MLM Lead Sources: 28 Paid and Free Ways to Generate MLM Leads Yourself

Need more MLM lead sources? You can buy leads online, but you may not know how the leads were gathered, and how many times they have been sold. If you set up MLM lead sources of your own, you have more control.

This list compares methods and prices to get pre-qualified MLM leads for you and your team. Note that all of these work, but some work better than others. Start with the easier methods first, and work your way up. You may find that you don’t need the expensive ones.

I have a few recommendations after the list.

Free Ebook Offer

MLM Lead Sources General Pricing, lowest to highest

2. Mall/street trawling, $0. You might spend something on the handouts.

3. Reverse recruiting, $0, but I think you should avoid this one. Recruiting the guy you called for information? Sounds a bit lame.

4. Public Speaking, $0, and you may be able to charge for this one.

5. Writing a column, $0, many experts earn money for these columns, but just starting out, you could offer to do it for free with a small ad or author box, or both in the column.

6. Buying leads/genealogy lists, $1-20 each lead

7. Restaurant fishbowl, $10. This is where you give a winner a free lunch every week, so you can capture a bunch of untargeted leads.

8. Sizzle cards, $10-50. Put them on cars, leave them in buses and the subway, put them in baggies and throw them on driveways with rocks. Watch out for the car!

9. Flyers, $20-100.

10. Sandwich board, $20, where you collect business cards, then give one person a free lunch. The cards serve as your leads.

11. CD's & DVD's, $50 for 25, with price breaks for purchasing more, usually. Then, you hand them out. You'll probably need these for most marketing programs.

12. Color brochures, $100.

13. Classified ad, $25-200 for your local newspaper. You can also put an ad in hundreds at the same time, or run multiple ads in your town or the nearest large city. Expect to pay more.

14. Painted signs on your car windows, or Door Magnets, $50-200.

15. Your own website, $300-10,000, this one comes with an income opportunity.

16. Trade show, $400-1000 per show.

17. Display ad, $200-5000 depending on the size of the ad, the publication and its circulation.

18. Card decks, $500-1500. You pay a card deck publisher to send these out. The decks have 50-100 cards, and go to a targeted list.

19. Pay per click, or PPC, $20 month up to over $100k. Seriously, I know people who spend that kind of money on online pay per click campaigns. If you don’t what you are doing, you can go broke, like nearly any other advertising method.

20. Radio advertising: For a 30 second spot, $25 for one spot on a station with a small listener base, up to over $1000 for a large city on the best listened to stations. Less at night and on small stations and you can get volume discounts.

21. TV advertising: $500-5000 to produce the commercial or more, then you pay for the slots, which can be as cheap as $5 for each slot in the wee hours of the morning, $60-100 during the day. Expect to pay more during prime time into the thousands per spot. This is for a medium size market (not national).

22. ezine ads, $50-1000, depending on the audience and size of the list.

23. Direct mail, $500 to test, $5000 for real run. Of course, you should do this more than once.

24. Write a book, self-published if necessary, $500-5,000.Provide phone numbers, mailing addresses, and website URL’s in multiple places in the book.

25. Billboards, $700-2500 per billboard, per month.

26. Stadium ads, from about $1000 up to full stadium sponsorship.

27. Celebrity endorsers, $10k-millions, depends on celebrity, number of ads, time period you have them for, etc.

28. Infomercials, $2500-100,000. Production can cost a lot, but the more you show it, the less it costs. Phew! That’s a hefty list of MLM lead sources. Some of these, like the cost of a classified ad or a sandwich board, I pulled out past experience. I did research for the more expensive ones. I was pleasantly surprised by the cost of TV advertising on a rerun at 2AM.

Recommendations

I can tell you this. The old adages are true:

You get what you pay for

And

What you get out of it depends on what you put into it.

In other words, if you produce a lousy commercial for the radio, you’ll get lousy results. If you don’t know how PPC works, you could lose your shirt – be sure to limit your daily budget. But these can be great MLM lead sources.

With that in mind, most of the top 100 MLM companies, and the bottom 100 as well, will advise you to start with #1, making or using a list. It’s cheap, you can start right away, and you won’t lose your shirt. (Sadly, many will also recommend you try #2, 3 and 8.)

I recommend something slightly different, or at least additional.

Working your list isn’t all bad. You know the people or have something in common with them. They likely live in your town. You can start here, and learn the ropes. But long term, you just don’t have a long enough list to be really successful.

So, start advertising. Here come my recommendations.

Attraction MLM Lead Sources

Which of the above MLM lead sources qualify as attraction marketing methods?

Numbers 4, 5, 15, and 16. In all of these cases, the person comes to you, and knows what you have to offer. You can add 19, 22, 23, and 24 if you have the money and you are straightforward. Besides, you can’t really do PPC and ezine ads if you don’t have your own website.

The funny thing is that 4, 5, 15, and even 24 are all the same thing, in a sense: offer something of value for free, and let people tell you they are interested. You could even donate your book to all the libraries in the local area to give people free access, and you would have more free MLM lead sources.

The Upshot of Building a Downline

But if you use permission marketing methods to attract people to your MLM lead sources, and give them something useful, and they see the value of it, they will often give you the chance to say more. And then you can tell them how to become a Maui Star Fleet Admiral Carbonite Recruiter with your company ;o)

Many will listen and sign up, because you helped them first, before the pitch.

Good luck!

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