Best Ways to Generate Leads for your Online Business

The need for leads generation in your online business is to boost sales even though the process can be a bit tricky. It is usually a step-by-step process that requires resource planning and investments that you must decide upon at every stage. For best results, you must be able to leverage as many online digital channels as possible to generate good leads. No matter the size of your online business, these here lead generation tactics can help your business to grow. If you follow these tips, they’ll help you to generate the right leads to grow your online business.

 

Optimize your Digital Presence

Optimizing your digital presence is a perfect way to maintain and grow the virtual presence of a business and attract leads to the business. This is one of the best ways to get leads to your business. Optimization is a technical way of using selected keywords on your content to attract the attention of search engines. Through this SEO effort, search engines particularly Google will rank your website higher in its SERPs. That means more organic traffic and consequently leads. Therefore, one of the best techniques to generate leads online is to keep up with ever-evolving Google Algorithms. This you can do by applying the latest SEO techniques to the content published on your website.

Effective Email Marketing

If properly deployed with effective segmentation and automation, email marketing is a great way to generate leads online for free. As most digital marketers very well know, email marketing remains one of the most effective ways to make people aware of your brand and services online. By deploying emails to drop customized newsletters, promotions, event notifications, and generally create awareness about a product/service, business owners easily generate leads extensively through these activities. If you craft your emails to be short and crisp, carrying the right intro and marketing purpose, having good aesthetics particularly good photos/graphics/images, making sure to include the right CTAs, and launched extensively in a well-planned and executed marketing campaign, they tend to generate more and better leads for a business. If you package your emails in regular newsletters to your email subscribers, it is a good way to grow your brand reputation and consequently generate more leads for the business. Widely sending cold emails is quite useful to help improve your chances of getting leads and converting them into sales/revenues.

Guest Blogging

Blogging is a fantastic content marketing activity business owners can always take advantage of online. That is exactly why guest blogging is one of the most creative ways to generate leads for a business. Guest blogs are done to promote the website content of a business with the help of other blog websites. Technically, guest blogging is the process of publishing your blogs by mutual arrangement and agreement on other websites besides yours. You must be generally good and recognized as a good blogger to effectively pull guest blogging off. If you are good at it, you can publish your blogs on third-party websites mostly for free to get traffic and leads and at times even through paid guest blogging services as well. Depending on the blogging conditions of the third party guest blogging website, you may be allowed CTAs on your blog posts. Such CTAs in combination with catchy blog titles and high quality and informative blog content, can be really great for leads generation and conversion rates. 

 
Build and Grow your Presence on Social Media

With about 4.6 billion active users worldwide, social media has gradually become one huge market out there online. The most popular social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube and the likes are platforms business owners now take advantage of to generate leads and sales. These platforms also have unique in-house tools to help business owners market and grow their businesses through leads generation and effective sales pitches. How do business owners take advantage of social media? This they do by consistently posting highly informative content on the platforms and sharing it widely. Business owners who have a large following on social media platforms benefit from viral sharing of their content, higher engagement with the content, and increased feedback. These activities are great for leads generation.

Work with Social Media Influencers

Working with social media Influencers through Influencer collaborations is one of the most effective ways online businesses generate leads and convert them into sales/revenues. The rapid growth and wider popularity of social media platforms has thrown up social media Influencers. These are persons who have very large following on social media platforms. Their activities play a huge role in influencing the behaviors of their followers. Business owners who are able to collaborate and work with social media Influencers tend to benefit immensely from the activities of these Influencers. Influencer activities are a great way to get leads for a business. Business owners can arrange this collaboration based on their niche business and the type of content that suits their business. If you create content in form of how-to videos, Influencers can help endorse these videos, recommend your products to their huge following or craft content for them with links to your product. Through these activities, Influencer marketing is also considered one great way to generate leads.
 
Ask for Reviews and Customer Testimonials

If you have a bit of experience in Internet marketing, you’ll know how great customer reviews and testimonials can be in leads generation. This is why most business owners directly ask for customers’ reviews and testimonials. These testimonials play a very huge role in helping to create a positive image of your business on the minds of people who come across and read reviews about your business. Business reviews are the first things potential customers, financiers and potential business partners rely on to gauge the reputation of your business. In the Internet world, reputation matters a lot to build trust along the way. It is smart marketing therefore to ensure that good reviews are easily visible on your website and with more clarity to create positive images in the minds of whosoever gets to read them. This is why reviews and testimonials are also top creative ways to generate leads for your business. Reviews and customer testimonials are particularly very useful to build the trust factor for a business. This helps the business to attract a great percentage of leads.

Use Referrals to Attract Leads

Referrals are usually quite suitable for already existing customers and affiliate marketers to invite new customers. It is a highly effective lead generation technique. Referrals are also considered one of the most trustworthy and effective ways to attract engagements. Participating referrers and affiliate marketers are usually in it for a benefit. Such benefits range from commissions, discounts and exclusive coupons which the referrers earn when they generate sales, sign-ups and leads.

Organize Webinars and Seminars

When properly used, webinars and seminars are also very effective to pass important information or even educate a large group of people. Business owners effectively use them to market products/services. If they are advertised well advance and with attractive packages, webinars and seminars can be very effective to educate potential customers about the products/services on sale. They are thus helpful to attract potential customers who became leads courtesy of the webinar/seminar. Technically, social media platforms, video conferencing apps, and many more of suchlike tools are quite helpful in creating and organizing webinars/seminars. They’re very good lead generators as a result. Seminars and webinars are in a class of their own. They are very effective lead generation strategies that help make potential customers aware of brands and products in the market.

Summary

Generating leads for a business takes time and proper planning using the right techniques and marketing channels. The foregoing techniques are very handy to help your business generate leads. If you fail to use the right techniques to generate leads, you risk wasting your time and resources on a merry-go-round without tangible results. Lead generation is hugely important to help stimulate your business growth. Therefore, taking positive and deliberate steps to generate leads is good for your online business.

3 Suspicious Things Affiliate Marketers Should Never Fall For

If you are an affiliate marketer, it is inevitable that you’ll have to market online. That comes with its own dangers because the internet is full of the good, the bad and the ugly as it were. In this age and time, many people are aware that more people are doing business online, particularly affiliate marketing. As a result, scammers have been creating irresistible pitches and websites to lure the uninformed and the gullible into scam businesses. If you are a consumer or business owner, you must be smart enough not to fall for scam businesses online. That said, you can always ask yourself how smart you are in determining scams from legitimate businesses online. If you want to earn legitimate income online, affiliate marketing is a good bet. It is also a legitimate passive income opportunity. This is why scammers deliberately target affiliate marketing for their nefarious activities online. 

 

Most of these scam businesses are sent through tonnes of emails luring people into businesses that promise people millions of dollars online even without any legitimate work done. What you must always ask yourself is shouldn’t these promoters keep these millions to themselves instead of inviting competition? The simple answer is they won’t because they want to scam you. That is one of the peculiar nuances of the Internet. Yes just like physical businesses, the Internet too is prone to scamming, but scamming is a lot worse on the Internet. Therefore, if you want do successful business online, you must take your own private precautions or else you fall for nothing. The following are three common and suspicious things happening on the Internet you must never fall for.

1. Illegitimate Websites: Yes it is a free world out there on the Internet and anyone can create a website, have it hosted and launched on the Internet without hassles. Depending on your fancy, you can even launch hundreds of such websites and do what you like with them. That “what you like” is inclusive of scam business. That is where the danger is. Whenever you come across a website online without a “contact us” or “about us” page, it proves someone is trying to hide something very vital to successful Internet business. If you come across a website that claims to sell products/services online without a customer support or “contact us” page, just switch on your alarm bells. Something is definitely fishy with a website like that. This is because, a true indication of a legitimate online business is a “contact us” page with a working telephone number together with email address, Skype and social media handles and even a physical address provided. The rule of thumb is, no matter how attractive the products on a website are, if you find not a single way you can make contact with the sellers, do not deal. Without any credible way to ask questions about products/services on display and effectively communicate with sellers online, it is difficult to know if you are dealing with a legitimate business. If a website appears illegitimate, it cannot possibly do legitimate business online. You must be very wary of such businesses whenever you see obvious signs of illegitimacy.
 
2. Multi-Level Marketing MLM Scams: If you have been in affiliate business for a while, you may have come across hundreds of MLM businesses promoting one benefit or another, most of them sounding too good to be true. As they say in the business, MLM businesses are a dozen a dime on the Internet. But, always have at the back of your mind, if any online business is too good to be true, it probably is. Even though not all MLM businesses are scams, most are. That is the frightening bit. Here is a tip! Anytime you land on a website and the first thing that gets your attention is the computation they have of their humongous earnings, that looks like the first sign of an MLM. That is when you switch on your alarm bells before proceeding to locate what product/service they’re selling if any. Find out if truly these are the products/services that are really selling to warrant the humongous earnings they’re claiming or if they’re merely reeling out figures from referrals. As a marketer, you must know that MLM only works if there is a product/service to sell and it really sells. If not, beware, you may be on the verge of a scam business.

 
3. Hyped Crappy Products: Online, it is very common to come across websites selling crappy or even rehashed products as affiliate marketing products. The people selling these products could be very smart and very tricky in their trade. You must be extremely cautious when you suspect such products. Your attention may initially be arrested when you see a video or picture about how one Mr. Jones from Dallas, Texas, is earning thousands of Dollars monthly from affiliate marketing. Naturally, the picture will show a big Texan wearing a cute Stetson hat smiling broadly with a huge cigar in his mouth and holding wads of Dollars in his hands and with cute cars, a swimming pool and a huge mansion in the background. Now, that easily gets anyone’s attention. If you scroll through the testimonials, you’ll probably get a link to buy the so-called secrets of the product owner’s success. Even if you find the product expensive, you buy it anyway because you too want to make big bucks like Mr. Jones. When you now access this so-called “big secret” you then realize that it’s just a rehashed version of some free e-book you may have read in the past but this time around, re-tweaked to make phantom and unbelievable claims. It may even be like some crappy and strange looking software from outer space. At this point, you’ve been had already and there’s no question about it. Beware! Not all products/services sold online through affiliate marketing are good products/services. Many are not even products/services properly so called but outright scams.

Last Line

If you do business online, beware lest you easily fall for scam businesses. Scammers are everywhere on the Internet permanently on the prowl looking for anyone who will fall for their scams. Surprisingly, even Scammers online claim to be in business too. So, make sure never to fall too cheaply for their scams. Many people have already fallen victim and are still falling victim daily for one scam or another. Make sure you are not the next victim. Just get smart and you’ll be OK.