Have you ever tried to figure out how much it really costs to buy leads for new business clients sent to you by lead generation sites? Have you been really confused about all the tied package deals requiring you to buy websites (for an initial and then monthly fee) and professional pages (for another initial and then monthly fee) and then you can get leads (for each a per-lead price with scalable flow or a fixed monthly price with an undefined flow or for throwing all the money you have in your checking account into the cloud and whatever comes back to you in leads you can keep)? Yeah, me, too.
Regardless of what type of business you have, almost any business type has two, three, or ten or more industry-specific (legal, medical, automotive repair, plumber, HVAC or whatever) websites that will:
- sell you a professional profile on their industry-specific site, where people looking for professionals like you can find you and get details about you and ask you to bid on their jobs
- sell you a website that you can link to from that professional profile,
- sell you warm leads from their industry-specific website and
- sell you some paid search services to put your ads at or near the top of search engine results pages for the right amount of money used to buy the right collection of keywords.
I have a real smart son-in-law who has worked for several such websites after graduating with a Bachelors degree in marketing with a specialty of Internet marketing. I’m embarrassed to tell him how much I don’t know about this stuff. So, I asked a bunch of his colleagues who work in my primary workspace, practicing law, to try to explain what they would love to sell me.
For example, I called my rep Scott English at Martindale-Nolo. He explained they have a 3-pronged approach to Internet advertising. First, they have their Lawyers.com and Martindale.com and Nolo.com websites where you can (and, if you want to get a deal on their websites and search services, you must) purchase their full and complete professional profiles. Martindale-Nolo will sell you a profile on those pages so people can find you when they search those sites for help by topic and location.
Second, Martindale-Nolo will also provide you with a professional website, if you don’t have a top notch website already. These websites are mobile responsive and search engine optimized.
Third, M-N will sell you warm leads when people search for lawyers on M-N’s topic-specific (DivorceNet.com, etc.) legal information and professional pages.
Now, try to follow the pricing. My main rep, Scott, could only price the first two items. We had to get a ringer, Dennis Melendez, from Martindale-Nolo.com to price the leads for us.
Having a Lawyers.com professional page by itself costs $250 a month. Having a M-N website costs $100. But, if you buy them together, you can get them for $200 a month. Of course, that combo deal expired this coming Friday (no matter which day of the year you are talking to them).
Then, if you want to add getting the warm leads, it depends on your geographic area and practice area, because the pricing for leads varies by demand. For example, divorce leads in Baltimore, Maryland currently go for $26 per lead. You have to agree to spend at least $500 per month for a campaign. They will bill your leads against your deposit. You get and have to pay for all three kinds of warm leads — the good ones, the bad ones, and the ugly ones. But, if not a lead you receive is not in practice area or geographical area you can request a credit for it.
Now, returning to our previous posts, we are trying to develop $25,000 work of business using a $2,500 per month budget. We are paying $200 for a professional page and a website and paying 500 for 19 warm leads. Assuming a 50% closure rate. We are getting 9-10 cases of people who want our $500 “no kids, no property, nothing to fight about, uncontested, easy, inexpensive divorce” uncontested divorce. $700 results in $5,000 worth of business.
Granted, if we took all types of divorce cases, including our “less easy, more expensive” divorces and the occassional “knock-down/drag-out” divorce then we would be able to get on average $2,500 per divorce or about $25,000 worth of business. This would be a better return on investment, but we don’t want to work that hard. We just want easy, inexpensive divorces. Maybe we can get cheaper leads for the no-contest cases.
Come back for the next post and see.
[reminder]For those of you who have different types of business, what are your similar figures for professional listings, websites, and lead generation farms?[/reminder]