| The question of buying sales leads vs. generating | | | | capturing your visitors contact information. It is this |
| leads for yourself reminds me of the proverb which | | | | contact information, when it comes from a qualified |
| states "if you buy a man a fish you feed him for a | | | | prospect, which makes a sales lead. This contact |
| day but if you teach a man to fish you feed him for | | | | page should be professionally designed and tested to |
| a lifetime." | | | | give you the highest possible conversion rate. The |
| When you are buy leads from lead aggregators, you | | | | conversion rate is the amount of visitors who fill out |
| are forever at their mercy because the day you | | | | the form (or call) divided by the amount of people |
| stop buying leads is the day your business stops | | | | who visit the page. |
| getting new customers. Not only that, but it is very | | | | Next, you need a system in place to get visitors (or |
| difficult to make the numbers work in terms of profit | | | | "traffic") to your page. |
| when you are buying leads. The reason for this is | | | | There are two distinct methods of getting traffic to |
| that when you buy sales leads, those leads have | | | | your landing page. |
| typically been sold to other businesses just like yours | | | | The first traffic method is the "paid" solution - taking |
| so they are difficult to close. | | | | advantage of the search engines' (Google, Yahoo, |
| Remember, the way for lead aggregators to make | | | | etc.) pay per click services. The beauty of a pay per |
| the most money is to sell the same set of leads to | | | | click campaign is that you are only paying for those |
| as many businesses as possible. Once they have | | | | visitors who have identified themselves as prospects |
| acquired a lead, there is no additional expense in | | | | by a) typing certain keywords into a search box and |
| delivering that lead to several buyers instead of just | | | | b) actually clicking on your ad. If they do not click, |
| one. If you are one of the buyers of these online | | | | you do not have to pay, even though they may |
| leads, you end up having to contact people who | | | | have read your ad. The better ad you write, the |
| have already been contacted by your competitors. | | | | more people who will click on it and the lower your |
| The odds of you closing them are long at best. | | | | cost of each click will be. |
| Rather than buying leads, you should learn to | | | | The second traffic generation method is the "free" |
| generate your own leads. | | | | (or organic) solution. This is accomplished by |
| There are two big advantages to this. | | | | mastering "search engine optimization", the art of |
| First, in the long run it is a lot less expensive (if you | | | | getting your website found by the large search |
| know what you're doing) to generate your own leads | | | | engines. Placing original keyword-rich content on your |
| than it is to keep buying leads. Next, you will no | | | | website and having lots of links coming into your site |
| longer be beholden to the lead aggregators. You will | | | | from articles, videos and social media sites are just a |
| be independent and able to sleep well knowing you | | | | few of the methods used to get organic traffic to |
| have a constant stream of prospects arriving daily in | | | | your landing page. |
| your inbox. | | | | Master both the paid and organic methods of driving |
| In order to start generating your own sales leads, | | | | traffic to your landing page and you will never have |
| you first need to have a web page, called a landing | | | | to buy another shared sales lead from an aggregator. |
| page, which is set up for the express purpose of | | | | |