Let’s face it, every business needs leads. I don’t care what your service or product is, if you don’t have a steady, fresh, stream of prospects coming through your marketing funnel, your business will die. Some die faster, and others whither away quietly. Either way, your business needs leads! I will share with you two ways that I like to get my leads. They are pretty simple and straightforward. However, don’t discount these principles as elementary. It seems like the more technology advances, the more we like to complicate the simple things that are at work in our lives and businesses. It does not have to be this way. Moving on…

The two ways that I prefer to generate my leads is through the search engines, more specifically pay-per-click advertising and buying them outright from lead generation companies. Obviously the best way is to generate them yourself. The reasons are obvious, first, since they landed on your page the are many more times open to what your offer is as opposed to someone who filled out a generic form or survey. And secondly, you have the opportunity to close the lead much faster when you generate it because it’s not considered a “cold” lead. I know that leads are technically not “cold” but you can see the difference here.

In order to generate leads from the search engines, you’ll see a few things. First, you’ll need a domain, hosting (for the site), a customer contact form or shopping cart (with merchant account) if you are taking live orders on the site. I recommend you create a landing page, with a compelling headline and a call to action at the bottom. Make it short and sweet. Remember that you typically only have a few seconds to capture the attention of your prospects, and if you are generating the traffic via PPC, then you’ll want to maximize it even further by perhaps including an opt-in form. This allows you to collect the name and email of all your visitors and practically forces them to insert their name to get more information. This is great because you can plug them into an auto responder and have multiple opportunities to follow up with your leads.

In order to be successful with PPC, you have to know your numbers. How much does it cost for you to convert a sale, and does that cost make sense for you? Once you have those numbers down, you will have to establish a daily budget for your expenditures. Both Google Adwords and Yahoo! Search Marketing allow you to set your daily budgets. Those are the only two companies that I’d go with and if you have to pick one go with Adwords because you’ll be online in literally 15 minutes and can start generating orders. One word of warning with PPC. You can blow a lot of money FAST in PPC marketing. If you are not on top of what’s going on in your account, you can find yourself broke really fast.

Advertising on the both search engine giants, more specifically PPC, is a great way to generate sales leads and gain lighting fast exposure for whatever you’re selling.