Local lead gen rent site vs sell leads

I am thinking about doing local lead generation and not sure the best business model to use. Unsure whether to rent the site out monthly or sell the leads. Starting to weigh the pros and cons of both. People have told me selling leads can make more money then renting it out. So I am starting to consider both but also consider what would be easier to sell to a client with just starting out and everything. Just curious whether anyone here has any experience doing this. Thanks again!

 

I have done a few lead generation projects and I have found more success with selling the leads that the site(s) generated. The first site that I completed I gave away the leads while I perfected the landing pages, design, content and traffic generation. Once that was completed, I was able to find a couple of companies that were interested in the leads that the site began generating. After about 4 months, I had three local companies competing for the leads based on the quality and conversion.

A couple of months into the first project, I had someone contact me in a different market based on one of the companies referrals. They were interested in the same type of leads for their business and proposed a flat rate for a 6 month term with first option to renew after that period was completed. The site started slow but eventually built up steam. The company that "rented" out the site had a rough few months but by the end of it, the site was generating enough solid leads that they made their investment back several times over. I ended up selling them the site entirely after the initial 6 month term.

Had I have sold the leads that were generated from site #2 in the last 3 months in a similar fashion to my first site, I would have made 3-4x what I made by renting it out.

Just my experience and everyone's will be different. Hope this helps!

Cheers,
Chris

 

Awesome thanks for the feedback there. I was thinking that was my best plan. Did you ever sell the same lead to multiple clients? I keep hearing people saying that you can sell 1 lead to 2 or 3 businesses and double your money. That just seems so unethical to me.

 

I never sold the same leads to multiple clients. My experience was for local lead generations and once I was getting a decent amount of traffic/leads, I was selling the next "X" number of leads as a package. The one site was doing roughly 60 leads a month so I gave the companies the chance to bid on the "Next 15 leads". I was originally dealing with 2 companies that were battling back and forth but when both informed me that they didn't want to grab the leads, I gave a batch away to a third company who loved the leads and gave me another company to fall back on.