What Lead Gen Companies Don’t Want You To Know About Getting Free Leads Forever

Justin Brooke
August 28, 2024
5 min read

Have you ever wondered how the “Pay Per Lead” game works?

Ever wondered… “How can they afford to sell me these leads for this price and what price does that mean THEY are getting them at?”

It’s like when you buy a pizza, you know the cook didn’t pay what you are paying. Obviously, the cook has to make a profit.

And really, what does pizza cost?

Cup of flour, cup of tomato sauce, cup of shredded cheese, and maybe a quarter stick of pepperoni. It’s maybe $3 IF they bought all premium ingredients, for the whole pizza.

And here you are paying $15 - $18 for the pie.

Obviously, these same kind of economics are happening behind the scenes with any leads you are buying. The ad network is making a profit, the marketer is making a profit, and then YOU to have to make a profit.

God must have blessed you today, because you happen to be talking to a former “Pay Per Lead” guy.

Before I was founder of AdSkills, I had an ad agency called IMScalable.

One of my specialties was lead generation. In fact, I used to think it was cheating when clients would ask me to only do lead generation for them. For me, lead gen came so easy that I thought I was doing something wrong.

So lets reveal some secrets…

How The Pay Per Lead Game Works From a Former Lead Seller

It doesn’t matter if you are an agency or someone needing leads yourself. Everyone, will learn how to reduce their lead generation costs from this. Maybe even make your lead generation a whole new profit center!

For some of you, this is elementary or obvious.

For the rest of you, it’s going to be a game changer.

The word you need to know is “co-registration.” With just that new word added to your vocabulary you’re going to be able to find tons of blog posts, Youtube videos, and whole courses on the subject.

Co-registration or “co-reg” as we call it, is the act of co-registering your leads with one or more other partners. For example, imagine your current lead form with a little tick box underneath of it. Maybe your lead form says “Free PDF Reveals The Secret To Japanese Knife Sharpening.” The tick box says “Yes, also send me 10 Japanese Knife Sharpening Mistakes.”

To the amateur and the consumer, this just looks like you’re getting two reports for the price of one.

To the well trained eye, this one lead is turning into two.

One for me, and one for my partner.

Co-Registration Soup To Nuts: How Lead Sellers Turn 1 Lead Into 2

The tool I like to use for this is LeadsHook.com, but there are plenty of others. You could even do it manually with Google Forms, Google Sheets, and Zapier.

What happens is that tick box triggers the tool to also opt that lead into a second email list. The consumer just knows they gave permission and received two emails. Most aren’t savvy enough to catch that it was two different senders.

When it’s done right it all happens so seamlessly that it’s hard for even a professional to notice what took place. It’s all done automagically at the speed of electricity.

It’s also not deceptive or illegal if you use all the proper disclosures.

I’m a marketer, not a lawyer, so I can’t tell you what’s proper for you or not. I use and recommend FTCGuaradian.com for all my marketing legal needs.

What you need to know today, is that the user is giving consent for both pieces of content. You can even disclose right underneath the form in one sentence if you want to be super above board. Just say “By clicking this checkbox you are agreeing to receive a second report for free from our partner company.”

Why would anyone do this? How does it reduce costs?

Glad you asked…

When you or I do our own lead gen we pay $x - $xxx dollars per lead. The user see’s our ad somewhere on the Internet, clicks the ad, reads our opt-in page, and fills out our lead form.

All of these same things are happening with co-reg.

Except we add the step of the check box for the second report/offer. This triggers the lead to be subscribed to two different email lists AND triggers a performance based commission to YOU or I.

Meaning, every time that checkbox below your lead form is checked, you’re earning whatever fee you negotiated to your partner for that lead. In the past I’ve done deals where we simply negotiate for half of our lead cost to as high as double our lead cost.

The Lead Seller Isn’t Getting Leads Cheaper Than You, They’re Just Getting Paid Twice

It’s still a valid lead.

It’s still a qualified, highly targeted lead.

Nothing has happened to the quality of the lead, it’s just that the seller keeps one copy for themselves and also earns from what they make off of your commission.

If you’re an ad agency you can build a whole division of your agency around this. You can have clients who are paying you for leads while you are building your own email list at the same time. THAT is what I did, but I did it for social media before anyone even understood the value of fans and followers.

In 2011-2013 era, my clients didn’t care about Facebook Fans.

All they wanted was email addresses and sales.

I asked them if they minded if I created a Facebook fan page to run their ads through. They didn’t care as long as they were getting their leads under $x. Meanwhile I was collecting tens of thousands of fans on these pages, which I then used as an affiliate to promote offers in that same space.

Later on I used the same concept when the market didn’t really understand the value of a retargeting pixel. I was buying tens of thousands of dollars worth of email ads for my clients and asking the list owner if I could add this little HTML code to the email for my ads.

Is Co-Registration Illegal or Deceptive?

I never ever ever tried to deceive anyone.

I took the stance that it was easier to ask upfront for permission, then to have to explain myself later on. I also knew that they just didn’t understand it all yet and very few people ever read or care to read legal disclosure pages.

Everyone gave me permission, all parties knew what I was doing, and I had all the proper legal disclosures.

That’s important! Don’t cut corners!

Better to be overly upfront about what tactics you are using, then to be caught later on.

If you try to be clever or deceptive with lead gen you can end up in a courtroom explaining to the judge why you violated the rights of tens of thousands of people. You’ve been warned!

How To Triple Your Money From 1 Lead

By now you realize that you could be instantly ROI positive on your lead gen with co-reg. Every lead that comes in is either earning you half the cost back immediately, or maybe even the full cost of the lead. This comes from the commissions you earn from the partner who is also receiving the lead.

By the way…

I don’t agree with the business model of selling and reselling that lead to may other parties. I believe that is why there are privacy laws around email in the first place. Some people got greedy and opted the lead into dozens of lists or call centers. Which pisses off the consumer and they start calling alphabet agencies to feel a sense of vengeance.

If you’re partnering with one company, who you have already vetted, and trust, then the consumer isn’t going to feel burned or abused. They will probably even enjoy the experience and thank you for the introduction.

Consumers do not mind trustworthy promotions, it’s when things are underhanded and greedy that the consumer gets offended.

That said, how then can we earn more from the same leads (ethically).

First way we double our money is selling the lead via co-reg to a trusted partner.

Second way is we then also sell our own products to the lead via our own email marketing.

But, then there is a 3rd way.

The 3rd way to leverage your lead gen for more profit is by renting your email list out to trusted partners. This does not mean you give them a spreadsheet with all your leads.

I’m not sure why they named this email list rental, you’re not really renting anything.

The Basics of The Email List Rental Business Explained

What is happening is your trusted partner gives you an email to send out and pays you for the opportunity to reach your email subscribers through your email list.

There are many companies that do this, Paved.com and SwapStack.co are two of them. If you don’t want to manage your own negotiations let a company do it for you. A fair price is $25 CPM, meaning $25 for every 1,000 people on your email list.

If you have 10,000 subscribers you could get $250 per email and if you mail out daily, that could be $250/day or an extra $7,500 per month from your email list. Obviously, you would do this after you’ve had the lead go through your own 30 day sequence first. Making sure you did all you could to entice them to become a customer, but then after that you can send them to a trusted recommendations list.

Or maybe you don’t try to monetize them daily, and instead you just supplement your income a little.

You can do once a week and then allocate all of those earnings into ad budget for more lead gen, which grows your co-registration income and your list rental income. Which grows your ad budget for lead gen and so on and so on.

THIS is how people get those large 100,000+ email lists and you can too.

Imagine how different your business could be if you focused on this for just 90 days.

Imagine if you did this for a whole year.

Where would your business be a year from now if all your lead gen was profitable and funding the scaling of your lead gen ad budget???

Well…

What’s stopping you?

If you need help, give us a holler at support@adskills.com.

See you next week.

Justin Brooke,


Founder of AdSkills.com

P.S. I’d love to tell you how I got 10,000 leads a day using Google ads. It’s a masterclass I taught inside AdSkills.com and you can join today for less than $20 bucks. Use code SAVE20 today to take 20% off, FOR LIFE!

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