The REAL Truth About Buying Leads

Lead sales are big business in the online world. Some companies do a stellar job, while others (a lot of others) are just plain unethical.

What happens with a legitimate lead wholesaler, is they post lead capture pages attached to various high traffic sites around the internet. Someone fills out a small survey asking for more information on a variety of topics (they chose their interest) and the lead company then sells those leads to lead retailers.

Next, a business buys those leads and begins to use them. If they're phone leads, they'll call them. If they're email only leads, they'll send them an email asking you to confirm your email address. The email should clearly spell out why they're sending you the email, who they are, and how to contact them by phone, email and snail mail (that's the law in the US)

Now here's what usually happens in reality:

1.) A business goes and buys some really cheap leads from a somewhat shady lead company. The leads have probably already been sold several times before. Then the business sticks them straight into their autoresponder series without asking if the person they're sending to really wants to get the information.

2.) A lead company harvests email addresses from all over the internet and sells them as "optin" leads. No one ever asked for anything, but businesses buy the leads because they're really cheap. Your email is on the list, so you get a ton of email like the ones that constantly clog your inbox, because the same leads are sold over and over.

3.) A totally unethical marketer buys some software that can be used to harvest email addresses from all over the internet. He takes them, tosses them into his mailing program with a letter saying that he's moving his list and needs to have you reconfirm your address or some other tall tale, and presto! He has a whole new list of optin suckers to market to.

4.) An even more unethical marketer (is that possible?) buys or creates software (called a blaster by some) that creates random email addresses based on the information he feeds into it and blasts his message out to any email that happens to be attached to a real box. In some cases (it has happened to me), he will also use someone else's legitimate email address as his return address.
They need to lock this kind of spammer up and throw away the key!

So, while there are a few good lead companies (I am an affiliate of one) and some businesses who do an excellent and ethical job of using email properly, there are far more who do not. No matter how much you'd like to be able to stop them, the world is far too big and it's just not possible.

Just be sure if you're using leads and autoresponders that you're not part of the problem! Once again, make sure to do your due diligence before buying and using leads.

God bless,

Dave