A key driver for any business to experience sales growth is attracting enough qualified leads to acquire new customers. While this may seem straightforward at first glance, it is an ongoing challenge that business owners across sectors face.

Because of this, lead-generation businesses have largely grown in demand, providing companies with lists of qualified leads to insert into their sales funnels. So what exactly is a lead-gen business, and how can you make money with this model? 

Continue reading through this guide as we lay out the steps you’ll take to set up a lead-generation business. 

Can You Make Money Selling Leads?

Before we dive deeper into the steps to set up a lead-gen business, let’s discuss whether you can make money from this endeavor.

The fact of the matter is, lead generation data is important business intelligence that many entrepreneurs will pay good money to access. Oftentimes, business owners don’t have the tools or understand the first thing about how to use an email scraper or related programs, so they’ll pay experts to do it for them.

Just like with any other business service, lead generation is a legitimate business model that offers a real value exchange between the provider and the business owner requiring the leads. 

So here is the money-making equation: the lead-gen service provider will use scraping tools to generate lists of leads with relevant contact information, and the business owner will pay a fee per lead to access this data.

Is it Legal?

Now that you know you can make real money from selling leads generated by scraping tools, you may wonder–is email scraping legal? After all, the last thing you want to do with a new business endeavor is to enter into illegal activities and face penalties and fines. 

So even though all lead generation services don’t rely on email scraping, it’s still a valid question that you may have.

When done correctly, it is in fact legal to capture information on leads and sell it. However, there are some limitations. It’s always best practice to check out the Terms of Use on a specific website when you’re email scraping to see if they have a policy against it. Plus, you cannot do this if the information was stored behind a paywall or any restricted-access site.

With these points in mind, you can feel better that you’re abiding by all applicable laws with lead scraping and not putting yourself or your business at any legal risk. 

Is it Lucrative?

So yes, lead-gen businesses are legal. But are they a lucrative endeavor?

Every business out there relies on leads to make money and continue growing their business, both for B2B and B2C companies. So, it’s a very valuable part of running a business today, though not all professionals have the time or resources to generate a list of qualified leads on their own.

Thus, this opens up the market for lead-generation businesses. While starting a lead-gen business isn’t for everyone, those who do the research ahead of time, have the proper tools on hand, and price their services accordingly can access a great source of income and become very profitable by selling leads. 

How to Make Money Selling Leads: Step by Step

Now that you understand the legality of lead-gen businesses and how lucrative they can be, let’s break down the steps you’ll need to follow if you’re looking to get started with this model for yourself. 

Pick a Niche

First, you need to decide on the niche of clients that you will serve. Consider your areas of interest or expertise when making this decision, but also keep in mind the prospects of the specific industry or market that you decide on–like is the space expected to grow or shrink over the coming years?

Of course, you will also need to choose an industry that relies heavily on leads, and is willing to pay a reasonable price to access this information.

Some common niches for lead-gen businesses to target include, but are not limited to: 

• Real Estate
• B2B SaaS/Services
• Financial Services
• Legal Services

Decide on a Fee Structure

Once you have a niche selected, you can move on to finalizing your compensation structure. As we discussed, most lead-gen businesses will charge clients based on a per-lead fee. And while this fee may be relatively small, most of the time you will be providing hundreds or thousands of leads at a time, so this can add up to a sizable rate.

In order to come up with the actual rate you’ll charge, you may want to start by considering the long-term value (LTV) of each lead to your client, or the dollar amount they could generate for the business over their lifetime.

Generally, the larger the LTV, the more you’ll be able to justify charging the client for each lead. Keep this in mind as you’re explaining the fee structure to the client, and make sure you have a clear basis for how you derived the fee based on the pricing of the product or service they sell and the customer LTV.

For example, if you’re selling leads to realtors, you may be able to justify charging a higher rate per lead than if they were hairstylists given the higher ticket price of their work.

Invest in the Best Lead Scraping Software

With these two steps taken care of, you’ll need to figure out how you’ll generate the leads to sell. 

To do this effectively, you’ll need quality software that can uncover leads with ease and efficiency no matter where they’re at on the internet. Above all, good lead scraping software can automate this process, not requiring you to pine over databases or do any guessing games to come up with the right email addresses for each lead.

So for anyone looking to start a lead generation business, they need to use Klean Leads, an 

email scraper online. This program quickly supplies users with accurate contact information on leads. Using this tool will allow you to provide quality leads to your customers that will help them close more deals. 

The search and scraping capabilities of the software are very powerful, as you can find email addresses and other contact information from a number of locations online, which we’ll discuss in more detail below. 

Determine Where to Find Leads

Next, you’ll need to figure out where on the internet you’ll go to source leads. The good news is that when using Klean Leads, you’re not just limited to one sourcing method. So, you can use our all-in-one tool to scour the internet for any and all leads that could be valuable to your customers. 

Many people looking to sell leads can use our bulk email finder. It’s the best sourcing feature for lead-gen businesses to use because you need to be as efficient as possible with your time and resources. This is a great feature for many reasons, one of them being that you can access millions of leads–both B2B and B2C–quickly through a simple search. 

In other cases, you can do an email search by name if a client has a specific request for a lead. Or, you can use our Linkedin email extractor to efficiently pull emails from LinkedIn profiles that meet specific search criteria of your client’s target audience.

With any of these uses, Klean Leads software does all the hard work for you, leaving you with an organized and straightforward list of qualified leads and contact information that you can share with your clients. 

Market Your Services

With all these details of your lead-gen business ironed out, you can begin marketing your services and start taking on clients. 

Once you begin speaking with potential clients of your own, don’t worry if you realize you need to alter your niche or pricing slightly to meet the needs of the market better. 

Then, after you take on some clients and begin to provide the service, you’ll quickly see that using Klean Leads is the ultimate resource that allows for efficient and automated service delivery. 

Final Thoughts on How to Make Money Selling Leads

Running a successful and profitable lead-gen business is a great way to leverage your scraping skills to help business owners access crucial information they need to grow their sales.

After all, there is a great amount of value placed on the ability to find any email address for someone or get someone’s email from LinkedIn, so you can utilize a tool like Klean Leads to your advantage and create a profitable business venture from it. 

So if you’re looking to get started with running a lead-generation business, each of the steps listed above is very important and cannot be glossed over. Specifically, you need to make sure you’re investing in the proper tools to help you stay efficient and provide quality service to your customers.

Get started with Klean Leads today and enjoy a 7-day free trial so you can see how great of a resource it can be for anyone starting up a lead generation business.