NO matter what business you are trying to build online, you will need sales leads if you are ever going to make sales, and sales leads are what you are trying to generate if you are marketing on the internet. In order to survive, any web site needs a steady flow of qualified leads.

The aim of any lead generation campaign is to build your mailing list. Internet marketers often say “the money is in the list”, which is totally true. A list of responsive buying customers that trust you is worth its weight in gold!

While spam filtering has lessened the impact of email marketing, it’s still a viable means to getting your sales messages out there. In theory, email is marketing is free, although of course its costs you in terms of your time. The theory behind email marketing is that by using a “hook” such as a free product or some other incentive, you can “funnel” interested parties onto specific products and services. Visit Internet Marketing Solutions

When you consider generating leads via an email campaign there are basically three avenues you can explore: email signatures, joint ventures and safe lists. One word of warning though, and that is avoid spam at all cost, one spam complaint can seriously damage your online business. You should familiarize yourself with the laws concerning spam, and at the very least ensure you include a un-subscription link in ALL your marketing emails. Due to spam, it is advisable that you avoid buying leads, no matter how reputable the company, buying leads can easily lead to a spam complaint, you have been warned!

In its simplest form, email marketing is a matter of putting a signature in all your emails that contains a link to your main product.

If you are looking to vastly increase your list quickly then a joint venture (JV) may well be the key you need. In its simplest form, in a JV you supply the product and a fellow marketer supplies the leads and you share the profits. Hopefully, you will then get the emails of your fellow marketer’s customers, so you can then mail them with further offers.

When considering a joint venture there are many considerations you have to think about, but the main one, before you consider contacting anyone about mailing to their list, is “what’s in it for THEM”, not “what’s in it for me”. NEVER write to a fellow marketer unless you can offer them something of value in return for their help, and that is not necessarily just a share of the profits, be inventive!

Finally you have safe lists. A safe list is a list of people that have agreed to receive marketing emails in return for being able to send their own marketing email. The value of this form of marketing has never been that good. After all you are trying to sell to people who are only interested in selling to you! Visit Online Marketing Solutions

You can use pay per click advertising such as overture or Goggle adwords to advertise your site and draw in interested leads.

One other highly effective way of generating interested leads is posting in forums that are related to your area of business. Include a link to your site in your signature and people interested in your sphere of business will often click it if your forum post was interesting.

Three other popular sales lead generation techniques are submitting articles to ezine publishers and article directories, press releases and testimonials for products in your target market.

No matter what lead generation technique you employ you will need a way to capture your leads email address when they arrive at your site.

The traditional method has been to use a pop up or pop under which contains some incentive to get someone to sign up. With the invention of pop up stoppers their effectiveness has dwindled and therefore unstoppable pop ups (also know as hover ads or slide in ads) have evolved. This new generation of pop ups are built into your webpage and as such cannot be stopped. Simply do a search on Goggle for “unstoppable pop up” and you are sure to find a software solution to produce these types of pop ups for you. Visit Internet Marketing

The other alternative is to use what is called a “name squeeze page”.

In essence a name squeeze page is a web page whose sole purpose is to capture an email address.

They generally contain a small amount of information about the product or service you are selling as a “teaser” for the reader and will contain a sign up form, with a message like “to find out more simply fill in the form to be immediately directed to further details on this amazing product”.

A name squeeze page not only helps build your list, this information can also be used with certain software to help personalize your site for your visitor, a technique that has been shown to increase sales. Again, simply do a search for name squeeze page generators.

No matter how you generate sales leads there is one thing always to bear in mind, and that is to be effective your leads must be in your targeted market. If, for example, you are selling internet marketing products, then it’s no use advertising on a site that is all about scuba diving!

When you start to build your online business, ensure you include a well thought out sales lead generation strategy from the beginning. Do not make it an afterthought; this should be in place from the very beginning if you want your business to be a success

Offline traffic generation is something which a lot of businesses with a website, especially web based businesses pass by. There are many methods of offline traffic generation which can be very effective. Your business can use print ads, television and radio to bring in more traffic to your website.

It works really well when you have a high average lead value because you need to offset the relatively high cost of many offline advertising methods. You can also use this strategy to augment your existing offline strategies.

We recently worked with a client here in Sydney who is in the pest control business. They use ads in the Yellow Pages; a full page ad, in fact. Now we’ve added at the bottom of this ad an invitation to the reader to visit their website and download a free termite control report.

So if people don’t call, the website address gives the company another opportunity to get a hold of their contact information and work on getting their business - and with a somewhat complex and expensive service like termite control, any lead pays off well.

The idea here is to get people interested in your business and to drive traffic to your site using a freebie like a report. This will let you get the contact information of people who visit and download this free item; you will then be able to communicate with them via auto-responder and other means and educate them about your product or service - this will lead to contact being initiated by the leads when they have a need for your service.

If yours is a retail business, then this technique will also let you capture names for use in your newsletters or any sort of regular offers which your business provides. One example of a retailer doing this is Borders. Also, I have to note here that my local shoe store has an invitation to sign up for their online newsletter printed on each sales receipt. It costs them really nothing to do this, but brings in a lot of leads for their business. Offline marketing offers a lot of opportunities to build your business this way.

Name Capture and Follow Up

Using name capture and follow up involves asking for your prospective customer’s contact information so that you can contact them later with other information. This is one of the very best methods of lead generation. If you can get a prospect’s attention, you will find yourself with many more leads that are ready to buy from you.

Now, this is a conversion strategy as well, because when you follow up, you get a higher percentage of visitors converting into high-quality inquiries. It’s also a traffic generation strategy because when you follow up like this, you get more prospects visiting you site more often.