Free Leads
The Myth - And The Reality

     As long as we are exploring the myth of "free," we might as well begin with some adages that we all know--even if we don't always like their truth.  And sometimes we willfully choose to not believe them, or to ignore them.

These things are undeniably true:

• There is no free lunch.

• You can't get something for nothing.

• You get what you pay for.

• The bitterness of poor quality lingers long after the sweet taste of a low price is gone.

The idea of a free lead, or a free anything, is so preposterous that it is truly amazing that so many people actually believe in "free."  Lets face it.  It takes work to produce anything.  In the commercial world there are no volunteers.  There are no charities in the commercial world.  Whoever does any work expects to be paid for it.  And rightly so.  Everyone should be paid for the work they do.

So then, why does anyone make the effort to build a website, advertise it (which incidentally costs money) and go through all the labor necessary to contact customers to offer them "Free Leads?"  And then, why does someone go to all the effort of advertising for opportunity seekers and harvesting the names from internet forms or 1-800 voice mail boxes.  Once the raw data is gathered it has to be formatted and put in files that can be usable by network marketers with varying levels of computer skills and varying types of programs on their computers.  All this takes a tremendous amount of work--and why does someone do all that work?

The answer, of course, is because they are getting paid to do that.  Now how can they get paid if the leads are free?  And the answer to that, of course, is that the leads are not free.

Associate programs, and affiliate programs, sound great.  How can you lose?  All you have to do is sign up for a monthly program--and the most popular one costs about $500 per month for 1050 leads per month.  Sounds good so far, that is less than 50 cents per lead.  Then when you have referred 4 people who also have signed up for $500 per month you will get your leads for free.  Now all everyone has to do is to keep 4 people signed up underneath them to keep on getting free leads.

The really sad fact here is that now the focus has shifted from growing YOUR business to growing the lead company's business just so you can get free leads.  You can probably even earn commissions if you get enough people signed up underneath you.

If you have enough people in your downline who will follow your lead you can probably make some money by getting them to help you sell the lead company's leads.  Unfortunately, they will probably lose more in product sales or in recruiting new dealers than either they or you will ever make in lead commissions.

You will probably also learn sooner or later that the leads you are getting are a mixture of newer and older leads.  Probably 30% of them could be considered fresh, that is less than 14 days old.  The rest may be up to 60 days old.  And none of them are exclusive.  They may have been sold up to 10 times before you got them.

But even if you got them for free, you have to wonder if you got your money's worth.  You had to do the lead company's sales work to get them.  You may have sacrificed building YOUR business.  You may have lost the good will of some of your dealers.  And what did you get in return?  Free leads?

Our experience is that they were not free, they were just worthless because they had been sold so many times.

Performance Technology
Santa Monica, CA
310 394 7858
performance_technology@prosperityhome.com