My Buy Essay

Posts Tagged ‘Lead Generation’

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 .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.

.ablake.net/forum/

.williecrawford.com/cgi-bin/index.cgi

.howtocorp.com/forum

sswt.webservicenetwork.com/forum/

.ozemedia.com/cgi-bin/webbbs/webbbs_config.pl

internet-marketing-forum.com/forum/

.associateprograms.com/discus/index.php

.clickbanksuccessforum.com/forum/

.network54.com/Forum/184615/

copywritersboard.com/

.bryanhall.net/members/forum/index.php

profits.cc/forum/index.php

.internetbasedmoms.com/bb/

.network54.com/Forum/11488/

.hunteridge.com/forum/

.im4newbies.com/forum/

.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.

What I’m about to explain to you will change to way you do your online marketing Today, Tomorrow and Years to come with little effort on your part.

This simple But effective technique involves the use of a ‘Pop-Up’ on your website, but, the difference between this technique and just a standard ‘Pop-Up’ or ‘Exit Pop-Up’ as we all see them is that when your potential prospects see them they are more then willing to give you there Name and Email address.

Why you ask?

Because your offering them something of Value for FREE.

As you well know the word ‘Free’ is one of the most Powerful words on the internet when used correctly and when combined with an ‘Pop-Up’… it could make you alot of extra money with little effort.

As a marketer myself, a simple Name and Email Address is worth hundreds, if not thousands of extra dollars a year if I collect and follow-up my leads properly, but, the questions that always seem to arise are…

…How do I do it? …What steps do I need to take?

So… now that I have your attention, let me explain to you how this can be achieved in a simple ‘Step-By-Step’ fashion.

Step #1:

What do you have that you can give away to your visitors as they leave your website that is of value to your visitor and more importantly, will benefit from?(Here’s a hint… Free Reports, eBooks, eCourses, etc.)

(Note: Give away brandable ebooks, reports, etc. with your affiliate links embedded within them. Make sure they’re related to the subject of the content.)

Step #2:

Once you’ve figured out what your going to give away, put together some ad copy for your ‘Pop-Up’ that your going to build that will grab your visitors attention and get them to sign-up for your ‘Free Offer’ or ‘Give Away’ as they leave your website.

(Note: You don’t have write alot, just a few attention grabbing sentences pointing out the ‘Benefits’ of your offer.)

Step #3:

Write a short Solo. You need this because after they sign-up through your web-form from your pop-up, this is what they will receive in there Inbox with either download info or other instructions that you specify in order for them to receive there Report, eBook, eCourse, etc.

(Note: Also, make sure you attach a ‘Signature File’ at the end of your Solo. Many marketer’s forget this part and are losing out on alot of extra profits. Don’t Forget!)

Step #4:

You need to go to your ‘Auto-responder’ management console and set-up an seperate auto-responder with the solo you wrote for your ‘Free Offer’ and/or ‘Give Away’.

Once you’ve set your auto-responder its now time for you to copy the HTML code for your auto-responder’s Web-Form and paste it into the ‘Pop-Up’ you just put together.

(Note: Auto-responder services may very. Simply follow there directions.)

Step #5:

This is the easy part, once you have completed all of the other steps, simply paste your ‘Pop-Up’ code into your desired webpage(s).

If you use pop-up software that creates and automatically inserts the code for you simply select the webpage you want the code to be placed on and the software will do the rest.

Now simply upload your newly formatted webpage and pop-up to your host and start sending it Traffic!

As a general rule, test out your pop-up for your first week a see how it pulling. You may need to tweek it if its not performing to your stardards. All it takes is just a few words to be changed to make your pop-up a success.

That’s it… your Done!

These are the 5 basic steps needed to turn your website into an fully ‘Automated Sales Machine’ that will automatically follow-up your leads 24/7/365 without you lifting a finger.

It may take a little time to set-up initially, but it’ll be worth it in the long run.

Now, I just have one last tip for you.

If you really want to get the most out of your Pop-Up and the leads it brings in simply load-up your already set-up ‘Auto-Responder’ with 6 or 7(or however many you want) follow-up emails and set them to go out every 3 to 4 weeks.

For maximum results make sure that you target the particular Product or Service you are offering or promoting because it makes no sense to offer a Product or Service that doesn’t relate to what your initial offer was that they signed up for.