This week in infectious diseases- Solar Lead Gen

If I haven’t made it abundantly clear by now, I admit- I have a problem with how the lead generation ‘companies’ generate ‘leads’.

One thing I’ve discussed in detail before is the scammy nature of the offshore types who create any and every lie possible just so they can get some unsuspecting person’s information and then sell it to similarly unsuspecting solar companies as a supposed ‘lead’ that is interested in talking about and exploring getting solar for their home.

Often, not always, they are offshore operations that are run by an unscrupulous species that may have just recently switched from either the car warranty robo-call or computer virus scam centers.

Those are genuinely bad. They fully know they are pushing boundaries on both sides- getting the leads and selling the leads. 

They aren’t the only ones to look out for though… There is another kind of actor in the lead generation space that isn't actually malicious. More often than not, they are honorable folks with genuinely good intentions…

Allow me to explain:

The ‘make money online’ marketers in recent years has created a wave of new ‘done for you’ (DFY) digital marketing agency customers who have flooded the market with offers to generate leads for various industries.

The business model is to pick a niche (like solar) and the DFY company sets you up with ads to solar companies to get them leads, and when they buy, you hire out the actual work to a ‘white label’ marketing team.

While this seems to be a legitimate business model, it has had the effect of amplifying the number of ‘offers’ a solar company sees for lead generation every day. 

This infectious disease-like virus is creating zombie ad agencies by the 10’s and 100’s per month, causing an explosion of lead generation ads in the social media, search engine, and display ads space for those of us who fall into whatever targeting criteria they may have.

I wrote an article about the effect this has had on our ability to use the search engines to learn more about Tucson Solar Companies. Spoiler alert, the paid ads and lead generation sites own nearly all of the positions on the search engine results pages.

Despite the seemingly overwhelming presence of the nefarious and malicious overseas actors and the prolific zombie lead gen advertising agencies popping up like weeds after a desert rain, there is hope…

This is one of the main reasons I created Tucson Solar Insider and the upcoming book Tucson Solar Insider Desk Guide for Buying Solar. If you’d like to skip past the nefarious and zombie lead gen types, you might want to hop on over and get on the notification list for when I release the book.

 

Be good!

Curtis