The survival of any business or website can be gauged by the owners ability to generate a steady stream of targeted leads. No leads = No sales and without sales your business doesn’t exist.
If you own Your Own Business or If Your Promoting Affiliate Programs. Your #1 Priority is Building a List of Targeted, Opt-In Subscribers that Know and Trust You. They will be the determining factor whether your business succeeds or fails. You’ve heard it before, “The Money’s in The List” and generating leads is in fact, building your list.
Let’s take a look at email marketing as a lead generation source. Using a signature in all your email communications will bring you an occaisional subscriber and I wouldn’t discount it’s use. However, I’m afraid it won’t bring you an overwelming flood of subscribers. I’d still use it since every subscriber is a lead generated.
I’m assuming you already publish a newsletter/ezine. If not, I strongly suggest you start one now. Doing Ad Swaps with other publishers in your target market is another effective form of email marketing. It’s as easy as You run my ad and I’ll run yours. Fresh eyeballs on your ad in your target market will bring you a good response.
Ezine/Newsletter Co-Ops is yet another way to attract new subscribers/leads. There are quite a few available. My favorite is http://www.subscribeme.net You can get your ad in front of over a million subscribers for fre^e. But you do have to agree to be subscribed to all the ezines in the co-op. This doesn’t have to be a problem. Just use a seperate email account and retrieve the newsletters from there. The above is not the only co-op available. As I said, there are quite a few. You can search your favorite Search Engine for Fr^ee Ezine Co-Ops and chose the one’s that you like.
Buying Leads: This can be risky. I’m sure you’ve seen the ads offering 5, 10, 20,000 double opt-in leads for X amount of dollars. My take on them is this, They may have opted in to someone elses list, but Not mine. Yes there are some very reputable companies that offer very responsive leads but they come at a high premium. If you decide you want to use purchased leads, I can only suggest that you due diligence when researching them.
Solo Ezine Ads: Not just any eZine will do. The response to your ad will depend on the quality of the ezine/newsletter you chose. There are many to chose from. Don’t be fooled by the size of the subscriber base. Bigger is not always better. I’ve found the response to be better with subscribers in the 5000 to 10,000 range.
Pay Per Click Advertising can be an expensive proposition if your not experienced. Test your ad on the less popular sites. Don’t just jump right out there with Google and Yahoo. You can eat up your budget in no time flat. Do a search for PPC’s or Pay Per Click Search Engines and a ton of them will show up. Some even offer a cash incentive for first time users.
Interested leads can be acquired by posting in forums. A word to the wise. Don’t go to these forums thinking you can just post a short blurb about whatever the topic is, leave your sig. go to the next and do the same. They’ll bust you for spamming the board. You’ll probably get banned, worst yet, reported to your ISP. Hang around, get to know people and post when you’ve got something relevant to say.Then you can leave a link to your site in your signature and people interested will often click it, if your post was helpful or interesting. I’ve included a short list below to help you get started.
http://www.ablake.net/forum/
http://www.williecrawford.com/cgi-bin/index.cgi
http://www.howtocorp.com/forum
http://sswt.webservicenetwork.com/forum/
http://www.ozemedia.com/cgi-bin/webbbs/webbbs_config.pl
http://internet-marketing-forum.com/forum/
http://www.associateprograms.com/discus/index.php
http://www.clickbanksuccessforum.com/forum/
http://www.network54.com/Forum/184615/
http://copywritersboard.com/
http://www.bryanhall.net/members/forum/index.php
http://profits.cc/forum/index.php
http://www.internetbasedmoms.com/bb/
http://www.network54.com/Forum/11488/
http://www.hunteridge.com/forum/
http://www.im4newbies.com/forum/
http://www.sowpub.com/cgi-bin/forum/webbbs_config.pl
Submitting articles to ezine publishers and article directories is another lead generation tactic. This method produces very targeted leads. They liked what your article had to say and obviously wanted to read more. This method will also produce links back to your site and in time will improve your search engine position as well as your page rank. Giving you Fr^ee search engine traffic.
The one thing that really matters, regardless of your method of generation, is keeping them in your target market. It makes no sense to advertise to Golfers if your selling Surfboards.
A lead generation strategy should be in place before any other business is done. It’s the backbone of your business.
Use the strategies above and you’ll have an ample supply of leads to market your goods and services to. Of course your gonna love all those trips to the bank. Happy List Building.
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