What do insurance salesmen, car salesmen, and every other salesman need a consistent supply of to makes their sales? The answer to this question is the same as what you need for success with your business. The answer is a consistent and fresh supply of leads.
When it comes to generating leads for your business there are many different options. In fact, it’s very easy to get lost in the whirlwind mess of generating leads.
But there’s no need to worry! This lesson is going to help explain to you what lead generation and advertising is all about and help guide you in the right direction.
Are you ready?
A lead is simply someone who has shown interest in your business or industry that you have gathered the information of. The information you gather on them may be just their email address or it may include their name, address, phone number, email address, etc. These leads are usually highly targeted, interested in your business or industry, and very valuable as a result.
The extent of the information you receive about a lead depends on the extent of information you or the company you get your leads from requests during the lead gathering process.
This leads me in to explaining the 2 basic methods available for getting your hands on some fresh leads.
Here’s the first way to gather leads…
The first way is to gather the leads yourself. Granted, this way is certainly more difficult and time consuming and takes some time to learn, but in the end it can save you a lot of money and prove to be very lucrative.
What happens here is you develop your own website that has only 1 single purpose. That purpose is to grab your visitor’s attention and get them interested in receiving more information from you.
You may do this by offering something OF VALUE for free. Like a free e-book or a free report or a free email course. Then, in order to receive this free prize your visitor must fill out a form with their information. You may just ask for the persons email address or you may ask for their name, email address, phone number and more.
Generally, the less information the visitor has to fill out, the more apt they are to fill it out. When deciding what information to collect on a lead, consider what your plans are for them. If you plan to simply enter them into an auto-responder system, just ask for their name and email. If you’re planning on calling your leads because you know you are able to close more sales that way, you should then ask for their name, email address and phone number.
Always remember to put a disclaimer on your lead gathering web page. Make sure the prospect has the assurance that their information will never be sold or rented to anyone and only used by you to contact them with the information they are requesting.
Once you have completed this lead gathering web page, you are now ready to get it exposure and gather leads with it. You can pretty much advertise a lead gathering web page anywhere and see a response greater than that of simply advertising your affiliate page. It is almost always easier to entice someone upfront into filling out some information to get something for free than it is to show them an opportunity and close a sale at the first meeting.
Rate on a scale from 1 to 10 how important you feel it is to build trust with your prospect before making a sale.
1 – 2 – 3 – 4 – 5 – 6 – 7 – 8 – 9 – 10
If you guessed 10 or near 10, you are absolutely correct!
That is what makes lead gathering so powerful. You can gather leads more easily and then work them into the sale. I recommend feeding your leads into an auto-responder system (explained elsewhere in this course). This helps to work the lead into the sale and in most cases reproduces much better results than trying to close the deal up front.
This is just like when a salesman comes to your door and tries to build rapport or credibility with you first. The salesman’s goal is to build a trusting relationship with you first, which will make you thousands of times more likely to buy from him. This rule should most certainly apply to the online advertising world as well as offline as it will yield immensely successful results for those who use it.
So what is the second way to gather leads? Buy them!
Yep, that’s it! If you would prefer not to spend the time and effort to gather leads yourself, your only other option is to purchase them from a company that specializes in the lead gathering process, gathers the leads, and then sells them to you.
In this way, you have an instant supply of leads to run with and, in most cases, purchased leads come with name, address, email, phone, and other useful information. You can put them into an auto-responder; call them, or whatever you’re best at closing the most sales with.
However, when you are purchasing leads, you must be sure to be very cautious who you buy from. Some lead companies gather their leads through simple check boxes on other web sites where people have already filled out their information. The best leads are those who filled out a form separately just so they could request to receive more information on a home based business.
It is also my advice to find leads that come with I.P. addresses and date stamps from the computers of those who filled out the form. This will allow you to know that each lead is a real person that actually requested information and not just automatically generated names.
Do your own due diligence on a lead company before purchasing from them. See what others think about the company and even email the company’s sales team with pointed questions about the nature and source of the leads.
Purchased leads can prove profitable, if those are chosen wisely.
If you have the time, generating your own leads is always the best, but if you don’t have the time, then choosing a good lead source and using good strategies for converting them to sales will still prove helpful to your business.
Bonus:
Here’s a bonus way of gathering leads. I have not had much experience with this, but I here from others that it works quite well.
What is it?
Create your own Free For All (FFA) link site. You can do this pretty easily by using a system like http://www.freeffas.com/ or one of the many others available.
Although FFA sites are almost completely useless in increasing your search engine ranking, many people still believe it helps. You can use this to your advantage and bank in by creating your own FFA site.
After you have created the FFA site, you then find the automatic FFA submission tools that people use, such as http://www.worldwidepromoter.com/addeng.shtml , get your site added to these and you will soon have thousands of people submitting to your FFA page every day.
The advantage is that you get the contact information of each one of these people who submit to your FFA page. You now have thousands of leads to advertise your opportunity to as you wish.
And the more FFA pages you own…the more FFA networks your a part of…the more leads will pour in for you to advertise to!
Just remember, think creatively of ways to gather leads and use them to your advantage!
