Regardless of what you are promoting online having a list of quality is the most important tool you will use. With so many ways to generate leads online its very easy to get lost in the storm. Many online marketers and home entrepreneur’s go the route of buying bulk leads instead of generating their own as on the surface that it is a quicker and more efficient way to instantly obtain a list of contacts.

In over six years of online marketing I have tried nearly every marketing idea under the sun, including buying these so called “bulk” leads. No matter what label is put on these contacts they are all he same. Bulk leads, auto responder leads, surveyed leads, verified leads, 4 question surveyed, 8 question surveyed. The bottom line is it is a list of names and email addresses of people who have previously asked for more information about a particular product or marketing idea. There is a right way, and a wrong way in using these lists. Lets start by talking about the wrong way.

The wrong way to promote to these lists is to immediately begin shooting out offers for your product or service. The reason? Because when the inevitable SPAM complaint comes in, you will not have any grounds to defend yourself. Even if these people DID in fact ask for more information, you have NO idea what information they asked for. All you will probably have is an IP address and a date/time stamp, and a website where you bought these contacts from. What it boils down to is these people did NOT ask for information from you directly and you will likely be guilty of spamming.

The right way to market to these lists to treat them as unverified traffic. Most of these leads are single opt-in, and none of them have any idea who you are. The first thing you want to do if load them into a quality auto responder that will send out a verification letter asking them to opt into your personal marketing list. A percentage of your lead list (based on how many times the lead list has been sold) will opt into your list, and now you have a true digital trail of an opt-in to combat future SPAM complaints. Blasting emails out to an unknown list that you bought from a website is never a good idea, as the possibility of a SPAM complaint is high, and even if you don’t get a SPAM complaint it will adversely affect your professional image.

There are many places online in which you can buy lead lists, and they all are basically the same. You should never spend more then a couple cents on any lead, no matter how ‘hot’ or ‘new’ they are. Online sales are determined by mass exposure, not burning money on these so called ’highly targeted leads.’ In this case quantity is definitely superior to quality.

The upside to buying lead lists and marketing to them is your not wasting time surfing traffic exchanges and posting to multiple safe lists hoping for leads. You simply load the lead list into an auto responder and people opt in to receive your offers. The downside is that it doesn’t perform as fast as other methods, and does have an upfront cost. You need a lead source and an auto responder, which can be expensive based on your sources.

Be smart when buying leads and realize that no matter how ’hot’ or ’new’ a lead source claims their leads are, each list has probably been resold countless times over and over. The only way to have any success with this type of marketing is by doing it in mass volumes.