If you're just starting to play with the idea of jumping into the lucrative world of leads, well, we can't blame you. Many people have made a living buying and selling leads, and others have been able to use it to supplement their existing income. Either way, lead selling means money in the bank for you, as long as you take the first steps to make sure you're doing it right. So let us help you out. When getting started with lead selling, here are the first few steps:
Finding Leads
Obviously, the first step to selling leads is to have them in the first place. Here are the two main ways to get your hands on your first leads:
Generated Leads
Generated leads are, quite simply, any of the leads you generate yourself, and there are plenty of avenues to start producing your own leads. The most common is using a landing page, complete with an information form, that interested consumers can fill in with their contact information. Advertising these landing pages on search engines, display networks, and other high-traffic media can produce more than enough leads for you. In addition, finding leads on social media is getting easier every day. Twitter's Twitter Cards and Facebook's soon to be released Lead Ads can capture contact information in just a few clicks, pre-populating your forms with their user data.
Paid Leads
Another alternative for finding your leads is to buy them from other companies in order to resell them, a process known as "arbitraging." Many lead generation companies are happy to find buyers for their leads, so simply getting in touch with whatever lead generation companies you find on a Google search will most likely result in you finding leads. On one hand, this process is much easier than generating your own leads, but of course, it can cost more than an advertising budget for your own generated leads.
Ultimately, finding leads comes down to budgeting yourself well. You gotta spend money to make money, right? If generating your own, make sure you know how much you can spend on your advertising budget, and if you're going the paid route, make sure you've done the research on how much your leads tend to profit you.
Finding Brokers
What's the point of having leads without buyers? And how will you buy leads without connections? Well, there are a couple of options:
Lead generators love to buy and sell on LinkedIn. There are dozens of great lead generation groups on the site, ranging from incredibly broad to vertical-specific. Not only will you get great offers for leads, keeping an eye on the conversations will teach you a lot about how leads are bought and sold, how lead generators communicate, and other small details that you can only get from experienced traders. It really is an invaluable resource to not just buy and sell leads, but to learn how the trade works.
Trade Publications
Though the print magazine has largely gone out of style in the B2B arena, blogs and ezines are still all the rage. Many lead distribution companies run their own corporate blogs (like us!), and there are plenty of B2B and social media info blogs that do the same, like B2BMarketing. Many of these blogs have active comment sections that are full of active buyers and sellers, and can prove to be a valuable resource for your business. So get out and start networking! People and companies want your leads; they just need to know you have them.
Conventions
A couple of times a year, lead generation conventions come around. Not only are they in great locales like New York and Las Vegas, but they are the premier place to network with others in the lead business. Events like LeadsCon let you spend the weekend in great cities with other like-minded individuals who love to work in the B2B sector. If you find your way to LeadsCon, let us know! We'd be happy to meet with you and get you all set up, and make introductions on your behalf.
Last step: Get a distribution system (like ours!)
Lead selling can start to get hectic quickly, and hand-selling leads is so old fashioned. The best lead sellers boost their efficiency with lead distribution software, and that's where we come in. boberdoo has been building lead distribution systems since 2001, and we would be glad to not only get you started on a system, but also introduce you to any of our other clients to get started on your lead system. If you're looking to get started, check out our brand new Starting a Lead Generation Company whitepaper, and then give us a call at 800-776-5646.