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It should be no surprise that the lifeblood of ANY MLM or homebased business is having plenty of leads to talk to. It’s also nosecret that you make money in Network Marketing by doing twothings. Acquiring new customers using your product Acquiring new representatives to promote your product Now the only way to get these two things done is to talk to as manypeople as you can about what it is you have. There are a few waysto do this with the first being everyone’s favorite “Friends &Family” approach.But what happens when you work through that list of everyone youknow and you’re not a millionaire yet? What happens if you’ve beendown that road in the past and it didn’t work out so well? Some ofyou might even be at the point where your friends and family avoidyou like the plague so they don’t get pitched on yet ANOTHERopportunity!Whatever the situation, the only logical answer short of closing upshop is that you need to find a way to expose your home business orMLM to more people, otherwise known as acquiring leads. There are two ways to get leads, you can buy generic home basedbusiness leads or you can generate your own.Before we start talking about how to generate your own targetedleads, let’s go ahead and talk about the first option which isbuying generic home business leads. This seems to be where mostnetwork marketers focus their time, money and energy.The first thing that you must know about ANY home business leadthat you purchase is that no matter how many buzzwords are used indescribing that lead. No matter how fresh it is or how good thatlead sounds it’s still someone that you don’t know, that doesn’tknow you, doesn’t know anything about your business there is noguarantee that they are going to pick up the phone or give you asecond of their time to discuss joining your home business.90% of purchased leads are produced by people filling out genericonline forms about making more money from home and you don’t knowthe circumstances about why they filled out these online forms.Were they looking for a Job instead of a home business opportunity?Were they trying to win a free Xbox?Where they drunk behind the computer at 3:00 am?You just don’t know!There are really no way cut corners on prospecting the leads thatyou purchase. Oftentimes you are competing with several other peoplewho are contacting the same leads and the only way to make thesetypes of leads pan out for you is to buy large quantities and sortthrough them to see who has an interest. So here is my suggestionfor network marketers using these types of leads: #1 - Keep your costs down when you buy “cold” leads. I don’tsuggest spending more than 30 cents a lead! Most MLM leadcompanies online sell leads for $1 to $5 apiece… Stay away fromthese high priced leads and use a service like BigTimemlmLeads.comwhere you can get surveyed leads for as little as 14 cents apiece. #2 - Start to put together a strategy to generate you own homebusiness leads and phase out the cold contact leads over time.Okay, now for the really fun stuff and the best strategy forbuilding your home business. How do you as a home business ownergo out and start generating your own targeted mlm / home businessleads? The first thing you must understand about the process of generatingyour own home business leads is that it takes time and it’s notsomething that happens overnight. You have many hoops that youhave to jump through in order to get yourself set up witheverything you’re going to need. The goal of generating your own leads is to leverage your time andefforts by being able to cut corners on the “sorting” process aswell as position yourself highly with your leads. This means thatwhen you do actually talk to them on the phone they already have anunderstanding of who you are and what your opportunity and/orproduct is all about. This makes your job promoting your home business much easier andleaves your prospects much more responsive to what you want them todo. So know that we know WHY we want to generate our own positionedleads… It’s now time to look into the step by step process ofdoing so.So here is the "formula for success" when it comes to generating your own leads:Step #1 – Get an online presence.Your “Online Presence” is where you will send prospects to find outmore information about you and your opportunity. Step #2 – Drive traffic to your website / capture page.There are hundreds of different marketing strategies to drivetraffic to a website online. The important this is to get as manypeople to your “Online Presence” as possible. Step #3 - Convert your traffic into leads.Using a regular website for your “Online Presence” won’t cut thecake! You need the power of a good capture page that will convertyour visitors into leads. The goal of a good capture page isn't tosell people on the opportunity rather educate them on who you areand sell them on what you are going to share with them and why theyjust gotta see what's on the other side. Step #4 - Introduce your prospects to your Opportunity.After your prospect opts in and becomes a lead you then want togive them some background information about your company andopportunity before you ever get on the phone with them.Although this might sound a bit confusing at first, it’s really asimple and profitable formula once you get the hang of it. Let’sbreak down each step and show you exactly what you need to make this system happen.Step #1 – Get an online presence - Custom Capture Page vs. Generic Capture PageThe first thing you need to do to generate your own targeted MLM /home business leads is get a capture page that you direct youronline marketing efforts and potential prospects to.What exactly is a capture page you might be asking? Simply put, a capture page is a website that gives prospects a small amount ofinformation about you and your opportunity and gives them a chanceto “Opt-In” or “Request” more information about what you have tooffer.Now I’m guessing that many of you reading this might have a genericcapture page because lots of network marketing companies out thereprovide them.Although a generic capture page is better than nothing, it lacksmany key functions you need if you truly want to generate“Positioned” leads that have a background about you and youropportunity.Some other BIG problems with generic capture pages are that they’renot unique and you have no control over the look and feel of them.What I consider a much better thing to do is to go out and createyour own custom capture page. Why? We’ll for many reasons… Firstoff you have control over the content and development of your page. Second, you have the ability to make your capture page unique andsell yourself as much as the business you are selling. Remember, the goal of a good capture page is to give people a bitof information about yourself and a bit of information about youropportunity and combine this information in a compelling way thatgets your prospects interested in what you are talking about. There are several ways to build or get a CUSTOM capture page: #1 - You can build one from scratch all by yourself. To do thisyou will need to sign up for a web hosting account with Yahoo,HomeStead, GoDaddy or any of the other web hosting companies onlineand proceed to build a page from scratch. Most of these webhosting companies will have easy to use site builders that you canuse to do this and web hosting usually runs between $10 and $20 amonth.The downside to building your own capture page from scratch is thatyou’re on your own in terms of what to write, how to design it andhow to make it work effectively. Since you’re on your own it couldtake a lot of trial and error before you get something thatactually produces. If you are not an expert at writing ad copy,website design, graphics and sales this probably isn’t the bestoption for you. #2 – Another way to get a custom capture page built is to hire aprofessional to do it for you. Depending on where you go this cancost between $300 and $1000 for one very solid capture page. I’vebeen building professional capture pages for years and I know thatI usually charge $60 an hour with the average project costingaround $500 to $1000. Plus I charge a web hosting fee for thatpage of $20 a month.The downside to having someone else build your capture page is thatit is very hard to make changes after the page is built. What ifyou want to use a new picture or change the re-direct link? Oftentimes you are at the mercy of the designer and additional editswill probably cost you money.#3 – By far the best way for a home business owner or networkmarketer to get their own custom capture page is to use a completecapture page design and marketing service, like MyCaptureSystem. The MyCaptureSystem program gives you all the tools to build anunlimited number of your very own custom capture pages. MyCaptureSystem, hosts your pages for you, gives you pre-written adcopy and website designs, has a marketing resource center thatshows you how to drive traffic to your pages, plus many advancedmarketing features that can kick your lead generation efforts intohigh gear.Since YOU build the page, you can always make edits to those pagesyourself and manage all your marketing campaigns from one easy touse back office. You can learn more about this program by going toMyCaptureSystem.com. Step #2 – Drive traffic to your capture page.After you’ve created a great custom capture page the second step ofgenerating your own leads is to drive traffic to your new onlinedestination.So how do you do this… Many different ways.Pay-Per-Click Search enginesArticle submission onlineBloggingPress ReleasesPosting on Message boards and forumsEzine articlesSearch engine submissionOffline advertisingTraffic exchangesPurchased trafficPlus many many more!Traffic generation is not an easy thing to master. It will takesome patience and education on your end to learn and implementseveral different traffic generation strategies.There are many different training organizations, ebooks, manualsand courses online that can teach you how to drive traffic to yourwebsites. Some of them are great resources while others lack inactual value. Some of my favorite marketing personalities are, Terry Duff & Gino Nicoli of the Dream Team & Jonathan Mizel of the Online Marketing Letter. If you decide to build your capture page using MyCaptureSystem,don’t forget that your subscription includes weekly LIVE trainingteleseminars and access to the marketing resource center full ofstep-by-step traffic generation techniques.Step #3 – Convert visitors into leads & measure your success.As you start to generate your own leads from your capture page thebiggest thing you need to do is track your results. This is reallywhat separates professionals from those that lose money attemptingto generate their own leads.You want to track your results in a few different ways…#1 – How many people visit your page compared to how many opt-inand become a lead.#2 – What campaigns are worth the money and which ones are a waste of money.Here is what I mean by this. Let’s say you are doing two paidadvertising campaigns in hopes of generating leads via your customcapture page. The first campaign is a $200 Google pay per click search enginecampaign and the second one is a $200 pay per click campaign fromBigCashTraffic.com. If you let these campaigns run togetherwithout separating them than you will never know which one paid offthe best (meaning generated you the most amount of leads for themoney).So how do you do you track your results?Well there are several different services that can help you trackyour advertising. An example of this is HyperTracker. HyperTracker is a service that provides you different trackingURL’s for each of your different marketing campaigns. This is avery valuable tool for online marketing and sells for $19.95 a month.I would suggest using HyperTracker if you end up building your owncapture pages from scratch or hire someone to build them for you. If you decide to use MyCaptureSystem to build your capture pages,don’t spend the $19.95 for HyperTracker because this feature isalready built into the MyCaptureSystem program.Step #4 – Introduce your prospects to your opportunity.So now that you’ve built an awesome custom capture page (or pages),started driving traffic to that capture page, and have a way totrack the responsiveness of your page, it’s now time to decidewhere you want to send your prospects after they become leads. This is very important because you want to educate your prospectsas much as possible before you ever pick up the phone to talk tothem. There are two basic strategies you can implement:#1 – Do a simple redirect to your corporate website, moviepresentation, or any website that will educate your new leads aboutthe home business opportunity you are involved with.#2 – Do option #1 PLUS input them into an auto-responder series ofemails. An auto-reponder is a software service that automaticallysends out follow-up emails to your leads or subscribers without youhaving to manually do it.While option #1 is very simple to accomplish and will get the jobdone, tying your new leads up in a follow-up series of emails canbe very beneficial. The top autoresponder companies’ online rightnow are Aweber & GetResponse. So there you have it… Its time to get out there and startgenerating your own leads!By now your head might be spinning a little bit and you might evenbe thinking that this is too complicated for you to go do yourself. Relax and take it one step at a time. Generating your own homebusiness leads will take some effort but it can actually become pretty easy if you start using some of the powerful tools outlined in thisarticle.As you go on your way today, just remember that marketing your homebusiness is all about hitting it from multiple different angles andtaking time to educate yourself on how to be successful.
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Josh Bradley is the CEO of Big Cash Creator LLC, an online marketing company that specializes on helping home business owners and network marketing companies achieve success online. Discover the awesome secrets behind Josh's brand new complete lead generation system and even sign up for a free account at www.mycapturesystem.com.
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