My journey as a marketer started in 2012 when I figured out that people were making tons of money online doing something called “affiliate marketing”. Affiliate marketing is basically selling other people’s products for commission. I started in 2012 selling other people’s courses on a blog that I had, and then soon figured out paid advertising was a better way to earn more. My main focus back then was to find an info product that sold for a few thousand dollars, and then promote it as an affiliate for a 75% commission. I started to earn a few thousand dollars a month in profit which was great money for a college student. However, a few years into my affiliate marketing journey around 2015, Peter and I discovered a completely new way to make money online. We discovered that instead of getting a commission whenever we generated a sale, we could instead get paid to just simply generate leads for other companies.
What Is Lead Generation?
Every company needs sales. However, in order to generate sales, a company first needs to generate a lead. This is a person that expresses interest in the product / service by submitting their info, so the company can follow up with them and hopefully close a percentage of those leads into sales.
There are many different ways that companies generate leads. They might run their own ad campaigns in house. They might rely on an ad agency to do everything for them. They also might rely on affiliate marketers like myself to generate leads for them and pay those affiliates a fixed price for every lead they generate.
Where To Find Lead Gen Offers To Promote?
Finding companies that are willing to pay for leads could be one of the biggest problem a new marketer has. However, in reality this is the easiest step. The easiest way to find lead gen offers to promote as an affiliate is through an affiliate network. An affiliate network is a website that helps connect companies to marketers that will generate them leads or sales. However, instead of working with the company directly as a marketer, you go through the affiliate network as a middle man. Affiliate networks will have hundreds of different offers to promote in one place and you can pick and choose what you want to promote based on what the offer is and what the payout is per lead. Whenever you generate a lead through your affiliate link, you will get paid by the affiliate network on a weekly or monthly basis. You will get a unique personal URL to promote for each lead gen offer, and whenever someone becomes a lead through your link you will get paid for that sale. Want to find and join an affiliate network? Check out OfferVault for a list, or message me privately.
Essentially anyone can join an affiliate network and start promoting offers, which makes it very easy to get started in lead gen. You don’t need to go have meetings with companies and ask if you can generate leads for them. You can just login to the affiliate network, pick a lead gen offer and start generating leads and getting paid without having to talk to anyone.
How Do You Generate Leads?
Once you find a lead gen offer to promote on the affiliate network, the next step is generating the leads so you can start getting paid. The only way to generate leads is by driving web traffic to your link. There are two main types of web traffic, organic and paid traffic. Organic traffic would be traffic that you generate for free via a blog, youtube channel, instagram account, etc. Paid traffic is advertising that you pay for on a ad platform like Facebook, Youtube, Google, or Snapchat.
When I first got started doing affiliate marketing, I focused on free organic traffic via blogging because I was basically broke. However this was an extremely slow and painful way to get started. I was hardly making any money doing organic traffic. I soon realized that if I wanted to make any significant money, I would need to learn how to drive paid traffic.
The reason why paid traffic is more effective than organic is because of the ability to scale. The problem with organic traffic is that if you want more results, you need to put in more hours to creating content. With paid traffic if you want to scale you simply increase the ad spend budget.
The business model of doing lead gen with paid traffic is rather simple. The goal is to simply spend less money to generate a lead than the lead pays out. For example, lets say that you are getting paid $10 / lead for an auto insurance company. The goal should be to spend $8 or less on paid ads to generate that lead. The difference is your profit margin, in this example the profit was $2 or 20% net roi.
Why Quality Matters
In lead gen there is one factor that you need to pay very close attention to. This is your lead quality. For example, lets say that you generate 100 leads at $10/each for an auto insurance company but none of them were remotely interested in getting a policy. The company has paid you $1,000 and nobody signed up for an auto insurance policy. This means that your leads were poor quality. At that point the advertiser would likely ask you to stop sending them leads, and may even not pay you the $1,000 in some cases.
The best way to make money in lead gen is by sending the highest quality leads that you possibly can. There are many different ways to make sure that you are sending quality leads but the main factor is who you target in your ads and your ad copy.
You want to make sure that you are running ads to people who are in your target demographic and are interested in what you are offering. Facebook is a great place to get high quality traffic. The reason why we love FB is because since they have so much data on their users they are able to show your ads to people who are really interested. They gather data on their users in house by tracking what people click on or view, and they also buy data from most major websites around the internet so they have everybody’s purchase history and interests nailed down. While this might annoy the user from a privacy standpoint, its great for those who run ads!
Another way to make sure your quality is good, is to make sure that your ads are clear about what the offer is and to not mislead anyone into become a lead. You can even improve your quality by using intent/action based ad copy such as “Click Below & Get An Auto Insurance Quote Now” etc. That way there is no question of what the user is clicking on, and why they are becoming a lead.
Scaling Your Lead Gen Campaigns
Once you become profitable promoting a lead gen offer with paid traffic, its time to scale up. This means increasing your ad spend so you can make more net profit. If you are spending $100 / day on ads with at least a 20% net profit margin, then you should make it a goal to increase your ad budget to $1,000 or even $10,000+ per day. Then you can start making some real money. However, this is easier said than done.
In the near future we will be releasing some more advanced training on lead gen so stay tuned…
Best,
Tyler
