It's All About The Leads: Publishing to Capture Profits

All online businesses are nothing more than lead capturing machines. They capture traffic from search engines and links from other sources and turn that traffic into leads which turn into sales of products and services being sold on their sites. But there is another booming industry surfacing that utilizes specific niche content to attract leads for 3rd parties to convert into sales for banks, realtors, lawyers, and many other groups. And in many cases these leads sell for a lot more than you can make from the same people clicking on your Adsense ads. A LOT more. This is partially what is meant by going "beyond Adsense." You are simply getting into the lead generation business. Which is the same as Adsense publishing, but with Adsense you are selling your leads for pennies instead of dollars. You can certainly create sites that sell affiliate products to the leads they generate. Most people are operating under this business model in some fashion. But you can also capture the leads and sell them to people who are willing to pay anywhere from $1-$25 per qualified lead. What is a "qualified" lead? This depends on the deal you set up with the person you are collecting them for. Sometimes it means a lead has filled out an information request form. Other times it simply means they have signed up for an autoresponder sequence that guides them to a purchase or other action. In all cases I have studied, the income per lead is far higher than having the same traffic come through your site and clicking on pay per click links. It takes more work to find buyers and set up deals with them for the leads you can supply them, but once it is in motion, you are promoting your site with a greater return in mind than even selling a product on the site can produce per 1000 visitors. How you find the niches and create the sites to attract these leads is a topic for another day. The people doing this most successfully are groups of publishers like those at Content Desk.