Monday, June 28, 2010

Lead Generation Strategy � Things to Consider

Before setting up your business, it is extremely important that you understand and implement a lead generation strategy. Without it, you could be hindering the success of your business efforts. It is extremely important to not only be able to find leads for your business, but to be able to grab the visitor’s attention and get them to read your offer. Leads equal visitors, visitors lead to customers, and customers lead to sales and profits.

Finding the Right Leads

Insignificant or poor quality leads will only end up costing you a lot of time and money. They say that the first impression is everything and this holds true for your business' appearance. The first thing that a potential customer sees when they visit your page will determine whether or not they stay. Since you only have about 5 seconds to win or lose their attention, you have to make sure that something reaches out and grabs them. If they like what you have to offer, they will tell others and if they don't like it, well we all know what that means, NOTHING!

Growth vs. Profits

As the owner of the business, it is up to you to oversee your companies lead generation strategies. What's more important to you, growth or profits? Focusing on growth will bring in the profits, if you target the right audience. It is up to you to determine the growth or lack of growth within your business. If you are ready to take charge and develop a lead generation strategy, here are some tips for you to follow:

1. Use the tools available on the internet. There are lead generating companies, lead generation websites, as well as tools that you can utilize on your own. Take advantage of them.

2. Make sure your system is cost effective. It makes no sense to pay an astronomical amount for a lead generation system if you are not making enough in sales to cover the cost.

3. Save some money and do it yourself. Yes, there are companies that can provide leads for you, but why pay someone? If you are just starting out, money may be a little tight, so do your homework and create your own process. By doing it yourself, you are cutting out the middleman and keeping your money where it belongs, with you.

4. This is very important. In order for your techniques to be successful, you have to utilize the right keywords and keyword phrases that potential clients are searching for in the search engines. Without the right keywords, you're doomed because prospective customers will never find you.

The whole purpose of lead generation is to gain exposure so your potential customers have a chance to see what you have to offer. With that being said, developing a lead generation strategy is crucial to the success of your online business.

Read more: http://www.articlesbase.com/marketing-tips-articles/lead-generation-strategy-things-to-consider-564896.html#ixzz0nIZnpZj5 Under Creative Commons License: Attribution

Sunday, June 27, 2010

Insurance Lead Generation

Lead Generation Solutions will increase sales and revenues, reduce costs per sale, eliminate a challenging management process, produce results in the timely fashion you need them, finish and exit quickly, and always be ready to take on y next project.Clients utilize services because they prefer to leverage the time of their sales team and do not want to take on the difficult task to attract, hire, house, equip, manage, and motivate a lead generation or lead qualification team.

Lead generation, as well as lead qualification, requires unique skills. The talents needed to consistently find and/or qualify prospects are very different from those needed to close sales. The key reason why clients seek help is that their sales representatives and sales management are trained and compensated to focus on closing business. As important as it is to the sales process, most reps do not, and usually will not, consistently make the effort to develop new prospects and sales opportunities effectively. Clients spend more time meeting with qualified prospects rather than looking for them, or having to qualify them.

Step For Lead Generation

1. Business Analysis

2. Market Research

3. Competition Analysis

4. Campaign Designing

5. Investment Planning

6. ROI Prediction

7. Tracking Installation

8. ROI Calculation and Future Planning

Benefits of an outsourced lead generation or lead qualification solution:

1. Increased sales and profits.

2. Reduced costs per lead.

3. Lead Qualification—qualify and develop trade show leads.

4. Seamless representation of y company, products, and services.

5. Scalability to expand or retract the size of y lead generation or lead qualification team.

Businesses who have never used leads should try purchasing a small package or try prepaid leads as a starting point. This will give them a chance to see if it works for their business. To find a lead marketing service, business owners can check the Internet. When working with any unfamiliar company, business owners should always check their background for complaints and make sure they are not scam artists. Business owners can also check their local phone book for marketing companies. They may have to call and ask if they offer online lead generation.

Lead Generation will involve a number of advertising and promotional activities. In this article you have been introduced to a few basic techniques, but we have literally just scratched the surface. Do some research on marketing and online advertising. You will find a number of resources available that will help you begin generating your own exclusive leads.

Read more: http://www.articlesbase.com/business-opportunities-articles/insurance-lead-generation-86992.html#ixzz0nHdUvVlj Under Creative Commons License: Attribution

Saturday, June 26, 2010

Lead Generation And How It Works

For those of us who have been surfing a while the words lead generation is not a surprise. We have been hearing it floating around the internet over the past several years; but what is lead generation exactly? For those of you who are new to the internet or maybe just to promoting your services or products to the masses; lead generation is the gathering of potential customers interested in your particular product or service.

Lead generations are a hard thing to gather if you don't use the right channels. Learning how to play the game is only the start of creating your lists. You must get to know your customer. Lead generations provide the site owner with loads of information. They can see which of their products are most liked. They can see how many of the people surfing are really interested. There are many strategies in which internet businesses use lead generation as a way to expand and keep their business running below is a list to help you.

Generating leads:

Direct mail: Sending out information via snail mail, brochures, etc. not used as much anymore.

Seminars and training: This tactic has been very recognized as the new lead generation revolution. The video and conferencing have become the new age to IT internet technologies.

Web marketing: this form of lead generation offers many choices of marketing strategies such as pay-per-click, or pay-per-leads.

There are many other ways to generate your leads online however finding the one that is for your business is the key. There are several benefits to using lead generation. Lead generation helps you to find out what targets on your list are interested in your products and what products they are looking at this allows you to see what products are selling and what may need additional promotions. Finding accurate information on the sales of your products or services can get very difficult there are plenty of programs that will keep track for you, as well as send out emails to your customers and potential customers on a follow-up basis. You can customize the letters to make them more personal as well as determine when they are sent out.

Building a successful business online is not and easy task at all these days. However with the proper tools and lead generation you can promote and attract many customers to your business and products each day. Looking into the different forms of Lead generation and improvements they provide what could be easier?

Your page must focus on capturing the email address of your visitor so you can follow up over and over. The best way for this is to have the person subscribe to your newsletter via autoresponder. The two best services I know for this are Aweber and Getresponse. You can also purchase your own autoresponder software and have it put on your own UNIX server. The best one I have found is Autoresponderplus. You then should ask your prospect to confirm their email address. Your autoresponder software will have a setting to permit this. Now that your lead has confirmed he is a very valuable targeted prospect that you have permission to follow up with over and over. Only send him offers about what your lead specifically opted in for. If your lead is interested in health insurance do not send him info on pet products.

Read more: http://www.articlesbase.com/marketing-articles/lead-generation-and-how-it-works-264082.html#ixzz0nHcGpmVi Under Creative Commons License: Attribution

Thursday, June 24, 2010

Three Tools For Successful Lead Generation

Successful lead generation is one of those things that is going to lead almost any business to massive successes when implemented properly. However, it can often be hard to ensure that you have all the tools and resources you need in house to do your own lead generation. So, many people turn to outside tools that will help make lead generation a bit easier. But, which tools and resources are going to provide the most benefit for your time and money? Here are three quick examples of what you can do to get started:

Branding Tools

Anything that helps you brand your company more successfully is going to be a major tool in lead generation. After all, if a lead is contacted and hears that a company named ABC Enterprises wants to discuss their product with them, their first question is "Who is ABC enterprises" and their second question is "Why should I care?" They receive dozens of these calls a week and they have no desire to be bothered. By building a recognizable and respected brand, you can enjoy a much better reception during lead generation.

Building Effective Lists

Lead generation cannot be random, nor can it be done without the full support of a dedicated team. For this reason, many companies choose to outsource lead generation to a third party that knows what kinds of leads are best and which ones will convert better. They can develop scripts, use professionals for first contact and ensure that your list of prospective leads is as accurate and likely to convert as possible.

Providing Value

The last tool and probably the least tangible of any tool or resource you can use for lead generation is to build value into your generation techniques. This means that if you are doing cold calls from your office to generate leads, what benefits do potential leads get in answering and talking on the phone. This might come in the form of extra information about your product, an expert to discuss their problems with or some incentive to draw them into your company. Whatever you choose to use as your bait, lead generation is always much more effective when there is a catch to draw someone in with.

Lead generation is a tough process, especially for anyone that has not spent a great deal of time and money setting up a department and training employees in the processes required to effectively create and build leads. For this reason, you need to be sure that what tools you are using are the best possible ones around.

There are many options in this regard. While the tips above are going to get you further in your lead generation processes, the truly best way to go about it is to ensure that whoever is generating leads knows what they are doing. This might be an outside firm with a great deal of experience in handling lead generation or an internal hire that is trained and dedicated to the process. In either case, it is vital that whoever is doing the work knows their job well and is capable of dynamically generating leads at all times.

Read more: http://www.articlesbase.com/business-articles/three-tools-for-successful-lead-generation-857219.html#ixzz0nHYCYYgN Under Creative Commons License: Attribution

Tuesday, June 22, 2010

Lead Generation And Buying Leads

Let's start with a short definition of what lead generation really is.

Lead generation is a marketing term that refers to the creation or generation of prospecting consumer interest or inquiry into a business' products or services.

So this means that every conceivable business would participate in some form of lead generation. After all, businesses must make sales to stay in business so they are always looking for leads/customers.

Since lead generation is such a broad subject, we will concentrate on the various forms of web marketing lead generation that are:

1. Email marketing, e-zines, newsletters 2. Search engine optimization (SEO) 3. Pay-per-click (PPC), pay-per-lead (PPL), pay-per- action (PPA), pay-per-impression (PPI) and pay-per-sale (PPS) 4. Free classifieds and Free For All (FFA's) 5. Hire a lead generation company. 6. Buy leads from a Co-Registration lead broker

Let's discuss each of the above forms of lead generation.

Advertising in e-zines or newsletters are good avenues for acquiring targeted leads. You should subscribe to various e-zines to verify that the readers would be interested in your offer. Then select those e-zines you feel are targeted to your niche and place a solo ad, as sponsor ad or a classified ad.

Usually the solo ad is more expensive as this type of ad gets a full page or a separate mailing, whereas the sponsor's ad is about a quarter page and the classified ad is only a few lines. Your best bet is with the solo ad.

Costs vary greatly among e-zines. Obviously the total circulation of the e-zine guides the price of these e-zine ads, the larger the e-zine circulation, the higher the price per ad.

Search engine optimization (SEO), is the practice of designing your website to score well with the search engines and thereby get listed in the top ten of a designated search by viewers, is a daunting task. Competition is fierce for those spots unless you have a very narrow niche with a long tail keyword phrase.

The terms pay-per-click (PPC) and cost-per-click (CPC) are sometimes used interchangeably, sometimes as distinct terms. When used as distinct terms, PPC shows payment based on click-through, while CPC shows measurement of cost on a per-click basis for contracts not based on click-through.

In a PPC agreement, the advertiser only pays for qualifying clicks to the destination website based on a pre-arranged per-click rate. Popular PPC advertising options include per-click advertising networks, Google's AdWords or Yahoo's Search Marketing, and affiliate programs.

PPC is the process of writing a short, three or four-line ad to be displayed by the search engine, that contains the keywords on which you have bid money. Each time that ad is "clicked on" by a viewer; you must pay your bid amount to the search engine.

If you manage to convert enough of your visitors into sales, your PPC campaign will be profitable.

Pay-per-action is the action defined in a cost-per-action agreement that relates directly to some type of conversion, a sale being made or a registration of some sort is the most common.

In a pay-per-lead agreement, the advertiser only pays for leads generated at their destination website. No payment is made for visitors who do not sign up.

Pay-per-impression is a typical referral link/banner ad arrangement where the website wanting to purchase advertising space pays the host's website for each time it displays the ad.

Typically, prices are set per 1000 exposures and software is added to the hosting web server to track the number of impressions displayed.

Free Classified and Free For All advertising is not really recommended. These ads are not targeted ads and you are very lucky to receive one lead out of a 1000. Search engines have started to ignore links from Free Classified and especially the ones from FFA pages. You have better ways to spend your time than fooling with these unproductive methods.

Buying leads can be very costly. You have probably seen the ads claiming to "blast your ads to a zillion leads for only $29.95." You might just as well give that $29.95 to your favorite charity because you will not be getting anything back from the so-called blaster.

However, there is one type of lead purchase that has recently seen some success and that would be Co-Registration leads.

What is a Co-Registration lead?

Co-Registration occurs when someone registers for one thing (for instance, a membership or a magazine subscription) and then is offered more information on a related topic (such as making money from home). In another case, they might be visiting a website targeted to entrepreneurs and a pop-up asks if they would like related free information by email. Those who sign on are very good targeted leads as they have opted in to receive more information.

Once you have your leads opt-in to your own list, now you can pamper them, shower them with gifts and take extra good care of them because they are now your future.

You must gain their trust and once you have that, you have to live up to that trust by being honest and above board with them at all time. They will then buy from you again and again.

This is what it's all about.

Read more: http://www.articlesbase.com/marketing-articles/lead-generation-and-buying-leads-174351.html#ixzz0nIYRswR6 Under Creative Commons License: Attribution

Monday, June 21, 2010

How to Win at Online Lead Generation

There are many ways to create online lead generation, but generating targeted leads takes a bit more work. These techniques of lead generation do no automatically result from attending a networking event or contacting customers received from a paid mailing list. Qualified lead generation is a result of connecting qualified well-matched consumers with like-minded businesses, like yours.

While lead generation is used widely throughout the real estate business and the financial industry, targeted lead generation can boost internet sales significantly for online marketers and ecommerce stores.

Lead Generation Products

The idea of lead generation products is to track the activities of potential customers and use specific information like job titles, marital status, living situation, geographical location, etc. to link them to target markets. This multi-level approach to generating leads, puts the marketer in touch with a consumer who is interested and ready to move forward. This approach will always outperform "generic" mailing lists, cold calling, and the "hit or miss," approach of hoping customers will visit your site and make a purchase.

This strategy couldn't get any easier. With the inception of Web 2.0, online advertising strategies have made it possible to quickly build a large list of targeted leads. RSS feeds, social networks, and blogs are essentially fail-proof tactics to get traffic to your site. Options through Google, AdWords, Yahoo and numerous other sites that increase your search engine rankings puts your information out there for the world to view. Whatever business you are in, you can get leads 24/7 if your marketing strategy is adequate.

How to Generate Leads

Knowing how to generate leads is one thing; with a little work, anyone can direct traffic to their site. The key is how do you to keep them there, keep them interested, and keep them buying.

If you are still utilizing the traditional methods of generating leads, it's time you stepped up your game. While these methods will always be useful and will always work, you are losing out on countless opportunities to grow your business. Imagine what an impact combing the traditional methods with the new Web 2.0 technology can do for your online business.

If you're not sure what steps to take to learn business lead generation, consider a small business coach or business coaching services. These services can not only train you, they can also assist you in all aspects of your business.

The opportunities are there, but it's up to you to make a move and step up your game. From lead generation systems to purchasing leads -- these tools can be an asset to your online business. Take the time to learn this process so you can take advantage of all the benefits online lead generation has to offer.

Read more: http://www.articlesbase.com/marketing-tips-articles/how-to-win-at-online-lead-generation-571875.html#ixzz0nHaUylVz Under Creative Commons License: Attribution

Sunday, June 20, 2010

FREE Home Business Lead Generation, UK and Worldwide, by Ruling Google - Part 1 Niche Keywords

In any business you need leads. A steady flow of leads converts to sales, which keeps the all important cash flow for your business. This is very important in Home Business Lead Generation, UK and worldwide.

Lead Generation can unfortunately be an expensive activity. There are many companies out there that will supply leads for your business, but the problem is they want to be paid a lot of money. And in most cases the quality of the leads is not very high.

You can also use the internet to advertise your business to generate your own leads. Now the most popular choice here is to get listed on Google to generate your Leads.

There are two main ways to do this, pay for advertising via Pay Per Click or use Organic search. If you are not familiar with the term organic search this is the search results that are displayed for free to the left of Google.

Now you may say the obvious choice to get a free listing is to simply throw together a website and get it listed. Yes, it is possible, but what position in Google will you occupy? Page 80? Page 13? Result 470 out of thousands?! Get my drift?

So, what I am getting at here is wouldn't it be nice to have a FREE advert on the first page of Google?

The way to achieve this is to understand how to cleverly target and select the right Keywords then create, distribute and promote the right content, and finally put it all through a sales funnel to maximise your income streams.

In this first part we are focusing on Keywords

Here are the key things you need:

1) What keywords are people searching for? - Before thinking about creating your content you need to know what people are searching for. Even more important, is what they are searching for relevant to your product or service?

This research can be done for free using Google's Keyword Tool. Start off by putting some search terms in the free Google keyword tool to generate some ideas, for example MLM.

2) Targeting your Niche - I specialise in Home Business Lead Generation, UK and worldwide so I use the free tool to find out what the best words are for my audience. It is important to identify your target Niche within your overall market.

The Niche is in affect a targeted subset of your overall market. So for MLM, you would find a subset of that market.

3) Steer clear of over competitive keywords - When I mentioned a very specific Niche above, you may be thinking, what do I mean? Let's say I put "MLM" into Google. It may return millions of results. This is not ideal because you will find it hard getting to page one, which is your main objective!

I advise you to not choose any keyword term that returns anything more than 10,000 results if you want to succeed with free Home Business Lead Generation, UK and worldwide.

4) The magic equation - There is a known equation that allows you to work out the 'effectiveness' of your chosen keyword. It is more commonly known as the 'Keyword Effectiveness Index' or KEI.

Basically you need the number of searches (gathered from the Free Google Keyword Tool) and the number of search results your keyword returns (from Google search engine).

The equation for KEI is:

KEI = (searches / results) * searches.

So if I have a Keyword 'MLM' and it has 10,000 results (you wish! :), and searched 2,000 times a month KEI would be: 2,000 * (2,000 / 10,000) = 400.

In my opinion any score above 100 is a good keyword!

So, to summarise, and to succeed in Home Business Lead Generation, UK and worldwide, find out what your target audience are searching for, and research what your niche market is within that to allow you to dominate the first page of Google.

In the next part I will cover content creation, distribution, promotion and the importance of a sales funnel.

To your success!

Read more: http://www.articlesbase.com/business-articles/free-home-business-lead-generation-uk-and-worldwide-by-ruling-google-part-1-niche-keywords-888717.html#ixzz0nIZ2tWOc Under Creative Commons License: Attribution

Saturday, June 19, 2010

How To Put Together A Lead Generation Plan For Your Home Business

Of all the skills one must posses to become a successful home business owner none are more important than the important skill of lead generation. It doesn't matter if you're a network marketer, affiliate marketer or just run a home grown enterprise from your computer because without leads at terrible thing happens... Nothing!

So now that we know that you absolutely must have targeted leads to speak with and should always be building an ever growing opt-in database of potential business partners, how does a person go about doing this?

The truth is that the only way to do this and achieve success is to get the education and skills to generate your own leads and build opt-in databases.

Unfortunately 95% of home business owners out their think they can bypass this important skill and just purchase leads or buy opt-in databases. They often end up spending way to much money, don't get the results they were looking for and quickly end up out of money and out of business.

It doesn't have to be that way though if you start putting together a lead generation plan and execute that plan over the course of a few months.

So how does one put together a lead generation plan?

It's really not as hard as you might think and it all comes down to using a few golden tools and having the right education. Here are the three main ingredients to a lead generation game plan:

#1 - You must Create Your Own Custom Capture / Lead Generation Page.

I know what your thinking but I'm going to stop you right now. A replicated website that your network marketing company provided you with is NOT a good lead generation page. You have no control over it and if the company goes out of business or you switch opportunities all your hard work driving traffic to that page goes down the drain. What you really need is a capture page that you have full control over, can make edits to at anytime, and positions yourself as well as the company your promoting.

#2 - You must know how to create that page so it's unique, positions you as an expert and attracts the right people.

Let's face it, most network marketers don't have a clue when it comes to positioning themselves, creating web pages, or writing ad copy. So it's important that you get this education in order to not only to position yourself as an expert in your industry but also increase your opt-in and lead rates.

#3 - You must understand how to drive traffic to your capture page.

The final piece of the puzzle comes down to are you able to drive traffic to your capture page. Without traffic it doesn't matter how amazing or compelling your capture page is because nobody will see it!

So there you have it... Sounds pretty simple huh?

For most people, probably not. That's okay though and the good news is that their are tools out their to help you become a lead generation superstar... Seriously!

If you don't know how to build web pages, host web pages, write ad copy, drive traffic to websites and generate targeted home business leads in general I recommend using an all-in-one service. There are several capture page and online marketing programs available online, you just need to go out and find the right one for you.

The most important thing is to start putting together a lead generation game plan now so that six months down the road you are still not spinning your wheels with no leads to talk to.

Read more: http://www.articlesbase.com/home-business-articles/how-to-put-together-a-lead-generation-plan-for-your-home-business-547358.html#ixzz0nITxi2Ei Under Creative Commons License: Attribution

Tuesday, June 15, 2010

B2b Lead Generation: Imagine Profit Only

Imagine being the owner of a brand. Now imagine it making losses and some other competitor making big profit with the same kind of product although yours is superior to that of them. Is the imagination horrible? Of course it would be. Because sales is the major demand of any business and if a business is not making profit then it is a serious issue. If you make good use of certain advertising channels then it can be beneficial. B2B lead generation is one such channel and with the advent of online advertising it is growing with leaps and bounds.

Generally saying, in business to business lead generation or B2B lead generation, one product or brand takes the help of other brand for the sake of its online promotion. Here one website promote other website and both are getting benefit and it is not a new concept rather its an age old concept. Also, it is important that organizations find other companies to do business with. You can find many examples of the importance of good business-to-business lead generation. For example various manufacturing firms need other companies to supply them with a variety of parts.

And it is important that the makers of the parts establish themselves with compatible manufacturers in order to benefit both companies. This is how compatible companies help each other in generating sales though generating leads for each other. Now, this lead generation market is larger than ever before due to the advent of Internet. Now many companies are running an Email campaign and also utilizing options like auto responders, creation of opt in mailing lists, registration form offerings and business to business referrals. These days the offering of free services is also a nice option for bringing more customers to a particular website.

You would have seen some websites offering business reports, company profiles or horoscopes to invite users. This is also B2B lead generation. Their initial services are free and later they are used to link into products for selling. These sales techniques are working and are generating leads. This, if you are an owner of a brand then don't imagine worse, rather adapt to B2B lead generation and feel good.

Read more: http://www.articlesbase.com/email-articles/b2b-lead-generation-imagine-profit-only-491289.html#ixzz0nIUyO9AZ Under Creative Commons License: Attribution

Monday, June 14, 2010

Effective B2b Lead Generation Can Ramp Up Actual Sales

Sales are the most essential part of any business venture without which no business can exist even for a single day. B2B Lead Generation, which refers to business to business lead generation, is one of the marketing techniques that are available to modern day companies. B2b has become a potent technique in the hands of these companies to ramp up the sales of their products and services. The concept is fast emerging as a very popular way of increasing customer base and reaping heavy profits out of it. In this type of advertising campaign, an array of different companies associate themselves to the main business client that pays to promoters of its websites for drawing more customers.

B2B lead generation is the advertising process that consistently endeavors to convert qualified prospect sales into actual sales. B2b lead generation process of advertising is helping online companies benefit by way of offering them marketing solutions and sales leads schemes with guaranteed results. B2B lead generation involves using email marketing to create a brand image and enhancing the effectiveness and accountability of advertising to the hilt. Some b2b lead generation job is also being outsourced by multinational companies.

B2B lead generation works as the heart of a business that thrusts sales. No business can sustain if it is not actively in the lookout for new customers. The main aim of b2b lead generation advertising campaigns is to fetch businesses whose needs you can immediately fill or to create and maintain relations with qualified prospects, so that they take care of your products and service first when any need arises in the future course of business.

Establishing relations and maintaining top notch awareness with qualified prospects using your b2b lead generation initiatives is very important to be the winner in the highly competitive market. The efforts needed to create and maintain healthy business relations have neither to be expensive nor overly complex, but they do need business resources and acumen that your company may lack. So, hire companies that can help you with b2b lead generation through their research-based methodologies and integrated marketing services.

Read more: http://www.articlesbase.com/email-articles/effective-b2b-lead-generation-can-ramp-up-actual-sales-534968.html#ixzz0nHau3iNp Under Creative Commons License: Attribution

Friday, June 11, 2010

Why Targeted Leads Generate Sales

The quality of your leads is one of the most important aspects of generating business for your network marketing or internet company. The leads you generate should be targeted, so you are attracting the right people and customers to your organization.

You wouldn't try to sell steak to a vegetarian, but in essence, that is what many network marketers and internet marketers are doing with their advertising and lead generation methods. Think of it this way, if you were the coach of a professional football team would you put an ad in every newspaper trying to attract good football players? Or would you go to people who are already professional football players or star college athletes and interview them? In order to generate a lot of revenue for your business you don't need a lot of people, you need the right people.

Most marketers put out advertisements that are aimed at attracting everybody as a lead. Here is the problem, since the ad is not really focused on anybody in particular, no one in particular pays any attention to it. Believe me I used to place the same type of ads. They don't bring you any good leads.

Then I used marketing material that was misleading, and although it generated a lot of leads, they were dead beat leads, and that marketing campaign ended up costing me more time and money than if I had done nothing at all. These ads all said things like "make money fast," "its easy," "anyone can do it," "earn a six figure income in three months" etc. Read those statements again and think of the type of person that those ads will attract.

Won't they be the type of person who believes in get rich quick schemes and expects to make a lot of money with little effort? Can you really get rich with little effort?

In my experience all of these people will quit your organization because they simply do not have the necessary mindset or attitude to become a successful entrepreneur. Long story short, I wasted a lot of my time and money on these people by trying to train them, when in the end I was left with nothing because they all eventually quit. That is when I made the discovery that I was trying to attract the wrong people, I needed to attract people who were like me.

So how do you find the right leads? In order to generate good, targeted marketing material, think of the people you want to attract to your network marketing business. What do they like? What motivates them? How will they benefit from what you have? Then make marketing material that only caters to them. This is how you will generate good leads and more business.

The next time you see a Mercedes ad, ask yourself, "Who are they are trying to attract to buy a Mercedes? Everybody? Or the people who have the lifestyle to afford one?

One question to ask yourself to help you generate leads is, "who has purchased a similar product to what I am selling before, and/or who is actively searching for a product or a service like that today?"

The quality leads that you generate predict your future success, so if you have a network marketing business try marketing to other network marketers instead of everybody under the sun. You want leads who already believe in the business model and are destined for success, the rest quit anyway.

The only leads you want to generate are people who have been in network marketing before, who are in it today, or leads who are actively buying information to learn and better themselves in the business, not people who merely seek out information, but never benefit from learning it.

Read more: http://www.articlesbase.com/online-promotion-articles/why-targeted-leads-generate-sales-226035.html#ixzz0nIYGEtU5 Under Creative Commons License: Attribution

Tuesday, June 8, 2010

Internet Lead Generation, Steps To Increase Your Sales Pipeline

If you want to increase sales revenue--learn to generate sales leads online. Generating steady revenue consistently and predictably requires a consistent flow of leads. Learn how you can fill your sales force with a steady flow of prospective customers.

Start with Basic Lead Generation

Start to fill your sales pipeline by attracting customers, targeted prospects. This can be achieved by providing information and services that these customers need to make decisions. This should be the objective of your sales lead generation platform.

Here is a simple framework to use in creating your first lead generation platform:

* Descriptive domain or URL * Blog software * Post keyword-based articles * Add in interactive widgets (i.e., mortgage calculators) * Highlight contact information

With this set-up you can, without any knowledge of SEO or web development, quickly get yourself into relevant Google search queries. Bringing in targeted customers to your organization with their searches. It will also validate and reinforce your other offline marketing efforts.

Learn the Sales Process Before Spending

The first reaction of most sales teams is to take the short-cut and start buying leads or traffic. The better approach is to learn to manage and generate Internet leads and then begin spending.

Online customers are different and require a different sales process. So, learn how how to build a sales process that converts first--then think about spending more marketing dollars.

Certainly at start-up your own online lead generation efforts are not going to flush your sales team full of leads. This is where augmenting your own sales lead generation is important.

Start with some inexpensive Internet leads. Start you practice with low risk, this allows you to refine your sales and lead management process. You will find that Internet leads and high volume sales pipelines need to be managed differently.

Achieve Quality, Then Scale

Once you have your lead generation in place, learn to subsidize this flow by buying leads, and optimizing your lead management. This will build up your sales lead generation capability.

While carefully tracking your lead performance and profits, begin to improve the quality of those leads. Improve your own lead generation as well as that of the leads you buy. Smartly scale your sales operations. To do this you need to closely monitor sale performance and metrics.

Be Creative

Once you have the basics down, you will get a steady flow of leads--start trying some more creative approaches. Test different lead generation techniques, alternate lead providers, and refined sales processes.

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Saturday, June 5, 2010

Improving Lead Generation Marketing

There are many improvements that can be made to your marketing strategy once you have a better understanding of the importance of lead quality. One of the greatest predictors of return on investment for lead generation marketing is how targeted the lead are, which is why making improvements to this aspect of your campaign is vital to your success. Lead generation marketing provides the opportunity to use a variety of marketing tactics to reach a wide audience, but narrowing the focus is the key to creating the most valuable lead lists.

The more effort that goes into qualifying leads before they are channeled to your sales team, the greater your conversion rates will be. This can be thought of like putting your leads through a funnel at the top, with the most qualified prospects coming out the smaller end. Should you be concerned over providing a decreased number of leads to your sales team? Probably not. Fewer leads with a drastically increased conversion rate is going to create the highest return on investment possible, and that is good news for everyone. This is the benefit of quality-driven vs. quantity-driven lead generation marketing.

So, how can you improve the quality of the leads you are generating? It all starts with understanding what makes a quality lead. Once you understand what makes a quality lead and how important quality leads are to your business, everything else will start to fall into place. There are at least five things you must determine in order to properly qualify a lead:

- Does the prospect have a need for the product or service being marketed? You don't want to be in the business of trying to sell a tanning booth to a beachfront resort in Hawaii.

- Is the prospect the primary decision maker? If you aren't dealing with a person who has the authority to make a purchase, you are wasting your time and theirs.

- Is the prospect ready to make this decision in the immediate future? If they aren't looking to purchase in the next six months you can move them to a 'call in the future list,' but don't waste your sales team's time sending them to make a presentation now.

- Can the prospect afford to implement your product or service? You don't want to make a presentation for the purpose of "window shopping."

- How much business is the prospect likely to bring in? You need to make cost-effective presentations.

Some of these questions should, of course, be analyzed in the context of your actual product or service in order to fully qualify the prospect. Once you have established a protocol for using your lead generation marketing strategy to find highly-targeted leads and seen the bottom line results, you will never go back to a broad-based lead generation campaign again. The steps that are taken to properly qualify leads in the beginning are much more cost effective than passing unqualified leads to the sales team and hoping they will be able to "sell" them. It is almost impossible to "sell" an unqualified prospect whereas a qualified prospects practically sell themselves. Like anything else in business, making improvements to your lead generation marketing strategy should be an ongoing process.

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Friday, June 4, 2010

Headline: a Strategic Analysis of B2c Lead Generation

Smart online promotional strategies are always essential for B2C lead generation. If you are specifically selling something online then for generating revenue and creating promotions you need a certain level of B2C lead generation. Companies these days are opting for various techniques of generating sales.

The essential fact behind B2C lead generation is that by giving away something, such as a free product or any other such incentive, you can direct parties to specific products and services. Every working business owner should have a sales lead generation program in place. Some of them can be as simple as getting referrals from existing and new customers. Some can be as elaborate as a lead generation service.

Businesses use lead generation to create new customers. This is an ever constant process. Depending on the financial nature of your business, you can find low cost lead programs to use or you can hire a lead generation service to provide you a list of qualified leads.

Hence, this is how B2C lead generation essentially works.

Well, if you do intend to use a lead generation service, make sure that you are using the services of a reputable company who will stand behind the qualified leads that you will receive. Make sure you get qualified leads and that your prospective clients are able to use your product or service.

For B2C lead generation, if you intend to use a low cost lead generation, make sure the method you chose will narrow down the lists of prospects to those clients that are likely to use your product or service.

Every business needs a good B2C lead generation program working for them. It should work well as far as increasing of sales goes. There are always different methods of B2C lead generation that you can apply.

Here is the best mix as far as B2C lead generation is concerned:

List all possible marketing channels

1. Evaluate the fit between these channels and your business / product / service attributes

2. Choose and try channel

3. Review success and track metrics such as cost/click, cost/conversion, cost/sale

4. Adapt your marketing strategy

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Wednesday, June 2, 2010

B2b Lead Generation - Convert Relevant Ad Clicks Smartly

The rules of the game for generating leads through Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Advertisement are radically different for Business-to-Business (B2B) than they are for Business to Consumer (B2C).

The key objectives of using online marketing, like Online media and PPC campaigns for B2B businesses are - to extend their reach, and to reduce the investment on acquiring leads by substituting high-cost sales resources with online media. But, the lack of real time interaction between clients and sales people at the beginning of the process puts an additional responsibility on marketers - to develop an in-depth understanding of customer behavior, and to design the right message to address customer requirements at all stages of the buying process.

In the B2B universe, whether the client is an early Startup, SMB or a large Corporation, the decision-making process is considerably more methodical than in retail businesses where the impulsive kick plays a big role. Also, in most cases the buying decision involves multiple people in the organization who can be broadly categorized, for our purposes, as decision makers and influencers. It is crucial that our online presence speaks to both the decision makers and the influencers through effective messaging.

In my experience, B2B PPC Management is like adjusting multiple lenses and mirrors of a telescope. You miss out on one and your customer gets a distorted view.

5 Key Guiding Principles of a Successful Campaign

* Ensure that customers’ perception of your value proposition(s) is what you want it to be: The online world provides an extremely limited time and mind share to address your customer’s concerns. Your landing pages need to directly address your customers’ key concerns. If you are experiencing a high bounce rate, a low conversion rate or visitors are not taking desired actions; chances are your marketing message is off the mark. You need to go back to the drawing board, and talk to customers, industry insiders, and prospects to confirm whether your assumption of how they perceive your product or service is accurate. Make sure you are empirically testing multiple messages to come up with the right communication.

* Customer segmentation is not the same as keyword segmentation: It is important to conduct a focused research in understanding various customer segments, and in designing distinct landing pages for each of them. But, that’s not enough. You need to drive the right set of customers to the right landing page. Very often, what happens is that customers of different segments, whom you want to communicate differently to, use the same keywords for searching your products. To avoid this, group keywords independently based on the intent of the searchers and then map the ad groups to various customer segments. In case the same ad group maps to multiple customer segments, you might have to design a common landing page that directs customers to the right place.

* More visitors do not guarantee more business: To truly impact business results, it is very critical to look at the holistic sales cycle. A myopic view might help you in improving a portion of the sales cycle, but it will not give you the desired business results. Long tail keywords and lateral keyword themes make sense only if they are generating relevant traffic. Often, companies designs ads that communicate more than the business offers or delivers just to impact the CTR (Click-through-Rate) of ads. Not only does this invite irrelevant visitors on the landing pages, it also distorts the ad message communication for relevant prospects. Online Marketing companies are search specialist; they know how to generate more traffic. But, doing just that – without incorporating domain knowledge – to create an appropriate conversion path from search to leads does not produce desired results.

* Only talking to the Decision Makers will not work: Many Search Marketers produced great success for retail businesses where the visitor is the ultimate decision maker, and marketers can harvest impulsive buying. But, they fail when they use these tricks for the B2B environment. The desperation to generate more leads using these techniques takes away from the discipline of addressing concerns at each step of the business-to-business sales cycle. If you are not providing the information required by influencers, there’s little probability your business will be short-listed by the decision makers. All it does is increase the number of irrelevant leads, and may even negatively impact the quality and quantity of relevant leads.

* Focus on quality rather than quantity in lead generation: If your focus is quantity, you would probably never take steps that might decrease the number of leads, but increase the possibility of receiving high-potential leads. The number game does not work for B2B Lead generation. If you outsource your PPC campaign management to search engine marketing company, whose compensation is purely based on the amount of media spend or number of leads generated, they would inherently never support any step in reducing leads even if it means an increase in the quality of leads.

I recently worked with an IT services company offering IT Application development and Staff Augmentation services to clients in Europe and US. To achieve next level of growth, they were looking at increasing the number and the quality of leads through online marketing. For the last 5 years, they were managing the PPC Campaign in-house and, 2 years back, they hit a bottleneck – they were not able to increase the number of relevant leads generated per month. They tried to outsource their lead generation to external online marketing companies. Although these companies were able to increase the number of visitors to their website, they did not produce the desired business results. OMLogic worked with them and identified the key bottlenecks in their sales cycle. We selected various customer segments and revamped each stage of sales cycle based on the 5 principles defined above. Within 2 months we were able to triple the number of leads while maintaining the lead relevancy ratio and reducing the cost per acquisitio n by 30%. Get the pdf version of the article at B2B Lead Generation page.

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