Buying Leads For Your Online Business

Dear readers,

This article will touch several points related to buying leads for your online affiliate (or other) business, starting with:


-What is a lead?
A lead is someone who was interested (or curious) enough about starting their own home-based business to go to a website and fill out a short survery that is then sent to a company. This company will be selling this information to you. This usually includes:

-First Name
-Last Name
-Email Address
-Phone Number
-Companies sometimes also include:
-Best Time to Contact
-Date/Time Stamp & IP Address

And give you the option of buying leads that took the time to complete a more complete survey with questions such as these:

-Full address
-Best time to call
-When are you ready to start?
-How much money they are willing to invest?
-How long are you willing to work?
-Desired Monthly Income?
-How much time do you have to commit?





-What kinds of leads can you buy?


There are many different types of leads that you can buy, and different sites sometimes use alternate terms that usually mean the same thing.Here are some examples:

-MLM Email Leads: Specific to MLM's

-MLM Custom Email Leads: Can filter out certain domains (yahoo, msn, etc.)

-Real Time Short Form Redirected Leads: When your lead is finished filling in the information for their survey, he is immediately taken to your site instead of the company's generic site. Usually the second most expensive lead.

-Real Time Surveyed Redirected Leads : Same as Short Form except the lead does a more complete and informative survey. This is usually the most expensive lead, as it is the one most likely to be interested in your offer.

There are many other types of leads you can buy, and all of them are usually explained in detail on their websites.




-Which have the best Return On Investment (ROI)?


All Real-Time leads are said to have the best ROI, since the interest (or curiosity) expressed by the lead is very recent. The most expensive ones, Redirected Leads, usually have the highest conversion rate, as not only are they recent, but the person is sent immediately to your website instead of the generic one.


Think of it as buying a "click" from someone who is at least mildly interested in what you're selling. Some might be, some might not be. If you have a very attractive presentation and interesting or different capture page, this increases your conversion rate as well.


However, this all depends on what kind of business you are trying to promote. Affiliate and MLM programs (Like GDI) who are looking for very specific types of people will most likely benefit more from the Redirected leads.


Businesses that are simply trying to sell products online (either ebooks, or any product or service) or looking for traffic, might benefit more from buying Email Leads.


Some entrepreneurs simply call all their leads to start their business. They usually deal with a large amount of rejection, but if you can tough it out, it just might work out for you if you have proper telephone etiquette and you make people understand what you're trying to sell (or offer). It is especially important for this type of lead to not be sold more than once, because otherwise the amount of rejection will be much greater if the person you are calling has been pestered by another telemarketer in the same day or week.




-What reputable lead selling websites are there?

You have to make sure that the company you are buying from is not selling the leads more than once. Otherwise, you're going to end up calling someone who has been called repeatedly before, and your conversion rate will suffer greatly, and result in a deficit for your company or investment.


Another important factor is to make sure that the lead is not given any particular incentive by the company to join sites, otherwise it is not in the lead's interest to only join yours! Be very careful!

There are many big hitters out there, but the two that caught our attention was MLMLeadGenie.com, and National-Leads.com. Both offered roughly the same type of leads, but National had some better prices, so we went ahead and bought 25 Real Time Short Form Redirected Leads from them today for our Global Domains International business to see if it would get us some signups.


I'll post our results later.


As for MLMLeadGenie, they used to be in the Top 10 List (see below), but have been getting an increasing amount of unhappy customers as of late, so we decided not to try them out.

Here is a link to a very informative website called Leads-Center. They are a website dealing solely about blogs and articles pertaining to leads, their usage and user feedback on them. They do not sell leads.

They also have a section detailing which they evaluate as their top 10!

-Is it worth it?

As stated above, there are ups and downs to buying leads. It is obviously much better to generate your own leads for free, but if you can't do (or have trouble doing) that yet, this COULD be a lucrative opportunity for a business starting out.

Just make sure you understand what you are buying, and make sure you are buying it from a reputable company. The more targeted your leads are, the better your odds for success.


Sources for this article:
Leads-Center
National-Leads
MLMLeadGenie