One Question Friday: How To Start A Lead Gen Business

this is neil dub from toronto ontario canada my question for you is what are your first three actionable steps to creating a lead gen business and what are the three industries you would go after in small communities okay and we could do that it's hard to come up with three but i think we could just talk about it in general well i i got alright i got into this business a little bit i was testing on a lead gen site what i did was i email another lead gen site and i just said would you buy leads from me how much and they said if your leads were qualified using these parameters we will pay you a hundred dollars per lead sort of trucking website that i was working on and they said if they are long commercial driver license folks and you are able to verify that by getting a picture of their license we will give you one hundred dollars and so i assumed a hundred dollars was the cheapest that it would cost and then if i i also went linkedin and i emailed the marketing and growth managers at the actual trucking companies and i said how much do you guys pay and they said a hundred and fifty dollars and that kinda of gave me that range of i can acquire it for hundred to a hundred and fifty dollars and then what i did was i went and drove ads and traffic to a website that got this information and i was able to get leads for two hundred and fifty dollars and i thought okay if i just un if i just pulled around and got it for two hundred fifty bucks and they're one to pay a hundred and fifty dollars like i think there's something there that i can actually make this profitable that's what i did yeah i i i think my first step would be because i don't know a ton about lead gen i'd be like okay well who's killing it with lead gen and so i would just my first step would be like find a blueprint of success so who is who is a new ish lead gen site so i wouldn't be looking for one that like started in nineteen ninety eight has just been cranking since then i be like alright what's a new ish lead gen site so something that started maybe the last two three years and i would go look at their stuff i got read an article about them and then i would contact them and i'd be like hey really interested in your business and i'd either be like i interested buying your business can you tell me a little about it you be open to if you know at the right price would you be open to to selling your business and they sell yes or no or i would say hey i'm really trying to learn about the lead gen business for a different category would you you know would you be down to you know talk me for fifteen twenty minutes whatever and they might say yes they might say if i wanted to make it juice here i could say hey i'm doing a an article on my favorite five you know truck truck driver lead gen businesses or truck driver recruiting businesses i wanna feature you guys just need to hop on a call thirty minutes i'll ask you few questions and i'll use it in the article and then in that you know article i would base while doing that that call about the article i would ask them how they started how they get it you know how how they get the leads what's the hardest part blah blah blah and i would try to figure out a blueprint to figure out is this even the business i wanna be in and is there a common formula that these businesses use like oh they all use facebook ads as their traffic source or do they all use google keywords as their traffic source then they take you to a landing page with a quick email capture and then three question qualifier right after that and then their business models that they sell those leads to whoever at certain price and this only works if the leads are like you know a hundred dollars worth worth a hundred dollars or more the ones that are below that seem to struggle and i would try to figure out how much money they make and how they do it and now that be my first first thing is i'd be searching for a blueprint essentially that i can remix it's like alright i'm gonna eighty percent is gonna be the same and twenty percent gonna be different so the twenty percent that's different might be i'm in a different category or i do it from a a slightly different like you know i put a greater emphasis on copywriting or newsletters or whatever in order to generate those leads that would be my first first step in which industry so we have a couple examples here so you did you did trucking went on your own before that you've shown me an apartment one what was apartment partnership or what was the lead gen for well the company what what leads did they want the company that bought my company years ago was called apartment list originally they were called vertical brands and they just owned lead gen sites for senior living they owned all gen site for a rent to own housing which was like they boot bootstrap i think like six or seven million in revenue then they owned apartment list which eventually became the main company but that was lead gen for apartments and then they owned it for cars called auto list dot com which was acquired by car guru like thirty million dollars and so that was really effective but i would the math is basically like how valuable of a purchase price is the product multiplied by the frequency that they one person buys the product multiplied by the number of people who have that need so for example if it's legion for ceos of large of like small to medium sized businesses so it's like a job board for central ceos a small business would be one to spend like fifty thousand dollars on that and but they're only gonna hire once every eight years so like that kinda gives you like help and there's like not that many people who are into that that kinda gives you like the math behind the opportunity does you what i mean yeah exactly i'd i'd be looking for high ticket pricing so i was gonna say senior living my father in does senior living and i see that like he wants customers a customer to him is gonna pay maybe six grand a month for a room so their customer in and you know and they last on average you know two years at the place right so you're getting twenty four months times six thousand dollars their customers are very valuable they're willing to give you six thousand dollars for you know for a customer if you can send them one so their leads might be you know a few hundred bucks that they are willing to pay for if you're qualified right if you're in the area and whatever else so senior living was one i was gonna say and then the other ones are like you know i see this with like moving companies or construction companies or like pool construction companies like oh that's a fifty thousand dollar project to build a pool in this area and maybe the pool construction companies are not the best at seo like optimization i'm gonna go after that category because i think that that's that's one where i can i can beat them at their own game and sell them back those those customer leads so i would look for really high ticket price things like moving pool construction senior you know senior care there's one more those i was thinking of that's alright slipped my mind but yes things like that i think those are those are great categories to go after i can find this client in full have you heard of hubspot hubspot is a crm platform so it shares its data across every application every team can stay aligned though out of sync spreadsheets are doing databases hubspot grow better can i share everyone that i just heard about that i actually think would be pretty valuable here is because it's related to what you were saying about senior care facilities there's this new kind of facility that's coming online that's essentially like mental health triage i think is the way to think of it which is essentially like you walk in and there's a bunch of lazy boys and they've got tvs in front of them and if you're having like an episode a mental breakdown you go in there and they might help medicate you if you need that and they'll i'll set you up with a therapist on this big tv and just like make sure you're okay while people figure out what's going on because mental health issues are we becoming more and more prevalent okay so this is like actually just coming online and these is are like a new type of care facility and i feel like there's probably not a lot of competition yet for finding those types of leads so there might be some some opportunities to to help call you even google's it's a good question i don't my buddy dennis is like helping build one so he he told me about it but i don't i don't know what you would call yeah i maybe mental health care treatment or something like that but like i think that you know the general principle is you want a high ticket you know buyer of your leads so you need you need them to be making a ton of money off of the thing you wanna have low competition if possible the other thing is can you use content as like your lead gen so you're not just playing a google keywords bidding game or our facebook ads keyword bidding game but like if you are educating people about something so like i don't know let's call it like what's that like surgery that a bunch of getting like brazilian booty lifts or something like that it's like yeah there's some surge there's some new thing that a bunch of people are curious about right and the topic itself like kinda lends itself to content or ratings or reviews or like you know pro pros and cons and stuff like that like can you create youtube tiktok content that's just talking about you know the pros the cons the the good stories the horror stories the whatever else and then basically if people and then you capture interested parties who are like they were googling to try to learn more about it and you as the educational source become like you know slightly trusted you never need to operate the underlying business you just sell that lead you you know farm them to a partner who's basically like you know your vetted partner to do that that procedure or do that whatever it is in in a given geography sick did we answer that ben i think that's a good ass answer that's it one question friday alright and if you want your question red live on on the show so go to m m pod dot com and click on the microphone ask us questions bye