Most profitable Internet businesses (small, mid-size or big) invest at least 70% of their advertising and marketing efforts to list building and lead generation.
When done right, financial rewards of list building and lead generation can be very profitable. With an effective lead generation campaign, you can easily add at least 20 new leads to your list each day which equals to about 600 new leads each month and around 7000 new leads each year.
And when you think about that you can realistically expect to profit at least 1 dollar per lead subscriber each month, this results in some very decent numbers.
Although lead generation is a broad topic by itself and whole books and courses are written about it, here are three core steps to generating leads and building a list for your Internet business.
1) Lead Capture Form
If you want to generate more leads for your business and continuously build your own list, you need an opt-in web form where visitors of your site or blog can opt-in and give you their contact information. To get the best possible results, you need to place your opt-in form on your most visited pages.
If you're running Pay-per-Click ads or any other form of online ads like ezine ads, CPA ads, classifieds or video ads, the best way is to use a special dedicated landing page, also known as lead capture page or squeeze page.
If you own a blog, make sure to place your opt-in form of your blog and all other blog posts.
If you don't have the skills to create a web form by yourself, you don't need to worry. Email services like Aweber, GetResponse, iContact and others provide you with Form wizard that lets you easy generate opt-in form without being a “computer geek” or skilled programmer.
2) A Bribe
If you want your visitors to opt-in and give you their contact information like First name and Email address, you must give them a very good reason to do so.
The best way to do this is offer them a bride -- anything that's related to their core needs, wants or problems. You might want to offer them a free ebook, report, white paper, or a special discount for your products or services.
3) Targeted traffic
Once both your opt-in form and your “bribe” are in place, next very important step is to get highly-targeted traffic to your pages with your opt-in form.
There are many effective ways to do that and it just depends on your resources. No matter what type of traffic strategy will you eventually choose for your lead generation efforts, your ultimate goal should be to get traffic from search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing. Traffic that comes from these search engines is of the highest possible quality.
