Where to Find Work: Are Lead Marketplaces Worth It, or Your Own Website?

Two jobs for two thousand, or two thousand for one?

Anyone chasing work faces this question again every winter: buy access to enquiries, or build your own website? Both cost money and both can be calculated — only the maths works differently from what the price list suggests.

A marketplace sells you access to people who are looking for a supplier right now. You get a contact quickly, sometimes within the first week after registering. At the same time you compete for that same customer with other firms, the operator sets the terms and you pay as you go — once you stop paying, the enquiries stop.

Your own website offers none of that straight away. It needs content, time and measurement. But once it starts working, it brings people in from search engines, maps and direct visits, and the pages you paid for stay yours and keep working.

So this is not a choice between a “cheap and an expensive channel”. What decides is the cost of a job you actually won, its margin, and how fast you need to fill your capacity. This article shows how to work it out on your own numbers.

The price of a contact is misleading. Count the cost of a job

A low price per contact looks tempting, but a contact is not a customer. Some enquiries will not match your trade, your area, your timing or your minimum job value. In others the prospect does not pick up the phone, goes for the lowest price, or approached five firms at once and you are the fifth.

So with a marketplace, count like this:

Cost of a won job = (access fees + price of contacts bought + time spent sorting, quoting and travelling) ÷ number of jobs won

If you buy ten contacts at price C and close one job, the contact cost is 10 × C, not C. With two jobs, 5 × C. And add the hours of the person who reads the enquiries, makes the calls and writes the quotes — for a sole trader this is usually the largest hidden item, because nobody invoices it.

For a website the formula looks the same, only the inputs change:

Cost of a won job = (website and content costs for the chosen period + maintenance + sales time) ÷ number of jobs from the website

The difference is how long those numbers take to settle. A marketplace can be judged after a few weeks and roughly a dozen contacts handled. A website cannot — new and revised pages reach search results within weeks, but half a year is more likely to pass before they produce enough jobs for a sensible average. Anyone judging a website after the first month is judging chance. What to track specifically, and from when, is covered in How to tell whether content is paying off: what to track.

What to check with a marketplace before you pay

Poptávka.cz, ePoptávka.cz, Nejřemeslníci.cz and other services run on different business models — some charge membership, others credits, individual contacts, or commission on a closed deal. Price lists and terms change, so do not go by what a mate told you a year ago. Open the current price list and terms of business and work through this list:

• How many suppliers can buy the same enquiry? The difference between three and an unlimited number is the difference between quoting and an auction.
• Can you see the location, scope of work and timing before you buy — the things that tell you whether you even want the job?
• What happens to a contact that turns out to be invalid or unreachable? Do you get the credit back, or is that your risk?
• Does the subscription renew automatically, and by when can it be cancelled?
• Can you filter by trade, region and minimum job value? Without that you will be paying for work you do not do.
• Are you paying for the contact, for the chance to reply, or only for a closed deal?
• Do you get data on how many enquiries you bought and how many ended in a job? Without it you cannot calculate the cost per job.

And then there is speed. With simple services the customer often picks from the first suppliers who got back to them concretely — with a price, a date and a question about the details. If you only reach a new enquiry two days later, you are paying for a contact someone else has already served.

When a marketplace makes sense

A marketplace is a tool for quickly topping up spare capacity, not for building a business. It pays off when:

• you know exactly which jobs you take and which you turn down — and you can tell from a single paragraph of the enquiry;
• you have the margin to absorb paying for the unsuccessful contacts;
• you respond within hours and concretely, not with a generic “we’re interested, get in touch”;
• the service can be defined by location, timing and scope, so you can quote without a site visit;
• you measure how many purchased contacts ended in an order;
• the customer may come back or recommend you on — then the cost of the first contact dissolves into the later jobs.

It does not pay off for low-margin services, where three unsuccessful contacts swallow the profit from the fourth job, and anywhere suppliers are compared on price and almost nothing else. There you are not buying a marketplace as a source of customers, but as a ticket into a price contest.

What your own website gives you that a marketplace cannot

Your own website does not sell a ready-made list of contacts. It meets people earlier — while they are still investigating the problem, comparing options or checking out a particular supplier someone recommended to them. That is a stage a marketplace never reaches, because it only works with a decision already made: “I’ll put the job out to suppliers.”

For a website to work that way, a home page with the sentence “we offer comprehensive services” is not enough. It needs:

• a separate page for every service you want to sell — with the procedure, the scope and at least a ballpark price;
• answers to the objections you hear on the phone over and over again;
• examples of work actually carried out, not generic assurances of satisfaction;
• articles about the problems the customer is dealing with before they even start looking for a supplier;
• a visible click-to-call number and a short form, not a contact hidden away on a separate page;
• internal links from articles to the matching service — otherwise the reader finishes reading and leaves.

An article does not have to produce an enquiry on the first visit. But it can explain the problem, show how you work, and lead the reader to the service page. That is exactly what separates a useful text from one written for traffic. How to build such articles is covered in How to write articles that bring in enquiries; the difference between a business card and a website that brings in work is shown page by page in A website as a business card, or an enquiry machine.

Side by side

A website is not “free enquiries” either. You pay for analysis, copy, revisions, maintenance and your own time. The difference is what remains for that money: not a one-off contact, but a set of pages you also use in quotes, in emails, and when someone recommends you and the customer goes to check you out.

How to compare both channels on your own data

Without records this debate is guesswork. Start a table — a notebook on your phone or a sheet in Excel is enough, the main thing is that the team actually fills it in — and for every enquiry record the source, the service, the expected value, the outcome and the reason for turning it down.

After a few months it will give you the seven numbers that decide:

1. the number of relevant enquiries;
2. the number of quotes sent;
3. the number of jobs won;
4. the gross margin on those jobs;
5. the time spent handling them;
6. the cost of a won job;
7. the share of customers who come back.

For the website, set up measurement alongside it: form submissions and click-to-call as events in GA4 or Matomo, and in Google Search Console track which queries the site appears for and how many people clicked — that is where you see whether the people arriving have the right problem. There is a step-by-step guide in Search Console for the business owner.

Only evaluate the marketplace once you have handled enough contacts. One good enquiry, or one bad one, tells you nothing about the channel; the first sensible conclusion can be drawn after a few weeks and at least a dozen relevant contacts.

Most often the combination wins

A sensible approach for a small firm looks like this: use the marketplace as a fast source of work and build your own website alongside it, out of the money the marketplace earned.

The marketplace has one underrated benefit on top of that — it shows you how customers describe their problem in their own words, what they ask about, and why they turn a quote down. Those are exactly the topics for service pages, FAQs and articles. Use them as insight, not as a photocopier: personal data and the wording of specific enquiries do not belong on your website.

Once the website starts bringing in measurable jobs, you do not have to cancel the marketplace. Narrowing it down to the trades and regions where it works, and comparing both sources on a single number — the cost of a won job — is enough.

If you do not know which topics make commercial sense, and you do not want to find out by trial and error, we will go through your customers’ actual queries and propose the content: which service pages are missing, which articles to write, what to add to the FAQ and how to link it all to your services. Nobody will promise you a search position — the goal is a measurable channel of your own, whose cost per job you can set beside the cost of a job from a marketplace and decide on the numbers.