Free Leads Online: The Beginner’s Guide To Getting Started With Lead Generation Using Free Online Methods!

Online Marketing
In a perfect world is where you would have a huge budget to find new customers and leads, and increase sales. But in reality, most small businesses don’t have access to the necessary resources.

 

Does that mean they leave out the most essential component of “lead generation” from their marketing plan

 

Hundreds of online marketers have been successfully amassing free leads online using targeted strategic methods. On the other hand, there are others who fail to reap the benefits offered by the Web.

 

The reason for this is simple.

 

Lead generation is one of the most misunderstood concepts that leaves many marketers scratching their heads wondering where they’ve gone wrong.

 

Get this right: Lead generation is not about how many leads you have: it’s about who they are. Fewer, better leads trump lower quality leads every time.

 

There are numerous methods of amassing free leads online. Most people in most niches, in many ways, can easily enough produce 1,000 free leads online in a short time.

 

But the best ones are qualified leads – people who are genuinely interested in what you have to offer. Attracting such targeted traffic, for marketing purposes, and making them want “what you have to offer” is a whole different ball-game.

 

There are many different ways of generating free leads online, and I’ve tried several of the methods, during my time here: free and paid.

 

6 Awesome Lead Generating Methods

We’ll be discussing the way to generate free leads online here, not just free but targeted leads, thus improving lead quality. We want to stay away from wasting time on large quantities of non-converting leads.

In my opinion, however you look at it and whatever you do, all the successful methods, from which people genuinely generated targeted leads, and earned from them, really boils down to one inescapable essential.

Giving away something of value.

This can be anything from an entire blog filled with excellent information not found anywhere else, a newsletter or email offering tips and answers to questions people are looking for, a report or an eBook that helps them immensely and leaves them craving for more.

Let’s take a look at some of the more popular methods of generating free leads online that continue to show excellent results even in today’s every-changing and highly competitive online environment.

Free Leads Online #1: Blogging

Who would have thought that a simple blog can lead your business to success? In 2016, blogging ranked first as the best form of inbound traffic. A couple of years ago, it was SEO that ranked high. This could be because SEO today is basically all about blogging and creating fresh, unique content. Blogging and SEO are interlinked.

So it all boils down to good content. People pontificate about content, saying “good content” cannot be defined. I don’t agree with that line of thought. Good content is nothing but content that other bloggers/webmasters in your niche want to share with their own visitors and subscribers. Good content is valuable information that your visitors share with their friends.

When we say blogging, we mean your own content websites and blogs, as well as “guest posts” on other relevant sites.

All you have to do is create a form asking your visitor’s email address and place it on your blog. Follow up with an auto-responder. As you can see on my blog there are several ways in which my page asks for email addresses and when a person joins my email subscriber list they will receive valuable information that will help them in their business. Its a win-win for everybody because the subscriber receives great and useful content for free that will benefit them and I receive the benefit of hopefully building a strong relationship with that person over time where they may buy from me, join me in my business, recommend me to others or joint venture with me in the future.

If you want to learn how to set up a WordPress Blog and then promote it then you might like these three articles:

Begin Blogging – A Guide to Building Your First WordPress Blog

How To Promote Your Blog – The Definitive Guide

Blogging For Profit – The New Rules That Top Bloggers Know and You Don’t

Free Leads Online #2: SEO

It’s no surprise that more and more people are steering toward SEO. Unlike paid advertising, which stops the minute you stop paying, getting found online through good SEO is an asset that builds over time.  I invest a great deal of time in SEO and I recommend that if you aren’t doing it, start doing it.

Organic search is often the leading source of high quality free leads online and converting customers. But the reason many fail to take advantage of this wonderful medium is because they have no visibility into what sort of content or keywords is generating those free leads online.

You might also like to read this article I recently write about SEO:

Post Penguin Link Building: SEO Isn’t Dead..It’s Just a Lot Easier To Understand

Free Leads Online #3: Social Media Leads 

There are a wide range of theories about using social media for obtaining free leads online.  The problem with most social leads is that they’re not ready to buy. You don’t want to throw thousands of non-buying leads into your funnel every month.

Use social media, but focus on your niche topics and nurture your social media leads properly. Use amazing content always, listen to people, and engage them by asking open-ended questions and by eliciting feedback.

  • Twitter

Twitter search is a great tool. On Twitter’s homepage, you’ll find hot trends. If you click on the trends, you will see the public conversation related to the trend. You can also use your own keywords to search. Start following people in your niche and soon you’ll have many of them following you back.

Another great way getting quality leads is to find people in your niche market that either sell similar or comparable products – and then follow their followers. Once those people start following you back, you’ll soon have a huge list of people following you.  I’ve seen people go from zero to 10,000 followers in a short period of time. Just remember that Twitter do in some cases restrict or disable accounts if users start mass following (and also un-following non followers). There does not appear to be any specific limit they set so just use caution with doing this.

When you “Tweet” interesting and relevant messages on your Twitter account for all your followers to see, you’ll experience a surge of traffic to your website – leads – and finally sales!

But – and this is a BIG one, keep the content on your web page or blog updated to build kick off growth in leads, which usually starts at around 24 – 40 posts. More indexed pages on Google, also equals more leads.

You can read my light hearted post about Twitter Marketing by clicking the link below:

Social Faux Pas You Don’t Want To Make When Marketing With Twitter

  • YouTube

Video is now an essential part of any lead generation strategy. Your goal should be to entertain and educate, to increase awareness about your niche. Optimize your videos with targeted keywords, giving them a chance of reaching the first page of Google and getting free leads online.

Create videos related to your product/service – and include a direct link to your website in the video description, as well as within the video itself. This can be a very profitable way of leveraging the huge number of YouTube users to get many free leads online.

  • Pinterest

You must have heard the chatter about this new social networking site. It’s now an undisputed fact that Pinterest can send huge amounts of traffic when compared to other social networking sites. And people here are in the “buying” mode.  Blogger, Kate Ryan says that she has attracted 16,000 subscribers from Pinterest and her top 10 traffic referring URLs are all Pinterest.

LinkedIn and Facebook are the other two social networking sites you can concentrate your lead generation efforts on to get many free leads online. I’ve written about Facebook several times and these are my most read articles about this social network.

Steps to Successful Facebook Advertising – Time To Go Back To Basics

How to Be Crowned the King Or Queen of Facebook Marketing

Facebook Page Posting – Quick and Dirty Tips For Posting More Content and Creating More Engagement

Free Leads Online #4: Forum Participation

This is time-taking like most genuine free methods are, but it has the potential to help you get laser-targeted free leads online. Join forums that are related to your business. Start conversing with others, answer questions and establish yourself as knowledgeable.

Include a link back to your lead generation pages. Most forums need a specific post count before they allow you to add links, and most of them don’t allow affiliate links. Just don’t be in a hurry to increase your post count, unless you have something of value to share.

Free Leads Online #5: Blog Comments

Posting comments and participating in discussion on other blogs in your niche is excellent. Provide insightful feedback and include a link back to your pages. The idea is to post comments that entice people to follow your link.

Want to know where to find active blogs for you to comment?

Set up Google Alerts to send you an email whenever there is any discussion related to a specific keyword. You’ll receive hundreds of alerts. Visit each blog and spend time posting replies to questions or commenting. This helps you find active places from where your responses can divert traffic to your blog/webpage and give you many free leads online.

Free Leads Online #6: Free Lead Generation Offers

This is something I’ve been working on for many years and it has the potential to generate an insane amount of free leads online.

A lead generation offer is something you offer your prospects, in return for their contact information. It can be a free eBook, report or a coaching series.  Personally, I wouldn’t look at anything that “sells” blatantly. You don’t want to push your prospects away by sounding too salesy. Your free offer should have the ability to pre-sell effectively but very subtly.

The more detailed and valuable the offer, the better it is, as people would be more willing to part with their information.

Alternatively, you can offer free product reviews with a link for people to provide their email, to receive new reviews and updates over email.

Free “junk” is getting harder to give away. So look at offering value. I take the view that anything you give away for free in return for an opt-in should be something that you would be able to sell quite easily. If you do that, you are WAY ahead of the rest of the field in giving value and you will receive many free leads online as a result.

Free Leads Online Take Away…

There are many ways you can generate free leads online and make your lead generation strategies far more powerful and bigger. Try each one of them on a small scale, track them heavily, and stick to those that are sending you the most free leads online.

The key to making lead generation work for you is being able to create a “Brand” that people get addicted to. The product or service you offer should stick in people’s mind and make them want more of it.

The marketer with the most flair, style, impact and value to offer will win – and win big.

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