Lead Generation Tools For Online Marketing
Aside from having a solid business proposition, the most important factor in the success of most business-marketing efforts is “lead generation.” This is especially true for businesses offering professional services, custom-fit products, and network marketing opportunities. Leads become the prospects for the product or service that you are offering. The proper selection and use of lead generation tools is an essential part of your marketing efforts.
So, what are lead generation tools and which ones work best?
Advertising usually jumps to mind as the first choice of the traditional businessman. But with conventional media – TV, magazines, newspapers, Yellow Pages – the cost is often prohibitive for new ventures. Even so called “free advertising,” in the form of publicity, can be expensive and difficult to obtain.
With the Internet, new online marketing choices are available. But the usual banner ads on websites or “pay-per-click” ads on search-engine sites, while often effective, are expensive, too. So is buying lists of email leads from online business sources – and that approach is often not effective at all because the leads are stale.
The oldest form of marketing your product, of course, is direct selling. That is still working effectively for some companies. An example is the Fuller Brush Company, which has elevated it to a high art form.
And it is the method of choice for almost all network marketing, or “MLM” companies. Contact your family, friends, business associates, and acquaintances. You must have a “list of 100 names” to contact as your “warm market.” Call them all and present your opportunity.
Sound familiar? Some people have a long and supportive list of friends and acquaintances. But many do not. And after you exhaust your lead list, who do you talk to? Why, your “cold market,” of course. And there begins the frustration.
With the Internet and online marketing, we now have a method of lead generation that is not expensive and that can generate an endless number of interested leads. Internet network marketing is the answer to thousands of frustrated MLM business owners – legitimate entrepreneurs who have exhausted their lead lists and themselves talking to hundreds of people who have absolutely no interest in their product, service or business opportunity.
But tapping the Internet as a source of leads is not as simple as many online marketing “gurus” can make it seem – for “just a small initial payment.”
So, how to get started in online marketing or Internet network marketing? There are some basic approaches and techniques. And there is a 5-Step program for getting started. Watch for future articles on those.
