Generate Leads Effectively: Why and How to Generate Leads

Lead Generation is a major skill to be mastered for any marketer today. If you don't generate leads its really hard to build relationship with your readers and make money online.

We live in a very complex world with technology advancements going on every single day and most newbie entrepreneurs or “aspiring” entrepreneurs tend to think that its difficult to generate leads and build a business online.

It’s a fact that is really worth pointing out. Most aspiring brilliant people are turning their back on the potential they have in them just because of the lack of knowledge of various concepts involved to generate leads, sales and conversions a.k.a building a business.

Joining a network marketing company or business opportunity doesn’t really guarantee your success in the business. You need to sell to become successful and the fastest way to sell your product is by marketing them to the right audience using content and generate leads.

As mentioned earlier, we are living in a VERY complex world and people generally ignore ads as soon as it appears in front of them, so paid methods to generate leads is not always reliable.

Nowadays, we come across users who use ad blockers on their browsers just so they can read ONLY the content that actually helps them, rather being caught up with pop-up Ads.

If you take these obstacles into consideration, it would be quite overwhelming for most people to think about starting a business of his own. Probably since you are reading this article, you must be someone who wanted to start his own business online, and if so, my first advice is to give value and generate leads.

Truth be told, any entrepreneur who is trying to build their own business without a capture page or any other method to generate leads, will not be able to attract people to them and they would be like the 97% of the marketers who drive traffic to their offer and quite often run out of money.

As mentioned in the 3Cs of Internet Marketing, after creating traffic you need to capture or generate leads and convert sales.

Many marketers keep pitching 24/7 and fail but some manage to get a sale, which in most cases its because the prospect got tired of the newbie pitching daily. ( I have been there, so i can relate to it)

People tend to hesitate to buy from you as you do not project any value to them and that is a turn-off to any prospective lead.

 

Why is it important to generate leads for your business?

Leads are the building blocks of your online business. If you want people to buy a product ONLY from you, then you have to provide value and generate leads.

It just makes perfect sense to point out that inorder to generate leads, you need to have traffic sent to your capture page. The only two ways to achieve constant traffic is by paid traffic (which is not recommended if you have no marketing budget) and the second way is, my favorite, using content marketing.

Paid strategy works faster but it’s longevity of effect is limited to duration of a campaign. Content Marketing on the other hand is a double edged sword for building repertoire with your readers and for driving traffic to your capture page to generate leads.

Traffic is the life blood of your business and the prime goal of sending traffic to your site is to generate leads.

In the internet marketing space, a collection of leads is called a “List”. Ever heard, “The money is in the list”, its because the list has all the leads to profit from.

The greatest advantage of having a list of leads is that you can market to them over and over again and get sales.

Its nearly impossible to present the same offer to people who just visit your site, read your content and leave.

In the online business world, you provide value in exchange for their email which allows you to follow up with them. You don't use this strategy and overkill it.

One of the common mistakes most marketers do with their list is that, they do not treat their list as people. They just consider them as a bunch of email ids sitting in their autoresponder. A successful marketer always treats his list as his clients and serve them well and build relationships, so to be successful with making money online you have got to generate leads.

A small word of advice: Mailing your list with sales letter and pitches alone would probably get your lead to unsubscribe from your list. Share value and in between share some of the products, you as a marketer suggest. Remember 80/20. 80% value and 20% pitch.

Got it? Lets roll…

 

How to generate leads for your business

So we just covered, Why is it important to generate leads for your business. Next, we are going to talk about How to generate massive amount of leads for your business

Lead generation is very easy online. If done right, you are looking at atleast 200+ leads A DAY or maybe more.

It’s a pretty staggering number of leads and that’s what we are after. By the end of this article, you will learn how to get staggering amounts of leads 100% FREE.

The best way to generate leads that are highly targeted for your business is to give away helpful information 100% free with no strings attached.

That’s right, no strings attached. This approach is called “Content Marketing”

Free informative content draws people to you, your call to actions, banner ads will get them to take action to know more about some exclusive piece of information which you give away after you get people to opt-in, thats how you generate leads.

Content attracts people to your page and if your content is really good and epic, people will share with their network which causes the viral effect which would help you to generate leads.

How do you come up with content that other people will be willing to share? Here is how…

You see, people love to spent majority of the time on the internet only if any of following qualities are met.

1. Informative
2. Social
3. Entertaining

The only possible explanation to this is by analyzing the top three trafficked sites according to Alexa ranking.

1. Google (People use for finding information)
2. Facebook (People use to socialize with others)
3. YouTube (People love to be entertained)

Your content will be shared by others, if it is Informative, entertaining or sociable i.e. something that others can relate to.

If you’ve been writing content for a quite sometime and you don’t see a spike in your social media share, likes and comments, you might want to check out if your pages have any one of these features.

If you have all three qualities in your post, then you are golden.

When you create content for people to read and get benefited for free, they perceive you as an expert at what you wrote about and they feel more comfortable in talking to you as you become social. They would feel that you are a real person through your videos as you become more and more friendly.

So far what you did with your content is that, it sent you some traffic and you got an audience to talk to via your blog post or article.

You've got people's attention, now don't mess it up. 😛

If your content is informative and something that they would like to know more about, 90% of your visitors would leave their email address in  your capture page or a form (like below), so you can email them with your latest content.

 

This is one way of doing. Giving away content that people like and getting leads for sending more info, in which you can pitch them a little bit.

Another approach to generate leads, which is almost similar but slightly different from the above approach is by giving value in exchange for a lead. This is a much widely used strategy by marketers these days.

Both the approaches require you to write content but the second approach makes a whole lot difference as it uses “Attraction Marketing” using content.

A visitor who is interested in what you wrote, could come across your banner ad to provide something of incredibly awesome value which you are willing to give away for free for an exchange of their email.

You are “attracting” your user to you with the incredible piece of information you are willing to send them privately. Notice?? We ain't hunting, we ain't begging for a lead or a sale. You just attract people who are interested in working with you.

The only way any of the above approaches work properly, is by creating content, creating awesome content and having a capture page to generate leads for you.

Focus on creating value-packed content and syndication daily (meaning, sharing in social media and letting people know about your content). You do not want to be one among the 97% who keeps pitching everyone without providing any value.

In doing so, you would lose your own value as a person. Create content to provide value to the marketplace, people will respect you for it and you can become the person who people follow and this would benefit you and your business for the long-term.

In fact since lead generation in this approach doesn't cost you a lot of money at all and people are not avoiding your content as ads, they would stick on to your blog. As you build more credibility you would be able to increase your returning visitors which means your blog is getting noticed and ofcourse generate leads.

As you build your reputation with the audience, people start liking you and they would become comfortable to leave their contact details to you, as they trust you and build relationship.

At this point you are not going behind anyone for a sale, you are not calling strangers, or holding home meeting, you are just serving people with the knowledge you have about something to read and build a relation with them.

You can give your visitors valuable content in any form, it could be a video which gives them an over-the-shoulder training about something that would be helpful to them, or access to private hangouts which goes over a detailed training session.

After all, your content is there to stay and generate leads daily on autopilot.

Here is another alternate strategy…haha…am not done, i love to over deliver…

To generate leads and maximize your sales, you can add a little something called “Scarcity marketing”. This is something you can use to get people to just go crazy opting-in on your autoresponder.

Scarcity Marketing is simply an approach of giving away information that is beneficial for the reader with a time limit to which the information will be allowed for the readers to access. This causes them to take action immediately and ofcourse the value of the information you are willing to give away should be nothing short of EPIC.

Scarcity refers to any limitation placed on a product or service with the goal of increasing sales through pressure placed on the consumer. The fear of missing out causes people to make the decision to optin. The limitation can be a time based deadline or a limited quantity, often mixed with some kind of perceived benefit for acting quickly, like a reduced price, a bonus item, or an increase in status (you got in, where others missed out).

–  slightly adapted from entrepreneurs-journey.com

Also be cautious not to misuse any of these strategies noted down here because the online world is a very skeptical one , so abusing these methods will not do you any good. Sure, you might some short-term goals, but your reputation, may won’t last long. A marketer's reputation is really important in his efforts to generate leads and convert sales.

It about how people perceive you, if that impression is ruined then its going to be hard to get those conversions up or even generate leads.

These are some of the ways to generate leads using your blog. The reason why most people prefer to generate leads using a blog over long sales pages is that, blogs are friendly. Its like an online journal where you write about what you want and sharing with others.

Google loves content and it prefers to lookup a blog rather than going through a boring long sales letters and this is the reason why we advice you to blog daily. Your consistency in creating content daily will help you generate leads and convert sales on the long-term.

When you blog consistently Google will see you as an authority in your niche, giving you some Google credit which again circles back to helping you generate leads.

Blogging is simple and can be done in about an hour per day and you just learned how to generate leads for your business. To effectively generate leads and build a business online, you absolutely need 3 tools, a blog, a capture page and an autoresponder.

Autoresponder is nothing but an automatic emailer which gets triggered every time you generate leads, it costs about $1 to just get started on Aweber.

So the question is, are you ready to take massive action on what you have learned and generate leads to make money online today?

If yes, click here to get access to my blogging platform and done-for-you capture pages. Its all setup for you to just login and get blogging.