Lead Generation: The Ultimate Guide to Selling Leads

How to Make Money with Lead Generation

Can you still make money with affiliate marketing in 2019? The answer is yes, especially if you are selling leads directly. Affiliate programs can help you earn extra money and even provide full-time income for those who want to work from home and be their own boss.

With the right tools at your disposal and a dedication to succeed, you can join the tens of thousands of people who earn real income from affiliate marketing. Learn more about what to do and what not to do to make money by selling leads.

Selling leads is a great way to earn money from home, but it doesn’t come from nothing. It involves real work.

Benefits of Becoming a Lead Seller

There are many aspects of lead selling that make it a good way to earn money from home including:

Low start-up cost
You don’t have to create a product
You don’t need to provide a service
You don’t need investors or a bank loan to get started
There are no shipping, storage or stocking fees to worry about
You can work from anywhere from any device that has internet access
Some lead gen methods allow you to earn passive income

Selling leads is a great way for many professionals to earn additional income. Lead selling is ideal for bloggers, entrepreneurs, coaches and anyone else who can operate a website.

Drawbacks of Lead Selling

There are drawbacks to selling leads as a business including:

Depending on how you generate leads, it can take a while to drive enough traffic
Your niche may be competitive
You may have difficulty generating high-quality leads that sell for more
You have no control over the product you are promoting

Lead generation has drawbacks like any business. It is up to you to decide if the benefits outweigh the drawbacks in your situation.

Why Start a Lead Generation Business?

Most companies rely on a steady stream of leads to grow and stay in business. Many companies do not have the bandwidth or know-how to conduct lead generation in-house, so they rely on lead generation companies to provide them with targeted leads.

Top industries for lead generation include loans, insurance, mortgage and home improvement. These businesses have a continual and massive need for leads. They are also highly competitive industry, where smaller businesses battle bigger brands for business.

Lead generation is considered part of the digital marketing industry, where U.S. businesses will invest $120 billion by the year 2021.

If you are looking for a business that is in high demand, can be run by a company of one, and is easy to scale, lead generation might be the right business venture for you.

How to Create a Scalable Lead Generation Business

Once you decide that you want to move forward with a lead generation business, you will need to follow steps to scale your efforts. Without scaling your lead gen efforts, you won’t be able to grow your business and earn more income.

Choose A Niche

The first step to building a scalable lead generation business is picking an industry to specialize in. Of course, it would be wise to choose an industry that depends on lead generation services like short-term loans for example.

Lenders provide short-term loans to consumers who need quick cash. Short-term loan borrowers are often repeat customers, which is good for business. Qualifying for these types of loans is easy compared to traditional loans, so generating leads can be easier as well. More than ten million Americans request payday loans per year.

There are more payday loan stores in the U.S. than there are McDonald’s restaurants. Which means there are plenty of buyers for your leads. Payday loan operators make around $46 billion per year in loans, and they collect about $7 billion in fees. The success and stability of the industry makes it a good choice for affiliate marketing, with lead sellers taking home higher commissions than those who focus on other industries.

Do your research before you choose an industry. It can take time to build a captivated audience and begin generating high-quality leads, so you do not want to waste time on the wrong industry.

Develop a Marketing Strategy

As a lead seller, you will need to choose an approach to lead generation. Many lead generation companies do not commit to one approach, instead investing in both paid and organic marketing strategies.

As an independent lead seller, you might not have the bandwidth or knowledge to develop multiple lead generation strategies. Instead, you can choose one and dominate it.

Popular paid marketing channels include Google Ads, Facebook and YouTube. For some industries Facebook is the cheapest way to generate leads, since the cost per click is often significantly lower than Google Ads.

On the other hand, Google Ads tends to have higher conversion rates. It might cost more per click, but it may take you fewer clicks to generate a lead than on Facebook where it’s easier to sell direct to consumer products rather than generate form submissions.

Google Ads allows you to reach active buyers, people who are actively searching for the product you are promoting. Unfortunately, Google Ads banned cash advance advertisements, so if you are generating leads for the short-term loan industry, you will need to use Bing instead.

Facebook provides more targeting options and allows you to reach passive candidates. You can reach consumers who may not be currently searching for the product you are promoting but have expressed an interest in it or fit the demographics of other customers.

Email marketing is one of the best, if not the best, channel for lead generation. The key is developing a list of target consumers. You can generate this list through a blog or newsletter, but there are companies that can provide prospects for a fee. Generating leads through email marketing will involve a marketing automation tool. These tools range greatly in price. If you’re just getting started a tool like MailChimp or Constant Contact may be all you need. As you grow you may need more robust tools like Marketo and HubSpot can provide.

In addition to paid channels, you can generate leads organically through methods like blogging. If you can build and rank a website for high volume, relevant search terms you can generate leads at little up-front cost to you, other than your time. Ranking a site on Google can take several months if not a couple of years, depending on the industry.

Different industries have different levels of competition. Often the companies most in need of leads, are those in the most competitive markets. They pay more per lead but generating leads may be more challenging depending on your skill level.

Look for Ways to Monetize Your Leads

Once you have developed a strategy for generating leads, you will need to look for ways to start selling leads. Multiple lead buyers will help you diversify, gain valuable information and find those buyers who payout the most.

Some buyers have caps on how many leads they will accept. By only working with one buyer, you may have leads that go unworked. Working with an affiliate network or lead generation company will help you reach multiple buyers at once, without having to do all the work of building a network.

In some cases, you may be able to repurpose your leads for other industries by adding different fields to the form on your site. For example, if a customer is looking for a payday loan, they may also be interested in checking their credit score. You can add a section of your form that says something like, “Request your free credit report,” where the consumer can opt to receive a credit report.

How Selling Leads Works

To sell your leads you will need to capture data through a web form. If you work independently, you will need to build a landing page with a form that captures lead data. If you work with an affiliate network or lead generation company, they may provide you with a white labeled website where you can send visitors to generate leads.

A white labeled website is a simple website or landing page that has been created by networks for lead sellers. The network comes up with the domain name, models the site after other lead generation sites, builds the lead generation form and provides hosting.

You may or may not be able to edit the content on the site depending upon how the site was built and what type of relationship you have with the network.

Different industries purchase leads differently. They also require different lead data. It’s important to understand what the lead buyer is looking for, what they legally require to be disclosed in a web form, and other operational details. These details can prevent issues for the lead buyer down the road.

As a lead seller, you are also responsible for providing consumers with adequate disclosures. You can get disclosure information directly from the buyer or the network you are working with. It’s important to follow all U.S. rules and regulations regarding the process of obtaining and transferring consumer data. Much of the information you need can be found by reviewing the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) rules.

If you are building your own site, you will need to integrate your website form with the network you are selling to. Most networks will provide technical support, and help you get integrated with their lead buying system, sometimes known as a ping tree.

Ping trees are commonly used by short-term loan lead buyers. A ping tree acts as a live lead auction. The network or lead generation company has partnerships with several buyers. These buyers provide criteria they require to purchase a lead, also known as lead filters. They can also set lead caps, and minimum and maximum bids.

When you generate a lead through your web form, the data is sent to the ping tree. It then displays a portion of that information to buyers starting at the top of the tree.

At the top of the ping tree are buyers who have agreed to pay more per lead. As the lead moves down the tree it sells for a lower price.

If a buyer has hit their lead buying cap, they will be removed from the ping tree, and not shown any leads. That means your leads are only shown to buyers interested in buying leads.

It might sound like a complicated process, but the lead buying process happens in seconds.

The customer completes the form and is taken to a loading page where they are told that their request is being processed. The typical wait time for a user is less than a couple of minutes. If their data has been purchased by a buyer, they will be sent to a thank you page.

If your lead is purchased, you will be able to see the conversion in your affiliate dashboard. If you are not working directly with a network, you will need to invest in tracking software.

It’s important to track your earnings to be able to perform campaign optimizations. If your leads are selling at a low price, the quality of your leads may be low. You may need to make changes to the content you post or the targeting on your campaigns to generate more qualified leads that sell at a higher price.

Summary

Lead generation is an amazingly scalable business that you can operate as a solopreneur (on your own). Leads continue to be in high demand by a wide variety of industries, which means you will have a wide range of clientele to choose from.

If you are interested in selling leads to short-term lenders, ArrowShade can help. As the first affiliate network for short-term loans owned by a tribal sovereign, we take a unique approach to e-commerce. Unlike other short-term loan networks, we can transcend boundaries and strengthen your market position thanks to our relationships with tribal lenders.