Regardless of where you are at the moment in your network marketing or affiliate marketing business, you will be spending a good portion of your time focusing on online lead generation. Lead generation is a never-ending process and it's a cycle that can begin again and again, particularly for brand new campaigns and promotions. As a marketer, affiliate or site owner, your main concern is to ensure that this process doesn't stall and that the results are advantageous to your goals.

The challenge of online lead generation

Let's face it. Running an online lead generation campaign will not be as easy as it used to be. Everyday, new web businesses are being created, all of these competing for the same market as you. All these new websites, along with the other websites that have already established themselves before you will be your competitors. Each one of them will be trying to get the same segment of the market that you are zeroing in.

Without a clear-cut strategy for generating leads online, you'll also find it difficult to filter through all the choices and find targeted leads. Without targeted leads, you'll waste more efforts marketing to and trying to convert a number of visitors who may or may not become leads. Just imagine converting 100 uncertain leads to a sale when about 80% of them aren't really interested.

Why you need targeted efforts

With online lead generation, remember that the best leads are those that have already undergone a selective procedure. This procedure should be designed in such a way as to ensure that only those leads that will respond favorably to your specific marketing campaign will be included in the listing. You're more likely to produce favorable results in whatever it is you want to achieve if your online leads are targeted.

Lead batching

Another very useful technique to use for online lead generation is lead batching. This is the process of gathering and generating leads with the use of specially designed advertising campaigns. Lead batching can filter out false leads and produce only those who have expressed interest in the business opportunity you are offering.

Lead batching is also a commonly used method for capturing leads to be used for multi-tier programs. Leads produced using this method are encouraged to create and develop networks of their own. This helps multiply the number of leads you will be able to produce under you and also increase your earnings.

Lead batching is very inclusive and can be a very effective means to capture and increase your leads. However, it does rely on how effective your marketing or advertising campaign is. A well-designed campaign is necessary to make sure that this method works.

Exploring online lead generation tools

There are plenty of lead generation tools you can use online but not every one of these will work for you. That will all depend on the skills, time and resources you have. Blogging, for example, is a recognized tool for lead generation but if you don't have the time to produce enough quality content or update it on a regular basis, forget it.

Consider all the tools marketers like you use online to generate leads. If unsure, go online and find out how people use e-mails, news stories, press releases, e-books and white papers to attract people's attentions. If the tone, style and timing attract you, it will probably attract others. Try to look at how other marketers use their tools to learn how to utilize them effectively yourself.

Using social networking sites

Online lead generation has been made easy by the appearance of social networking sites. Sites such as Facebook, MySpace and Friendster remain as some very useful sources of leads, provided you know where to look. It takes some clever marketing in order for you to maximize this method but if your business relies heavily on referrals or if you want to explore referrals as a means to grow your leads, then social networking sites will work very well for this purpose.