Online Marketing Lead Generation Is the Life Blood of Your Business

How to find customers using the Internet (that is, create “traffic”) and build your most valuable asset: your mailing list!

Customers all start as “leads”, that is, prospects.

Online marketing lead generation is one of the most critical components of your business!

Your business REQUIRES that paying customers part with their hard-earned money for something! Therefore, your goal is to find your ideal customer!

Marketing is nothing more than identifying:

1. What problems do your products or services solve?
2. Who is looking for these solutions? This is your “target market” (or markets.)
3. How best to reach these people.

Sales is the process of converting prospects into buyers!

Blogging is one component in personal branding. Remember, you have two important objectives for your marketing:

1. To be FOUND in the vast universe of websites, blogs, videos, press releases, forums, etc.

2. To rise above or be more visible than your competitors. I call this developing “You, Inc.”

Most importantly, your blog provides a direct way to build your very own list of subscribers!

It is insufficient and DANGEROUS to the life of your business and your profitability to rely on the replicated website of your chosen company or opportunity. You NEED to attract your prospective customers to your OWN site, and maintain your OWN list of Internet marketing leads (or series of lists targeting different niches.)

When you advertise information about your products, services, or your opportunity you could send them to the page provided by your company – but then the names and email addresses would be added to the company’s database.

Instead, you need to send them to a page that compiles your OWN list! ONLY your own site (and compiling your own list of prospects and customers) builds “You, Inc”!

This is worth repeating: if your advertised link takes the prospective customer to a page that is unique to “You, Inc.”, then you are no longer a commodity! You are unique, innovative, interesting – someone that is worth another look! And that’s all you need!

Another important feature of your blog is that each page of your blog has a specific web “address”. This address can be advertised “as is”, or it can be shortened, disguised or even assigned to a separate domain name. You can create special pages for each product, or multiple pages for each product as a way of testing various ad campaigns.

These unique pages all increase the size of your “real estate” on the Internet!

Now here is the key related to online marketing lead generation: you can incorporate MULTIPLE sign-up forms throughout your blog (after all, you control everything on YOUR blog!) You can designate entire special pages to serve as landing pages or capture pages just for lead acquisition!

These forms (also known as opt-in forms) are then linked to an email autoresponder email series. This email series is an important way to build familiarity, trust, and credibility – and these combine to convert your prospects into buyers.

At the same time,

· The more pages on your blog,

· And the more interconnecting links between pages,

· And the more links from outside sources the more relevant your blog appears to the search engine “spiders” and the higher you will rank for your chosen keywords.

In conclusion, blogging may appear like a huge waste of time and energy, but the reality is that it is a necessity. Don’t bite off more than you can chew initially. Start with the basics – but get started!

For more information, go to randyreek.com and view the free Marketing Training resources posted there. See also Randy's ebook, "Your Online Business"