The term Internet Marketing includes network or MLM marketers, affiliate marketers, and any person with an online home-based business.
Here are some compelling, but not limited to, reasons why you must become a lead generation expert:
The Bad Side Of Not Generating Your Own Leads
- Relying on advertising your business directly is not enough, and what’s more, it is very expensive. If you are a network marketer, or an affiliate marketer, you know that when you signed up for that program, the company gave you a URL with your username and/or code to pay you a commission for every sale you make. Once you have your affiliate page, some merchants will give you an online back office with some marketing materials such as Banners, emails, etc. All you have to do now is advertise your MLM or affiliate page. Besides making phone calls you now have to advertise your business to expose it on the world wide web to get leads and/or prospects. There are many online companies that can advertise your business, but if your advertising budget is limited, you can’t risk throwing away $2,000 bucks or max your credit card.
- Renting email lists to advertise your business is not very effective either. Although renting email lists is Spam free, many of them are not legitimate, others are very expensive, and still, many others are constantly bombarded with ads that your ads go straight to the trash.
- Buying lead packages. Many companies advertise targeted leads, and again there are many frauds that will tell you their leads are fresh, but they keep selling them over and over! There are some good companies, but their lead packages are far from affordable. The worst thing about it is, that after you purchase a lead package and the leads turn out very unresponsive, you’ve lost your investment. So what is your Return On Investment? A waste of time, money, and your own efforts!
- Posting on FFA sites. It doesn’t work either. People who visit FFA sites expect everything for free and don’t plan to pay for anything. So why waste your time and effort?
The Good Side Of Generating Your Own Leads
- The first good news is that is not very difficult to become a lead generation expert!
- There are some amazing cost-effective ways to generate your own leads. Learning to generate leads on your own is more cost-effective, efficient, and productive.
- Becoming a lead generation expert gives you a feeling of being a leader. Once you learn, you can teach others how to do it and follow in your footsteps.
- You can tailor your lead generation tactics to target specific niche markets. This allows you to have more targeted prospects and therefore improve conversion rates.
- It is the only way to build a foundation for your business. Generating leads creates a list of prospects, and having prospects on your list is what will bring paying customers to you and your business.
How Do You Generate Your Own Leads?
When I was a rookie, I was ignorant when someone spoke about a lead capture page or an opt-in page. I used to ask, what is a lead capture page, or an opt-in lead, and how does it work? If this is all new to you, don’t feel bad, we all go through this learning curve.
Basically, a lead capture, or opt-in page, is a web page with an offer, and a form where a person can opt-in or subscribe to a newsletter or email list. The prospect inserts his/her name in the form, and he/she is taken to another page, either a thank you page, a download page, or the actual affiliate or MLM website. Once a prospect has entered his/her name, he/she has opted-in to your list, or, you have captured his/her email address, and have become an opt-in subscriber!
The offer on your opt-in page should be something appealing, with a perceived value to give your prospect a good reason to opt-in to your list.
Your opt-in form should have fill boxes to let the prospect input his name and email address or more information depending on what your business is about.
Once you have captured his/her name and email address, where does the information go? Your opt-in page and form should be tied in with an autoresponder system. The autoresponder system takes care of the mechanics.
When your list starts growing, it is your responsibility to nurture and cultivate your prospects with free useful information about how they will benefit somehow from your products and services.
In summary, create your own opt-in page, and drive targeted traffic to it. Becoming a lead generation expert is the best thing to do because is more cost-effective, can target more focused niche markets, has less chance to go out of business, and more importantly, this expertise will help you build your own client base or prospect/customer list, and ultimately make you more money.
