Lead Me On -
Learn About Internet Marketing Leads
By: Mal
Keenan
Every business is engaged in selling
something, whether a product, service,
information, or something else. And sales
usually begin with sales leads. As an
offline example, new insurance and car sales
people are frequently asked to compile lists
of their friends, families, acquaintances,
and so on. This list is used then as a lead
builder - something to get the ball rolling
towards that first big sale. The online
world is no different. Every for-profit web
site needs a steady flow of internet
marketing leads. A big part of any online
marketer's job is to generate the leads that
will ultimately be responsible for another
sale. In particular, in the highly
competitive online marketing arena, someone
selling products and services to other
marketers will need a steady flow of fresh
internet marketing leads to fuel their
sales.
Selling to internet marketers is a tough
market segment to compete in. New products
and services are released at an amazing
rate. These new products and services are
sometimes driven by new technology, other
times by changes in market conditions or
search engines, and still others are
variations of existing products. Some of
these products are themselves designed to
help capture internet marketing leads!
There are several basic ways to capture new
leads online. The most commonly recommended
method is to build an email list. There's an
old direct marketing axiom "The money is in
the list", and this has held true on the
internet as well. Email marketing may not
work as well as it used to, due to spam
filtering, but that's not to say it's not
effective. After all, other than your time,
it's free to send, and response rates for
email that does reach the intended
recipients have remained steady. The theory
of this type of internet marketing leads
generation is that an email list works as
the first part of a funnel system, whereby
subscribers get some incentive to sign up
for the list. It may be a free product,
program, or report, or some other incentive
t will then "funnel" responsive customers to
your main products and services.
Other common lead generation techniques
include using pay-per-click (PPC)
advertising, adding information about a
site, product, or service to an email
signature file, and posting and answering
questions on marketing related forums. Just
think, for someone selling to other
marketers, what better free way is there to
generate internet marketing leads than
posting in forums where other marketers
"hang out"?
Whatever the lead generation techniques a
marketer uses, the most important thing to
remember about finding internet marketing
leads is this: to be effective, they must be
targeted. This means that the leads you
generate must be generally interested in the
product or service you offer. For an extreme
example, it probably wouldn't make sense to
try to generate leads for a knitting product
on a site that is football-related. The
target audience of a football site isn't
generally going to be interested in knitting
products.
As you begin to build your marketing-related
web business, be sure to plan a good
internet marketing lead strategy from the
outset. It shouldn't be an afterthought that
you'll take care of someday - Give it a lot
of consideration early on.
Copyright 2004 Mal Keenan
Mal Keenan is editor and publisher of Home
Business Tips Newsletter:
http://www.home-business-tips-newsletter.com/.
For a comprehensive leads package and
followup system in one visit here:
http://www.homebusinessnetworking.com