April 2010 archive
In case you’re wondering if it’s worth the hassle of setting up your own lead generation business, compared to just getting offers from a CPA network. Here’s my local lead generation story. You make the call.
About a year ago, I was involved in renting out real estate to tenants. I’d run about $500 worth of classifieds and display ads in the local media. I had a number of prospects contact me, but they didn’t proceed to make an offer.
I’d also added the property to internal realtor databases (MLS – multi listing services) and that didn’t generate any leads, even if there were at least 20,000 realtors accessing the system.
So I went through some of the most popular community sites in my geographical area (Singapore) and posted a number of ads on these sites. They were a combination of social networks, forums, chat sites. Total investment: about 2 hours.
A couple of days later, I got an email enquiry from a prospective tenant and I brought them to check out the property. They made an offer about 6 hours later. 2 weeks later, I collected a nice $3,500 check from the property agency.
With about 5 hours invested into the deal for a $3,500 ROI (or about $500/hour), looking at possibilities outside the networks can be very rewarding (This is not factoring that the 50+ leads which could be sold or distributed via a revshare basis to other realtors).
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If you’re interested in finding out more about local lead generation, be sure to check out my review of Chad Frederiksen’s Local Lead Plan.
Chad Frederiksen has a number of titles – Top 10 Azoogle affiliate, author of the popular CDFNetworks (btw, CDF stands for Chad D Frederiksen) blog, former owner of a linkbuilding business, daredevil mountain biker who’s fractured, broken and torn more parts of his body than most of us would like to think about. Add to that his newest title of ebook writer/course creator of the Local Lead Plan.
As many as he dislike ebooks because he finds that many are pretty scammy, he’s found that the digital format is perferable to deal with book publishers. And you might be wondering what sort of ebook course would someone who dislikes ebooks come up with?
Chad offered me a review copy so I can give a neutral, unbiased opinion of his product (pretty damn good).
First off, who will NOT benefit from this – If you’re totally new to internet marketing, if you prefer to stay holed-up in your bedroom, you will probably not do well with local lead generation.
On the other hand, I’ve used the internet to generate leads for a couple of brick-and-mortar businesses I’ve been involved with (real estate, pharmaceuticals, engineering services businesses and my own ebooks and courses), and online lead generation has been pretty darn profitable. On the average, each dollar of marketing spend online can translate into $10 of offline business. Plus online media being very cheap, it’s about 10-20% the cost of offline media (print advertising, display ads, direct mail).
So what’s local lead plan (which deals with local lead generation) all about?
Lead generation is something you’re already familiar with if you’re an affiliate marketer. If a patient is worth $2,000 per year to a dentist, the business owner might be willing to pay $50-$100 for each new referred customer. (When it trickles down to the affiliate level, those “dental plan” CPA offers might offer a payout of $10-50 per lead).
You might’ve read my previous post last September where someone I coached in lead generation turned a $200 ad spend into a $4,000 profit. This was all through the power of lead generation.
Local lead generation means working with businesses and entrepreneurs in your community or states and generating leads for their business and selling those leads to them.
This can be very lucrative because:
- If you’re the only marketer in the area, you have non-existent competition.
- Local traffic costs are significantly lower than fighting with other marketers and affiliates on a national level.
- You have control over the lead generation process.
Now for the negatives:
- If you’re planning to sit in your bedroom all day and have a thriving local lead gen business, it’s just not going to fly. It usually requires a couple of face-to-face meetings and phone conversations.
- There’s more work involved upfront, compared to the 5-10 minute quick setup CPA arbitrage campaigns.
But then again, you’re talking about selling leads for hundreds (possibly thousands) of dollars in some cases. It can be pretty lucrative, especially since I’ve seen a number of top PPC affiliates move into this space.
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Local Lead Plan: What’s it all about?
The #1 stumbling block for marketers/affiliates (especially if you’ve not run a brick and mortar business before) wanting to break into the local lead generation will be figuring out how to get started. Since Chad has been working with local businesses for some time, he goes through the thinking behind each step of the process and gives you a blueprint for kickstarting your own business, or improving your processes if you’ve already been doing lead generation locally. The Local Lead Plan is pretty comprehensive, although if you’d like to become a master at the lead generation game, you will probably find yourself heading to the library or bookstore to pick up additional books on prospecting and sales closing when you decide to scale your business on a massive scale.
Local Lead Plan is a good place to get started and covers breaks down the process into 3 areas:
- Client prospecting, negotiation, lead pricing
- Lead generation via various traffic methods, screening/de-duplicating/cleaning leads, tracking/billing
- The “secret sauce” – well, Chad doesn’t call it the secret sauce, but he includes his own tips and methods he uses in running his business and once you’ve mastered the basics, this is where the value of the product stands out, especially in dealing with potential problems you might face and how to protect yourself, and tips for scaling your business
If you also consider that he’s providing document templates for sales proposals, lead generation agreements, invoices and other documents, it could save you a lot of time when you’re getting started.
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Chad’s Local Lead Plan bonus:
A recent addition to the Local Lead Plan has been the addition of a private discussion forum for product owners to share tips and their experiences. The community aspect could be a great asset, especially since some of the experienced members have been posting case studies of past campaigns and sharing their own tips for setting up and optimizing your own campaigns.
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As Chad mentions, the local lead gen business isn’t a get-rich-quick scheme, and it’s not likely to put a huge sum of cash in your bank account by next week. However, if you’re interested in building a steady, long-term business, or add some stable income to an existing affiliate marketing or internet marketing business, local lead gen is probably one of the best options out there.
Check out the: Local Lead Plan
I find myself working on 3 different computers – my desktop or one of my laptops and keeping files synched and having easy access to email when I’m at home, at the office, or at a coffeehouse can get challenging. Here’s some of productivity tips I’ve been using.
Dropbox: My buddy Josh Todd tweeted about this and the concept of a desktop client used to access a bit of web storage seemed silly to me, since you could set up a FTP account on each of your machines and have easy access to hundreds of gigabytes of data storage on your web server. I take that back. When collaborating with partners, setting up a shared folder gives easy access to project files, especially if you’re labelling the files. This adds an extra dimension to collaboration via web apps (next tip) alone.
As an added bonus, if you’re running torrents you can set your home machine to auto-start downloads from torrent files in a dropbox-ed folder. So if you’re dropping torrents into your dropbox from work, you could go home to your evening’s entertainment.
If you sign up for the free version through this link, you’ll receive an extra 250mb of storage with your free 2gb account.
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Google Docs: Google Calc, the free, web-accessible spreadsheet application has been useful in the last month, especially with filing my tax stuff. I’ve also used the “Powerpoint” type presentation tool to create and share simple presentations in a pinch.
The text editor is functional and good for to-do and tracking projects, although I probably wouldn’t be creating any finished products using it soon.
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Skype/AIM: You need some instant messenger to collaborate, especially if your partners are a continent or two or three away. If they support voice-chat, it will help cut down on long distance phone bills. Video chat hasn’t been a deal maker or breaker in any of the projects I’m working on now.
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I used to use basecamp, active collab and other tools, although I don’t use them as much anymore.
Are there any other project collaboration tools you find useful/invaluable?
Before heading to Affiliate Summit in Vegas this past January I paused or discontinued many campaigns. Since coming back I’ve been doing some contract work for a media organization, filing my taxes (about a year’s worth of filing in the last 2 weeks) and along the way I’m about 90% recovered from my tendonitis (since Jan) with a steroid shot about 2 weeks back, and my badly sprained ankle is slightly swollen but I’m able to walk now (bike rides might be a month or two away).
So firing up my campaigns again, here’s what I’m working with:
I’ve shortlised a group of 6 CPA networks that I’m planning to work with. Why 6? For the range of offers and having enough options to load into an offer rotater.
The traffic sources? Probably a combination of PPC (tier-1 and tier2) and PPV networks. Although media buys seem to be really hot, I’m holding off for now.
I’ve been helping a friend who does really well with direct linking on a pretty massive scale, so I’ll try some of that out too, especially on the risk management and cashflow management front.
There’s still a couple of other facebook-related projects I’m working on with partners that will likely take up a fair bit of time/capital, so that will probably take the place of the tax filing which had been a major timesuck.
Else, everything situation normal, all fired up. (SNAFU).
How’s things going for you?
PS: I’ll likely aim to post 1-2 times a week. I noticed that my Google PR seems to have gone from a 4 to a 5.
In case you aren’t familiar with Evan Williams, he’s one of the founders of Blogger.com (acquired by Google in 2003) and later Twitter. So EV (his online moniker) knows a thing or two about success. What you may not know is that Blogger was on the verge of going bust when all the employees at that time left, and Evan was the only one running it for a time.
Evan has also had a string of failures (or projects that didn’t pan out along the way), so it was good to hear about the reality element of building an internet-based business.
There’s a lesson for affiliate marketers, internet marketers and product owners too if you listen to his interview by the BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) about his strategies in developing concepts, launching companies, monetizing them, marketing, and a whole bunch more.
Here’s the BBC link.
You might also like to check out this month’s InternetMarketingCookbook update on breaking through 2 barriers faced by all entrepreneurs and business owners.
Useful links:
It’s been about 2 weeks since my last post and since I’m the one usually bashing on other bloggers not posting regularly enough, I’ve posting an interim update.
Why the delay?
Couple of things – I had a bout of tendonitis (you might’ve seen my wrist brace at January’s Affiliate Summit) that flared up pretty badly about a week ago. I went to see a orthodontics specialist and got a steroid jab in my tendon. Hopefully things improve, else he might have to cut open my wrist (in a good way) to fix the stuff in there. That might affect my reaction time when it comes to FPS games. oh well.
At the same time I got my steroid shot and my wrist started to recover, I played some ball games last week and it probably wasn’t a good idea to wear running shoes on a basketball court… The consequence? Twisting my right ankle (it was bend 90 degrees to the left with a nice “snap” sound). Now it’s about 20% larger than my left foot and I’m hobbling around like a hobbit. Keeps life interesting, right?
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On the work front, I’ve taken up an editorial gig at a newspaper (remember those?) and it’s interesting to see what will appear in the newspaper a day before publication. Good fodder for trend research.
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I’d been talking to a CPA network about a major project relating to Facebook (nothing to do with FB ads or affiliate marketing) and the deal is frozen for the moment. It’ll still be one of my major focuses this year (as soon as I get my taxes done), so there’ll be fewer twitter and blog updates till some of this backlog gets cleared.
I probably won’t be on AIM as much as I used to be, so to all the affiliate managers asking:
- Yes, I’m still in the industry
- Yes, I plan to promote the offers we discussed
- No, I probably only can do it after April 20th
In the meantime, you might like to check out MrGreen’s biggest loser CPA case study. It’s been about a month. How about an update, Lorenzo?
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My friend, CarlRez has posted about some challenges he’s faced with his affiliate marketing biz. Check it out: one last hurrah.
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On another note, one of my friends who’s a very successful affiliate, reports generating a couple of hundred bucks each day off one of the tier-2 PPC engines. I’ll be checking it out.
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Last thing, the new April update to the Internet Marketing Cookbook has just come out. Check it out for strategies to improve your productivity and profits.
