Getting traffic is one of the crucial components to your business succeeding online.  The formula is actually quite simple ‘web traffic + good web copy = sales’.  Unfortunately, many webprenuers look to outside services to gather leads.  Outsourcing leads can be a very costly and damaging experience for your business.  The purpose of this article is not to scare you, but to educate you of the pitfalls associated with outsourcing your lead generation.

One of the main problems with outsourcing your leads is you have no idea where the leads are coming from.  Have you ever signed up for a service and they ask you if you ‘are interested in’ other services?  This is called co-registration.  Co-registration generates business leads for other ‘so-called’ partner businesses.  The problem with purchasing these kinds of leads is they are very untargeted.  For example; if you are selling custom metal roofing, a customer that signed up for ‘The Weather Channel’ daily weather briefs is of no use to you.  Yet these leads are bought and sold regularly as ‘hot leads’ for a premium.

Another method regularly employed buy ‘lead brokers’ is the use of robots that patrol websites looking for email addresses.  These programs surf the internet and ‘scrape’ email addresses off of web pages, and store the information in data files.  These ‘lists’ are then sold to customers.  The process in and of itself is not illegal however, sending emails to a list that is gathered in this manner is!  

The last thing that you want to get involved with is a CAN-SPAM complaint against your website, it can have a disastrous effect on your business.  From a website perspective it can earn your website a place on corporate blacklists which will get your sites kicked out of search engines like Google, Yahoo and Live (Microsoft’s search engine).  From a legal perspective it could cause your business to be investigated for sending spam.  In the end, you are out thousands of dollars due to legal fees and hours spent clearing your good name.

Cost is also another factor, corporations that do capture leads in a CAN-SPAM complaint manner charge exorbitant fees per lead.  There are some markets (the mortgage market is one) where leads go for as much as $120 for ONE LEAD!  Ouch…  Additionally, these lead brokers will sell the information to many different customers.  I’ve had customers tell me horror stories about their call centers calling the leads that they bought only to here ‘you’re the third company that has called me today’.

You could be gathering your own, fresh, ‘Michigan Business Leads’ from your website very easily, don’t let this resource go to waste!  Simply sign up for our newsletter and I’ll detail the process for you!