Creating my own lead generation business

I think this is all preference, and depends on your business model. It may be easier to find interested prospects if they see that it's a website unconnected to anyone else. Having www.BestLawyer.com/City1 and www.BestLawyer.com/City2 may confuse potential customers and turn them away, thinking that they have to compete with multiple businesses.

I'm not sure this is the best business model. You're profits will rely on another person making the sale. How do you know that they're a quality closer or honest about actually making the sale? It's one thing if you're closing the deals, but it's a complete other if you're relying on a strangers business to close them. I'd encourage you to charge per lead generated, and collect payment weekly/monthly. You can create a forwarding number that you can track calls, and set up a your squeeze page with a form that forwards from one of your email addresses, to theirs (so that you can track everything).

I agree with kebertt, and to add to his comments. In order to make it legal, I don't think you can have a system where they pay you per close. I know that some of the biggest law-firm referral-companies around Southern California, have it set up as a rotisserie system. Meaning the following:

Example - Their are 5 law firms all using XYZ Leads. All 5 of these law firms pay $x/month, and the leads are rotated between the 5 law firms. So the first leads goes to law firm 1, and the sixth leads goes to law firm 1. The lead-generators cannot guarantee how many leads the law firms will get, however the law firms can pay extra per month, to have another slot in the rotisserie system.

I know quite a deal about all this, have dabbled in this system, and have friends in law firms who use these systems. Shoot me a PM if you need more info.

E

Before you jump into lead gen, read this; THE LEAD RESPONSE MANAGEMENT STUDY
If this is going to be your craft - you have to know that stuff in the study cold.

If you use that data - you'd think like I'm thinking here...

I wouldn't create any websites. Period. It's no secret that Google is starting to rank video more highly - especially after yesterday. I just saw a video come up page 1 in the 4th spot for a 300,000,000 result query. First 3? The government.

Dominate long-tail. Create high energy but AUTHENTIC testimonial videos (Fiverr) videos for EACH your long-tail keywords. Ex; "Dentists in Malibu | 555-555-5555" <-- title it just like that. Then, SEO the crap out of it.

The "555" number should be a tracking number you set up to record all phone calls... Consider a lead as being any call having lasted more than 30 seconds. Send a report with all links to recorded phone calls along with your monthly bill. Direct the number to forward elsewhere, or to nowhere if no pay.

Don't even give the viewer the option of going to a URL. The more specific the instruction, the higher the conversion. When you and an "or" to anything, conversions go down... Anyway, 30% will be on their phones - so it just makes sense for them to be able to call while their hot off the video, thus increasing the chances of your client closing the sale.

I would go for the one website per city and klets say 15 miles surrounding suburbs and villages, the thing with domain.com/city is that it will turn out as a obvious lead gen site or a quotacion site which will get lesser convertion

You don't want to charge them only if they make a sale, this means that it's all on them. Even though you've been doing your job correctly, ie; sending them leads. It's still up to them, and whatever salesman is currently working at the time, to convert what you send.

Do you see problem here?

I'm on the don't set your payment based on their abilities.

This does not work for you, and will not net you returning business. Sorry, to say, but people are not honest, and if they can get by with not paying, they will. If they can blame you for their downfall, they will.

You get paid based on what you supply to them. Whether they close it, sit on it, sell it, sign it on for recurring or whatever is all on them.

Sell them as flat leads, qualified to what they have outlined they wanted, and collect your payment. You can make this sound good to them by saying "you pay a flat fee, no commission, and you can do whatever you wish with the lead." Explain further that if they make $100 or $1000 off the lead all that profit is theirs and they don't have to share it with you.

I run pay per sale for 3 local businesses and it works, but there's more set up. I hired a call center to which all calls go. The CC answers the calls as if it's the target company and takes all names and places them in a spreadsheet. I send the spreadsheet to my client and they pay me commissions for each sale.

This model is not without problems, but it works for me because (a) it's easy to land a client (they pay only when they make a sale) and (b) I earn $250 to $650 + per sale. I generate 8 to 15 sales per month averaging $400 per sale.

My clients are diligent in tracking sales. My contract stipulates I can hire a 3rd party to audit files. This hasn't been necessary.

I'm rolling out a new campaign where I'll include site/video rentals to see how that goes.

Sales work best for high value services. Think about it this way. Many people rent a site/campaign for $250 to $1,000 per month. I generate much more than that from commissions. However, rentals are attractive for stability and that's why I'm going to give that a shot in addition to the commission model.

The best model, which I haven't done yet, is to earn a small lead fee with a sales commission tied to a % of the value of the sale plus an exclusivity monthly fee for a few hundred. By exclusivity fee I mean you won't promote a competitor for a monthly fee. You must generate decent referrals each month to warrant this fee.

As for sites, I prefer one city and one service per site. That's it. I do a video as well and I'm experimenting with some high quality Web 2.0 sites for traffic.