Making Money Online | Selling Leads
If you haven't read Making Money Online | Affiliates you should probably read it now, it will make this page a little more understandable.
When life hands you lemons...
The story so far:
I sent affiliate sites a lot of clicks, and they resulted in little to no money, discovered that some programs cheat their affiliates, and have the solid proof that this is true based on the fact that people who bought the product through my link called and emailed me for service to the product!
I tried something a little different.
After suffering much at the hands of many affiliate programs, and discovering that I was being cheated, I started wondering what I could do with all that traffic I had been sending them, traffic from people who wanted to buy this type of product. I remembered a client who had bought some ad space from me. Having no other place to send these potential customers, I sent them to my loyal advertiser and waited about a week before contacting him. I then contacted the company and asked if they had noticed any extra traffic. They had. I asked them to track it through their sales cycle and see what happened, with the promise that if it worked for them, they could buy the traffic at a rate yet to be determined. If it didn't, no problem, I would just send the traffic elsewhere. They agreed. After a couple of weeks they told me that sales had skyrocketed!
We weighed the options for pricing, including a flat rate per month, (a little to0 soft, not favorable to either party) commission based on sales, (a little too hard to track accurately) and finally settled on a per click rate that made both parties happy (just right).
We based the price on the number of clicks it takes to produce a sale, the price of the product, and a standard commission rate. The net effect was, that I was selling leads by demonstrating the effectiveness of the program before attempting to sell it.
It is my most lucrative ongoing contract to date, and all came about as a result of being cheated.
Now that's lemonade!
For more of the tricks I learned along the way, keep checking back. I am not sure how much I want to reveal, but I might share a little more on the subject.