided on, are you sure those are the right intensity? I was thinking maybe we should..." My dad had the patience of a saint. Depending on the industry, if all of that went to the Twilio number, I'd be in the red. Thanks for your input though.

Hi, Riz. No problem! No offense taken. I gleaned a lot from your post, but wanted to add that there can be cases where calls can go long, plus that factor of clients sometimes just saving the virtual number as they think it's the contractor's number. There can also be cases where the virtual number comes up in the SERPs and other places you advertise for your client and is called not by a potential lead, but a B2B salesman trying to sell his own service or the like to the business owner and maybe holding his ear for an hour. Some of those situations coming up have been mentioned in other places in this forum.

But yeah, definitely won't deter me. I think this is a great business model. And thank you for adding the note about your experience; that's the kind of information I was looking for. Going to work with my dad as a kid and even working with him a bit when I was older, I always remembered those long calls from clients who were getting a bit antsy about a job and would keep calling up. You always get that one, you know the type... But educating a client about the virtual number is good stuff to keep in mind.

Thanks, Riz. Good stuff.

If you are doing this, and you do use an optin form (I agree with the guy who said not to and focus on getting their phone ringing), be sure to put on the optin form: please do not contact us about marketing, SEO, or any other form of advertising. I can't stand when internet marketing people use client contact forms to solicit them.

This sounds like a really good idea, im going to give this a shot.

It seems to me that this model of lead generation is sort of the "low hanging fruit" that the big corporations and firms won't bother with, but they try, e.g. HomeAdvisor.

it is not low hanging fruit.. ReachLocal.com - huge - mostly PPC lead Gen, ServiceMagic, HomeAdvisor, etc..who knows Groupon might selling leads

The site looks professional and engaging. I have never tried to sell leads but I can imagine why it would be more attractive to businesses compared to a service that delivers a benefit that is not as direct (example: ranking for a keyword, fan page design).

Thank you very much for sharing all of those details.

bawls,

Your comments go directly to the point. Why bother setting up websites or other "to be managed services" when generating actual leads and selling them directly to the user is the answer. How can they say no to an offer of paying clients for paying you. Such a deal!

Clear thinking coming from having done it successfully yourself.
Very good post. Thank you,

LLS

You mentioned backpage on your second post in this thread. You are actually getting leads from there?

Do you guys know for a fact if you can record the calls with Twilio? I emailed their support and they told me I couldn't record calls or maybe they just misunderstood me?

This thread is just awesome!

I had a few questions to ask:

How would you go about handling billing?

Do you have them sign a contract?

Would using other forms for getting traffic such as craigslist work?

Remind me again are we paying per call or every time a sale is made?

Thanks in advance!

If you type in "water heater repair" without the town local listings will still appear because of personalized search. How can we rank in those searches? The 7 Pack searches?

I've been selling lead generation also, just small niches in my suburbs and getting in front of the small service companies that don't know how to fanagle the internet. They're happy to have someone giving them business, more than happy really. There are a few niches I haven't gone after that I want to, high dollar things like general contractors for home remodeling. Each job might average 50k w/ a 10% referral fee.

Nice thanks for sharing.

I am finding now that mobile marketing is easier than ever but I am based in Europe so that may be why.

I am still getting great responses from my clients and I think a lot of it comes down to having a personal approach and referrals

Awesome post.

Thanks especially to bawls and YellowGreenMedia for your insights.

I got into AdWords about 5 years ago helping my brother-in-law get more leads (he's an electrician).

One thing led to another and I'm now a freelance AdWords dude, specialising in helping local businesses.

I hadn't really realised how I could scale this up, and how simple it actually is!

I'm somewhat familiar with the site rental model, which is a spin off on this. I was renting a few sites out for a fixed monthly to local dentists. I was seeing around 25% conversion rate (visitor to caller ratio) from organic traffic.

For some dentists I was generating 10-15 calls and one of them I was up around 40. In hindsight, I charged way too low.

Now I am comfortable with cold calling and I think selling leads would be super easy. The hard part would be getting the leads in. Anyway, I am considering trying to make it profitable through PPC alone (supplement with SEO but rely on PPC).

I have a question, and I always had this question - even from before when I was doing this.

What if the client doesn't answer the phone?

With the plumbers I've been calling last week, it seems a lot of them don't answer their phone. Some do call back fairly quickly, but some don't. If I spend money on PPC and a lead calls but there is no answer - does a system like Twilio still register that a call was made?

I'd be billing them even if they don't answer the phone. Because it costs money to drive that lead and if they can't answer the phone then in my opinion that falls on them, not me, to bear the cost (as I would have done my part of the job).

Thoughts?

Do you want more money? NOOO! Lead gen services are the best way to get your foot in the door and then have plenty of opportunity to upsell them as well. For the simple fact... You are going to be getting them more money to spend on your services! Funny how that works, huh?

Hello bawls, I like your posts a lot. I had a few questions about lead gen: would it be best to make one website per client or do you engage multiple clients per one website? I know you said your phone would be forwarded to the client's with a whisper as well. Also, how do you handle billing, paypal? Thanks, bawls.