How To Generate Your Own Free And Low Cost Leads

Building a business on a budget need not be a challenge. While you may feel like you are starting behine the 8 ball - so to speak- I encourage you to view this hurdle as a challenge that you can only learn from and move onwards and upwards.

My business would not be what it is today without my determination to find ways of advertising for free. Many marketers will tell you that free advertising is not worth wasting your time on and in many respects, they are 100% right. But when it comes to lead generation and attraction marketing, sometimes free is just as good as paid advertising sources.

It was from my own personal experience at buidling my business on a budget, that I developed such a wide range of marketing skills. This hubpage will share with you my top 5 free lead generation tactics and how to apply them to your business.

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My 5 favorite ways of generating free leads are;

• Forum posting
• Information email course or newsletter

• MySpace Marketing
• Free Classified Ads
• Articles & Blogs

The target market for my business lead generation and sales funnel is mainly existing online marketers and entrepreneurs.

I also further target my free lead generation tactics to reach specific groups, eg stay at home moms (like me!) that may be attracted to me and might want to learn about creating their own wealth online. This can simply be done by making specific splash pages for each audience and marketing said landing pages in relevant places. When I want to put my WAHM splash page out, I will post it to forums/social groups that attract that type of person.

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Home Based Business Leads

Many of my hubpages focus on giving quality advice, tips and how to steps to help the home based business owner.

• Forum posting - Hot Marketing HubPage

Forum posting is also great for driving passive targeted traffic to your website, plus aslo develops one way links that point back to your website - some thing that search engines love. Forums are a good use of applying search engine marketing to your business as it will contribute to your overall traffic rank.

• Information email course or newsletter

Each one of us have particular skills that we can use to develop an information product that relates to our niche. Writing an e-course or newsletter is free to do, but it does take time. In many ways it is similar to writing articles. Compile a series of articles that you can format together into newsletter format and then promote it on your blog/website.

They are also a good way of driving repeat traffic to your website. Place links within your newsletter that refer readers back to your site. On common way of doing this is to email just part of the information, then place a ..... to read the full article go here - www.example.com/newsletter.php. This gets the reader back onto your site and the more repeat visits you have, the higher your chance of converting this traffic into sales.

• MySpace Marketing - Hot Marketing HubPage

Creating and promoting a MySpace profile is free to do. You will find more practical steps on How To Market On MySpace here.

Other social networking sites can be used in a similar way, so you may prefer to look into Facebook for example. Check the terms and conditions thoroughly first as each site has different rules regarding internet marketing.

• Classified Ads - Hot Marketing HubPage

Classified are a fantastic free advertising source.They are usually simple to place and a good converting ad can generate leads over and over again. For low cost classified ads, consider newspaper classifieds.

• Craigslist
• Backpage

I set a schedule of posting at different sites on different days. It is all planned and organised on an Excel spreadsheet for simplification. Tip - spend a little bit of time setting up a system that makes life easier in the long run. You will need to track things like - schedule, user names, passwords, email accounts, domains/urls/cloaking details and ad copy.

BEWARE of spam from reverse marketers when using free classified advertising sites. I am constantly bombarded with emails from other marketers pitching a product or worse still, pretending they are interested only to end up putting the hard sell on me.

The most common email at the moment goes something like...."I saw you ad on ___ and am interested in more information. Is an investment required?" My other personal favorite is the one that goes "I have hundreds of network contacts who would be very interested in seeing your opportunity. Come to my website ____ and let me help you get it set up"

Go figure. While I think that reverse marketing is a valid tactic, these poor suckers have no idea how much they are putting people off, not to mention jeopardising their business accounts. If you are currently using tactics like this at least protect your account and don't put your website or affiliate links in your spam.

I have also received messages from very legitimate systems where someone has taken my name and email address (never my main) and opted me in. Anyway, enough of my little spam rant....back on track

• Articles / Blogs

Regular publish quality information in your niche that points back to your website and lead capture page. There are ways you can monetize your blogging and article publishing so do some more research to find sites that will suit what you write about. Join Hubpages and start publishing articles.

I am a big believer in generating multiple streams and passive streams of income. Any return on your advertising and time spent doing promotions is worth getting. When you have been publishing for long enough and contributed a significant number of articles/hubpages your income will grow.

Unless you are a professional writer and focus your business on this goal, writing articles is never going to make you rich, but the returns can help cover some business expenses.

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In order to simplify and automate your lead generation process as much as possible, there are a couple of things you should be aware of.

Capture Pages

Personalized lead capture pages are a great way of optimizing your lead generation. While the standard capture pages many companies provide do convert, you will find your response rate for a self branded page higher.

If you want to have a go at making your own lead capture pages try this handy free HTML editor. Before you begin making our own pages, you need to have a way of uploading these pages onto your web server. So if you don't know how, or are not able to spend time learning this process, it's probably best to use a service.

So once you have a system to capture qualified leads, you are going to need a way of following up with them automatically.

Autoresponder

The size and type of business you are running will dictate what type of autoresponder service you will choose. Be it Aweber, GetResponse, AutoResponsePlus or another, an autoresponder is essential.

Domain Name/s & Hosting Provider

Give you business to a company that will allow you to host unlimited domains at no additional cost and will also give unlimited sub-domains against your account. A quality provider will give you a free FTP account and have no hidden fees.

A couple that have good reputations are GoDaddy & HostGator. I personally use HostGator, but I have also been told that Kiosk is good also. Anyway, hosting provider is the least important thing for you to think about - as long as you get the features without the extra cost. Shop around. If you plan on having a blog hosted on your own domain name you will require Linux hosting.

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Another Under Rated Lead Generation Source

While I thought my days of traffic exchanges were behind me, I am fast learning they are a valuable lead generation and list building resource.

There are many aspects to a high converting traffic exchange campaign and I will do my best to summarise and explain below.

As I always write about..... a successful marketing campaign begins with research and proper targeting. One of the biggest mistakes people make with their traffic exchange promotions is to offer an opportunity instead of information.

Think about it, people who are surfing on traffic exchanges are already involved in a home based business or affiliate marketing of some description. So if this sounds like your target market, perhaps lead generation via TE's may be worth looking at.

Traffic exchange members are generally seeking traffic, leads and sales. It's that simple. Each and everyday these traffic exchanges attract new members seeking free marketing and traffic. Let's look at a couple of general overall factors for you. Active members of traffic exchanges like....

• free
• advertising
• website traffic
• simple easy to use systems

They also like quality free information.

For me a combination of offering free e-courses PLUS free website advertising have both proven highly successful lead generation tactics on TE's. Perhaps a hugpage on getting the most out of traffic exchanges is in order? : ) What do you think?