All online businesses are nothing more than lead capturing machines. They capture traffic from search engines and links from other sources and turn that traffic into leads which turn into sales of products and services being sold on their sites.
But there is another booming industry surfacing that utilizes specific niche content to attract leads for 3rd parties to convert into sales for banks, realtors, lawyers, and many other groups.
And in many cases these leads sell for a lot more than you can make from the same people clicking on your AdSense ads. A LOT more.
This is partially what is meant by going “beyond AdSense.” You are simply getting into the lead generation business. Which is the same as AdSense publishing, but with AdSense you are selling your leads for pennies instead of dollars.
You can certainly create sites that sell affiliate products to the leads they generate. Most people are operating under this business model in some fashion.
But you can also capture the leads and sell them to people who are willing to pay anywhere from $1-$25 per qualified lead.
What is a “qualified” lead? This depends on the deal you set up with the person you are collecting them for. Sometimes it means a lead has filled out an information request form. Other times it simply means they have signed up for an autoresponder sequence that guides them to a purchase or other action.
In all cases I have studied, the income per lead is far higher than having the same traffic come through your site and clicking on pay per click links.
It takes more work to find buyers and set up deals with them for the leads you can supply them, but once it is in motion, you are promoting your site with a greater return in mind than even selling a product on the site can produce per 1000 visitors.
How you find the niches and create the sites to attract these leads is a topic for another day. The people doing this most successfully are groups of publishers like those at Content Desk. http://contentdesk.com/csb
But today we are talking about selling the leads generated by your sites to people interested in paying anywhere from $3-$25 per lead.
To get into the higher paying lead sales you generally have to set up deals directly with lenders, lawyers, real estate companies and the like. And by directly, I mean visiting offices and doing face-to-face meets to show what you can deliver and come to an agreement on what that’s worth.
There’s really big money being made this way. I know people making over $200,000.00 per month with this very system of attract-capture-deliver and working deals face-to-face with the people willing to pay very well for the leads.
One of my partners has a client who went to a local real estate company selling condos in a very lively, large metropolitan area. He made a deal to get 10% of resulting condo sales in exchange for providing leads to the company.
He set up a simple content site on the area, relocation information, and other relevant, attractive content that people looking to move to the area would be interested in. He now gets $10,000.00 every time a condo is sold to one of his generated leads.
He set up the deal face-to-face and the company is happy to pay him for helping them sell out their inventory faster than just relying on old fashioned offline lead generation.
There are people in your local area, most likely, willing to do the same kind of deal and who are totally unaware of how easy it is for us pubshers to generate leads for them. They are mystified by the web and think you are a “geek genius” who they are happy to simply pay to do your magic!
This business sure beats going to the same places and trying to teach them to do it themselves as a consultant. First of all, they don’t WANT to or they would already have started the long arduous process of learning and investing in an online presence for this purpose.
They want you to do it FOR them and will pay you to take the pressure off of them to learn how to generate e-leads.
Food for thought. This industry is growing in all directions and if you know how to build content sites that rank well in the engines and get a lot of traffic, you can make a killing selling leads instead of just peddling “clicks.”
Copyright 2005 Jack Humphrey
Jack Humphrey is managing partner of Content Desk where publishers use cutting-edge site building software and tactics to turn content into cash. Learn the art of niche content site publishing here: http://contentdesk.com/csb
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