You don't have to wait for your potential customers to make a purchase before they pay you. In other referral models, such as affiliate sales, you need your potential customer to buy before they pay you. The best way to make money with lead generation is to send the highest quality leads possible. There are several ways to qualify your potential customers, but the main factors that contribute to generating quality leads are the target audience and the text of the ad.
All lead generation sites vary, but you generally earn money for every lead you generate for one of your clients' companies. It is important to note here that no sales are made in this process. The potential customer didn't buy anything; rather, they simply provided some information or picked up the phone and called their customer's company. To sell leads this way, I recommend that you have some vertical market experience under your belt.
If the customer asked for 100 leads in a week and then decided that they didn't want to use my services again, there would be no hard feelings. A lead generation business can adapt to the style of most buyers, but in each case it does so for very different reasons. Basically, there are five different ways to sell potential customers and all of them can be profitable if they adapt to the situation you've established with your customer. Once you find a lead generation offer to promote through your chosen affiliate network, the next step is to start generating leads so you can start receiving payments.
While there are a lot of resources when it comes to learning how to manage lead generation websites, there is one that is way above the other coaches out there. Some of your customers may not like the idea of paying the new owner and may simply leave the service entirely under new leadership. While they do a lot of marketing themselves, they also turn to other sources to generate qualified leads and pay good money for it. A potential customer is a person or company that expresses interest in the products & services you promote by submitting their information, which is then used to follow up with them, in order to convert those potential customers into sales.
All three have dozens of different offers that you can use if you decide that you prefer to go the affiliate route rather than the direct route of finding business owners who want to pay you per lead. One of the advantages of segmenting local searches with lead generation offers is that the competition will be less fierce than if you were creating a regular affiliate website. And yes, losing money, which is why I recommend selling potential customers with this method if you have experience in the vertical market. While affiliate marketing is different from lead generation, there's still a lot of overlap between the two models.
Generating leads using a pay-for-results model reduces the risk that creating leads online will not be profitable, since what is charged to the potential customer is agreed upon beforehand. If you're looking for a solid educational product for lead generation, I'd recommend Local Client Takeover or The Lab.