There’s hundreds of lead generation methods and strategies for a business to use. Some are paid and some are free. Ideally use a combination of the two. Paid lead generation strategies include using paid marketing platforms such as Google Adwords, Bing, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube. These platforms offer a fast way to generate digital leads for your business and drive targeted traffic to a landing page where you can collect subscribers information by email.
Slower tactics include social media marketing, blogging and SEO. You can also build niche websites like this one. See how to build a niche website and get free traffic. These lead generation methods and strategies might be slow, but over time they are powerful. Once you start generating leads from your free and low cost methods, you are able to build on what you have done. Over time, and if you put in the work, you can build multiple streams of leads from a number of sources.
Lead Generation Methods And Strategies – Email Marketing
One of the cheapest ways for a business to start a lead generation strategy is to get a email marketing autoresponder. Autoresponders are pretty cheap (around $10 a month to start) and let you collect emails from potential customers. You can also automate the process and collect leads from a website or landing page. Autoresponder software lets you place some code on your website which collects your customers email address and name. Once entered into the database, you can send out relevant information and follow up with your leads via an automated series of email messages.
Lead Generation Strategies – Blogging
Blogging is a cheap way to generate website traffic and leads. Ideally choose a topic which is relevant to your business and write regular blog posts. Make this a habit and, over time you’ll build up a steady streams of traffic. Ideally use an SEO plugin (Yoast SEO is good) to help you write your posts for maximum effect. Share your posts as much as you can and use social media share buttons to give your readers the opportunity to share too.
Have a look at this free ebook for more help and advice with blogging optimisation and keyword research. Blogging by itself won’t get you leads but it will get you traffic, which you can convert into leads.
Converting Traffic Into Leads
Converting website traffic into leads isn’t plain sailing. It can take some testing and measuring to do so. Many blogging focus only on generating traffic but neglect to test and measure a suitable lead generation strategy. Your website visitors will only opt in to your email list of you give them enough of a reason to. Only a small percentage of your website traffic will take the action of subscribing to your email list. So give them lots of opportunities to do so:
- Have multiple opt-in options – pop ups, free ebooks, drop downs etc.
- Give away something useful which is aligned with your content and products
- Make your offer clear on all pages of your website
- Focus on the benefits to your visitors of your free giveaways (not the features)
- Use clear and concise benefit driven calls to action on your offers.
See also increase conversion rate on your e-commerce website.
Using Social Media For Lead Generation
Twitter, Linkedin, Pinterest, Instagram, Quora, Facebook, YouTube etc all can be used to generate leads. Social media is a great source of traffic if you can learn a strategy which works for you. Ideally choose a single strategy and get good at it. Avoid jumping from one strategy to another because it will dilute your attention. Joining the various social media groups can be a good way to generate some interest in your business through a website. You need to be aware of the rules of the groups you join however, because you don’t want to get banned for spamming!
Quora
Ideally find a group in your business niche and answer questions on topics suitable for your business. I’ve found Quora a good source of website traffic using this simple strategy. Quora does allow links to a website if it’s a suitable piece of content relevant to your answer and if you also provide value in your answer. So Quora can work well with blogging.
First create content around your business on your website through blogging. Then find questions which relate to your content and answer questions on the site. Don’t just link to content as that is likely to get your answer removed. You should provide as much detail in your answer as possible. Then you can leave a link for a further resource to your blog content. This of course should also give visitors the option to sign up and become a lead.
Facebook – Business Listing
Facebook lets you set up a free business listing. This can be a useful strategy for lead generation because it can lead people to your content, where they can subscribe to your list. If you have a Facebook account you should be able to create a business listing. Go to facebook.com/business and click Create a Page in the top right hand corner.
Set up a page listing with details of your website, email address telephone number and complete as many fields as you can. Once you have completed your listing, you can post on your timeline like you would on your normal Facebook account.
As you encourage more interaction on your page, people will share, like and click on your various links. This will lead people back to your website where they can become a subscriber. You can also run paid adverts from your business page too, if you wish. Ideally, pick a business name which is well targeted to keywords which are searched for linked to your business. This can help you pick up some free traffic from Google listings which find your Facebook page.
Google Places For Business – FREE LEADS!
If you have a physical business, you can sign up for a free business listing with Google Places For Business. This lets you appear in the search engines at the very top of the listings. It takes less than an hour to complete a listing and you will receive a pin number in the post to verify you are at the address. You can also use this feature of Google to set up a home based business listing too. So even if you have an online business, you can take advantage of this feature if you get a little creative.
Remember once you’ve set this up it can be a source of traffic and leads for free. So it’s worth the short time needed to do so.
Lead Generation Methods And Strategies – Niche Websites
A niche website is a great way to generate traffic which you can convert into leads. Building a niche website can be done around specific keywords which relate to your business. Ideally spend some time using keyword research tools (like Google’s Keyword planner) to find keywords which are suitable to rank a site for. This site was built around the keywords “autopilot money making software“. It has managed to attract some traffic for free from Google. You can see what is involved in building a keyword targeted niche site in this article “create free website and earn money“.
The key to building a good niche site which attracts free traffic is the keyword research. If you choose keywords which are too competitive, you can have a hard time getting any traffic. Once you find your perfect keywords, choose a domain name and start creating some useful content which is relevant for your audience. If your content doesn’t reflect the needs of your target audience, you’re unlikely to find any leads from the traffic you find.
Paid Marketing – Direct Response Marketing
Paid marketing is in many ways far superior to free marketing strategies. For one, it’s much, much faster. You can set up a paid marketing campaign and start seeing targeted traffic to your website and leads coming in almost immediately. With free and low cost strategies, the results are much slower. So ideally use a combination of both low cost, free and paid marketing strategies.
Another benefit of paid marketing is that you can more easily increase your traffic and scale up. With certain organic strategies, you put in a lot of work upfront, often to see some slow results which aren’t easily scalable. Paid marketing is scalable, but you need to test and measure your adverts first, before you scale up. Make sure you know your numbers and have a good return on investment before increasing your budget. Checkout this book for more on direct response marketing.
