While companies everywhere are struggling to find qualified leads for their business, many overlook the obvious. There are ways of generating leads with little or no cost that will not detract from your warm circle or interfere with family relations or hurt friendships. They can also almost guarantee that people that are added to your network are interested in your business, bring a new level of quality to your lead generation.

One of the most commonly used methods of generating leads is through the use of online press releases. When a public relations company includes a write up about your business, it adds credibility to what you are saying and selling much more than a paid advertisement. People see the inclusion of a press release as having the backing of the publisher of the public relations network and therefore must be a legitimate business.

You will have to remember the basic rules of writing press release and that the content has to be news worthy and not a blatant attempt at self-promotion to be considered for inclusion in online and offline publications. New products, new business methods and even personnel promotions can help a press release see the light of print.

There are also article distributions services you can use to get the word out about your company and its products. These companies allow individuals to post articles, usually for free, for distribution to ezines and online magazines geared towards the interests of their readers. Writing and distributing articles containing useful information may get it published in a third party publication. When people see your name in many different publications on the same subject, they will begin to view you as an expert in that field.

Every published article from a distribution service will contain a little something about you as well as the internet address of your business. The people who like what they read and want to know more will visit your site because they have a real interest in what you do or what you sell, almost instantly becoming a member of your warm network.

Web logs, or blogs, are one of the big things going on today, other than personal and social network sites and starting a blog about the industry in which you business is a part can also bring more people to your warm network, or close circle of friends. You have to careful not to make a blog an obvious advertisement by talking about benefits of certain types of products and not necessarily the ones you sell. Include your internet address in every published blog and invite others to post comments on the subject.

By doing a lot of the fishing for leads on your own, using your own efforts and not paying for leads of questionable origins, you can quickly add to your lead base and begin to realize significant increases in traffic to your site. If you lack the time and talent to write your own articles or blog entries, you can hire a freelance writer to ghostwrite them for you, still saving money on the price of buying leads.