Getting started with a lead generation business is one of the fastest and most profitable ways to build an online income.
Creating websites in highly profitable and easy-to-rank niches, you can create a portfolio of digital assets that continue to bring in revenue through several different business models.
And we’ll cover all of them in this post.
With no physical product and no major barrier to entry, it’s a business model that anyone can get started with immediately.
In this post, I’m going to show you my exact method for finding golden niches, building fast-ranking websites, monitoring their progress, and the different models I’ve used for generating revenue.
What Is a Lead Gen Business?
A lead gen business involves building and ranking websites predominantly in local service-based industries that attract online search visitors.
The aim is to then convert those visitors into sales leads by strategically placing call-to-actions that get visitors to ring a phone number or submit their details in an online form.
Depending on the niche, those kinds of sales leads can be worth tens or even hundreds of dollars, and businesses are more than happy to pay for the opportunity to receive those leads.
The major advantage of this business model is that you don’t have to try to sell SEO services to a business; instead, you’re trying to sell them leads. You can even give away a few leads to a potential client so that they can see the value they’re getting.
As far as revenue options go, you have several choices:
- Rent out the entire site
- Keep the site for your own leads
- Sell the entire site
I’ve used all three of them, and there’s no right or wrong way to start with these. However, one of the most profitable options for recurring revenue is to rent out the site.
More on that below.
Step-By-Step Guide To Getting Started With Lead Gen
Right, I said above that lead gen is a great business model because there are no physical products or barriers to entry.
All you need are a few tools and the ability to click on buttons.
Let me show you my process.
Step 1: Choose A Profitable Niche
The keystone of my lead-gen strategy has always been to find gold niche opportunities. These are niche keywords that are highly profitable and easy to rank at the same time.
Normally, it would take endless hours of searching for keywords in different cities and hoping to catch one that had a decent search volume and low competition.
But I use a tool called Xagio Niche Hunter that automates the majority of the work.
Basically, I enter a location, set a search volume, CPC, and competition range, and start with a much more refined list.
It typically takes less than 10-15 minutes to find a new profitable niche where there’s an EMD available, where I also have a very high confidence that I can rank the site on page 1 or 2 without any backlinks.
You can learn more about how to use this tool in our dedicated Niche Hunter blog post.
Step 2: Build And Optimize A Website
Once I have an ideal niche, I get started immediately with building the site. First, I use NameCheap to register the domain, and I set it up on my hosting with a clean WordPress installation.
Normally, building out the site would require endless days of researching, analyzing, and filtering keywords before spending several weeks writing content and designing the website.
Now, I do all of that in about 15 minutes using Agent X.
With Agent X, I simply enter my location and keyword, and the tool will do extensive competitor keyword research and create clustered groups to target on different pages.
Once I’m happy with the new page clusterers, Agent X takes over and performs competition analysis, creates content, optimizes meta tags, designs the pages, and adds schema markup.
All this takes about 15 minutes, and you have a website that is ready to rank.
Step 3: Monitor Rankings
Once the site is set up and indexed in Google, you should keep a close eye on how the rankings are initially picked up.
I’ve seen sites that have jumped to page 1 within a week, while others might take a couple of weeks.
There’s no exact science to this, and that’s why I suggest keeping an eye on your rankings with Xagio’s Rank Tracker.
The good news is that if you use Agent X, then all your selected keywords for the website build are automatically added to the Rank Tracker, and you can simply check the graphs on a daily basis.
Step 4: Build Links If Needed
Whether or not I have to build links all depends on the competitiveness of the niche and how Google reacts to my new site.
I have ranked sites on page one with no links. One example is my agency website, which jumped from page 10 to #1 in a few weeks.
You can see more case studies of using Agent X here. The major benefit of using Agent X is that you’ll need far fewer backlinks, and you can often achieve exceptional results with just a few strategic links.
Step 5: Monetize The Site
Once your site is ranking in the top 3 and you start seeing form submissions and calls to the phone number, it’s time to decide how you’re going to monetize your new digital real estate.
Here are the three options, and when each becomes most relevant.
Option 1: Rent It
One of my favorite options for lead-gen sites is to rent out the site and send all leads to one company. You’ll also hear this model called the Rank & Rent approach, where you do all the work to get a site ranking and then allow someone to rent the digital real estate.
The reason this works so well is that when you contact a prospective company, you don’t have to convince them to pay you for results that might come several months away.
That’s what you have to do when selling SEO.
What you can do is show them the ranking as well as reports about incoming phone calls and form submissions.
You could even offer to send them 5-10 free leads to assess the quality before they commit to a monthly payment.
It’s recurring revenue, and depending on the niche, could net you thousands of dollars in rental income.
Option 2: Keep It
There are two ways to use the keep it approach. First of all, you could create a site in a niche where you can use the leads for your own business or grow an email list of prospects.
Another approach here is to sell the leads individually.
One option here is to use joint venture services, where you get paid for each lead sent to a phone number they provide. The downside here is that there are strict rules, and often the phone call has to last a certain amount of time.
Alternatively, you can set up call tracking to send a certain number of calls to one or more companies.
Each company then pays for the number of calls it receives. However, there’s more management involved in this, both from a setup and invoicing perspective.
Option 3: Sell It
This is another option I sometimes like to use.
Some sites I have ranked over the years for testing purposes haven’t been in niches where companies charge a lot. For example, lawn services in a small city might not drive a huge amount of calls and sales to a company.
Rather than manage a site and invoice a company for a few hundred dollars, I sometimes offer to sell the site to the company for a certain multiple.
I get upfront revenue and fewer work tasks, allowing me to refocus on more profitable niches.
Another use for this is if you rank for a particularly profitable niche. I know lead-gen SEOs who charge five figures a month for sites, and they sometimes decide to thin out their inventory by selling sites for six figures.
Pros And Cons Of Monetization Methods
| Model | Pros | Cons |
|---|---|---|
| Rent It | Passive, recurring income | May need ongoing SEO |
| Keep It | More control over lead revenue | Very hands-on process |
| Sell It | Fast cash, scalable exit | One-time payout |
I’ve successfully used all of these models. Even though they each have some downsides, I wouldn’t avoid any of them as part of building a successful lead-gen business.
Making A Decision For Your Experience Level
If you’re new to lead-gen, then I would suggest focusing your time on building and ranking sites and making the revenue part as easy as possible.
That most likely means renting out the site by agreeing on a specific price with a local business owner.
You’ll still need to learn how to handle sales, but it’s a lot easier to sell leads you’re already generating, especially if you offer the owner some free leads.
It’s also a great way to create recurring revenue; once you have an agreement with a local business owner, simply set up recurring payments with PayPal or Stripe, and you should automatically receive the funds each month.
You could always decide to sell the site to the business owner or someone else at a later stage, which is a lot easier once you have a proven track record of search traffic, leads, and revenue.
Build Your First Lead Gen Site With Agent X
If you haven’t already started a lead-gen business, then start building your first sites using Xagio’s Agent X.
It’s by far the easiest and fastest way to create fast-ranking websites in just a few minutes.
Between finding the niche and building the site, you’ll also spend less than $30 on average, meaning that you can easily launch 5-10 lead gen sites in a month to increase your success rate and experience in a very short space of time.
Users have already built thousands of sites with Agent X, so don’t miss out on this amazing opportunity.