I was looking at costs for lead generation in various forms recently and i was struck by the simplicity and yet rather elaborate attempts to charge reasonably high fees.

In my own experience i had a telephone lead generation company who didnt do any lead generation at all, in fact they gave me leads with schedule to call and when i did callk the leads i had been told were waiting for my call had left 3 years earlier.

Another one of the better examples is a company using salesforce.com as a CRM system and using a video and sending it out by email. Not bad and by all accounts a fairly successful system as far as they are getting customers. The cost at approximately $5000 per month really got me thinking at what that would buy in online marketing.

Both examples above are at different ends of the spectrum, there is the rip off merchant and then there is the very expensive email marketing program with an email thrown in and salesforce.com software too.

Lets take a look at what $5000 would buy in online marketing.

Infusionsoft CRM system for example would cost $500 per month for the premium version with all bells and whistles, you can see there is a massive difference in what is offered compared to salesforce.com http://www.infusionsoft.com/competition

So we still have $4,500 left, now to create a 30 second video would cost $140.00 (my prices) and to send it by email ???

i must be missing something.

We distribute it to over 50 sites (if suitable) and that costs a further $150 with optimised content description.

To create sales messages and if unopened it resend 3 times with different heading.

Ok, so lets look at using email lead capture system other wise known as autoresponder, i often get blank stares when i say autoresponder. The cost to set up from us and with a wordpress SEO optimised blog. (RSS set up, Ping to over 20 sites, structured properly, email marketing system in place and working, custome made theme with logo) ..Zero for the site, we charge a $150 – $450 set up fee and a monthly charge depending on who creates the content. If you create the content you pay only for the management and scheduling as well as the hosting…$310 lets say in case you like sending emails often and we need to load them often for you and if i charge $15.00 a time to set it up.

Where do they get the leads from?…i need to look into that but i am certainly missing something.

So where would we get leads…well our video is getting hundreds of hits if optimized properly, that is creating high PR backlinks to the site as well as driving highly targeted traffic.

We would still have around $4000

Enough to do a major firepower blast

Say we create 10 optimized articles for keywords we can rank in top ten easily and with good search volumes, and distribute them to over 400 directories each   -  at $200 each article that still leaves $2000

Press releases x 2 and distribute to 50 sites $1000 left

Social bookmark everything and build backlinks and maybe some forum posting and blog commenting for the rest of the $1000….and dont forget that infusionsoft totally rocks as a CRM system in comparison to salesforce.

You know for that we would also guaranteed multiple top ten Google listings in their local marketplace for at least 2 but probably 3 keywords that are of value.

What am i missing?

$5000 buys you a hell of a lot more than a video and email marketing system!

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