Today, in order for your business to survive, you have to keep up with the growing needs of your customers. As a result of the popularity of the Internet through out the world, it would definitely hurt your business if you do not have a website in the first place. If you have a website, but struggle to convert your visitors into prospective customers, then the purpose your of a website is lost. So the bottom line is after they visit your website you cannot afford to lose the link.

But how are you going to make it happen?

Lead generation and lead capture are two such marketing tools which can be used to obtain the contact information such as name, e-mail address and telephone number of a visitor of your company's website. Once you have obtained this invaluable information, you may use it to inform the visitor about the new products or services that your company offers. In addition, it is also used to let your customers be aware of important events, promotions and updates related to your business while assisting your customer to move from apathy to purchase. With a good number of captured leads, you can easily market your new products and increase your company's profits without having to spend money for each single promotion.

Let us now look at some of the effective lead capture techniques used by companies across the globe.

Opt-in List

This perhaps is the most important lead capture tool that you can have on your site. It's simply an e-mail form that will capture the name and e-mail of your visitors. However you and your web master should think of ways on how your customers would ?want? to give you their name and e-mail address.

Hint: freebies are a great way to capture the customer's attention just as they do in supermarkets

Affiliate Marketing

This is where a visitor first lands on your landing page and is then directed to the affiliate page or product you're promoting. It is commonly known that it takes up to six or seven e-mails before a

potential customer buys a certain product. By using the landing page, you create a contact list for people interested in your product or promotion. That way you can have a targeted list of interested leads to promote your products to.

Articles

Post informative and user-friendly articles on your website and you will definitely find your visitors giving you their information. What happens here is when people read your article, they become more interested in your site or product so that they feel willing to give you their contact information in order to reap more benefits. Therefore the more people you have reading your articles, the more interested they become with you and your products which in turn will give you more income potential and generate a greater number of leads.

Desktop Software

These are generally products such as free desktop calendars, wallpapers, personal planners, etc... which are given away free to your site's visitors who download the product and install it on their desktops. As these products usually have live links to your website, company products as well as contact details, interested customers will click through to your sites or contact you directly. The main advantage of these desktop programs is its viral nature which means the users will pass them around to friends and colleagues resulting in more lead captures for your business.

RSS

This is considered as the least understood and the hardest to understand lead capture tool. People are enabled to view your site's contents through RSS readers or an RSS equipped browser without actually coming to the site. The idea here is ?don't come to us, we will deliver.? Your task is to popularize the feeds all over the Internet and draw back interested visitors who are looking for more information which in essence is capturing leads for your site.

So what else are you waiting for? Create the best lead capture page that your web site can have, then generate and capture leads in order to strive your business to prosperity.