How To Generate Your Own Red-Hot Home Business Leads

It should be no surprise that the lifeblood of ANY MLM or home based business is having plenty of leads to talk to. It’s also no secret that you make money in Network Marketing by doing two things.

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 many people as you can about what it is you have. There are a few ways to do this with the first being everyone’s favorite “Friends & Family” approach.

But what happens when you work through that list of everyone you know and you’re not a millionaire yet? What happens if you’ve been down that road in the past and it didn’t work out so well? Some of you might even be at the point where your friends and family avoid you like the plague so they don’t get pitched on yet ANOTHER opportunity!

Whatever the situation, the only logical answer short of closing up shop is that you need to find a way to expose your home business or MLM to more people, otherwise known as acquiring leads.

There are two ways to get leads, you can buy generic home based business leads or you can generate your own.

Before we start talking about how to generate your own targeted leads, let’s go ahead and talk about the first option which is buying generic home business leads. This seems to be where most network marketers focus their time, money and energy.

The first thing that you must know about ANY home business lead that you purchase is that no matter how many buzzwords are used in describing that lead. No matter how fresh it is or how good that lead sounds it’s still someone that you don’t know, that doesn’t know you, doesn’t know anything about your business there is no guarantee that they are going to pick up the phone or give you a second of their time to discuss joining your home business.

90% of purchased leads are produced by people filling out generic online forms about making more money from home and you don’t know the 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 that you purchase. Oftentimes you are competing with several other people who are contacting the same leads and the only way to make these types of leads pan out for you is to buy large quantities and sort through them to see who has an interest. So here is my suggestion for network marketers using these types of leads:

#1 - Keep your costs down when you buy “cold” leads. I don’t suggest spending more than 30 cents a lead! Most MLM lead companies online sell leads for $1 to $5 apiece… Stay away from these high priced leads and use a service like BigTimemlmLeads.com where you can get surveyed leads for as little as 14 cents apiece.

#2 - Start to put together a strategy to generate you own home business leads and phase out the cold contact leads over time.

Okay, now for the really fun stuff and the best strategy for building your home business. How do you as a home business owner go out and start generating your own targeted mlm / home business leads?

The first thing you must understand about the process of generating your own home business leads is that it takes time and it’s not something that happens overnight. You have many hoops that you have to jump through in order to get yourself set up with everything you’re going to need.

The goal of generating your own leads is to leverage your time and efforts by being able to cut corners on the “sorting” process as well as position yourself highly with your leads. This means that when you do actually talk to them on the phone they already have an understanding of who you are and what your opportunity and/or product is all about.

This makes your job promoting your home business much easier and leaves your prospects much more responsive to what you want them to do.

So know that we know WHY we want to generate our own positioned leads… It’s now time to look into the step by step process of doing 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 out more information about you and your opportunity.

Step #2 – Drive traffic to your website / capture page.

There are hundreds of different marketing strategies to drive traffic to a website online. The important this is to get as many people to your “Online Presence” as possible.

Step #3 - Convert your traffic into leads.

Using a regular website for your “Online Presence” won’t cut the cake! You need the power of a good capture page that will convert your visitors into leads. The goal of a good capture page isn't to sell people on the opportunity rather educate them on who you are and sell them on what you are going to share with them and why they just 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 to give them some background information about your company and opportunity before you ever get on the phone with them.

Although this might sound a bit confusing at first, it’s really a simple and profitable formula once you get the hang of it. Let’s break 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 Page

The first thing you need to do to generate your own targeted MLM / home business leads is get a capture page that you direct your online 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 of information about you and your opportunity and gives them a chance to “Opt-In” or “Request” more information about what you have to offer.

Now I’m guessing that many of you reading this might have a generic capture page because lots of network marketing companies out there provide them.

Although a generic capture page is better than nothing, it lacks many key functions you need if you truly want to generate “Positioned” leads that have a background about you and your opportunity.

Some other BIG problems with generic capture pages are that they’re not 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 create your own custom capture page. Why? We’ll for many reasons… First off you have control over the content and development of your page. Second, you have the ability to make your capture page unique and sell yourself as much as the business you are selling.

Remember, the goal of a good capture page is to give people a bit of information about yourself and a bit of information about your opportunity and combine this information in a compelling way that gets 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 this you will need to sign up for a web hosting account with Yahoo, HomeStead, GoDaddy or any of the other web hosting companies online and proceed to build a page from scratch. Most of these web hosting companies will have easy to use site builders that you can use to do this and web hosting usually runs between $10 and $20 a month.

The downside to building your own capture page from scratch is that you’re on your own in terms of what to write, how to design it and how to make it work effectively. Since you’re on your own it could take a lot of trial and error before you get something that actually produces. If you are not an expert at writing ad copy, website design, graphics and sales this probably isn’t the best option for you.

#2 – Another way to get a custom capture page built is to hire a professional to do it for you. Depending on where you go this can cost between $300 and $1000 for one very solid capture page. I’ve been building professional capture pages for years and I know that I usually charge $60 an hour with the average project costing around $500 to $1000. Plus I charge a web hosting fee for that page of $20 a month.

The downside to having someone else build your capture page is that it is very hard to make changes after the page is built. What if you want to use a new picture or change the re-direct link? Often times you are at the mercy of the designer and additional edits will probably cost you money.

#3 – By far the best way for a home business owner or network marketer to get their own custom capture page is to use a complete capture page design and marketing service, like MyCaptureSystem.

The MyCaptureSystem program gives you all the tools to build an unlimited number of your very own custom capture pages. MyCaptureSystem, hosts your pages for you, gives you pre-written ad copy and website designs, has a marketing resource center that shows you how to drive traffic to your pages, plus many advanced marketing features that can kick your lead generation efforts into high gear.

Since YOU build the page, you can always make edits to those pages yourself and manage all your marketing campaigns from one easy to use back office. You can learn more about this program by going to MyCaptureSystem.com.

Step #2 – Drive traffic to your capture page.

After you’ve created a great custom capture page the second step of generating your own leads is to drive traffic to your new online destination.

So how do you do this… Many different ways.

Pay-Per-Click Search engines
Article submission online
Blogging
Press Releases
Posting on Message boards and forums
Ezine articles
Search engine submission
Offline advertising
Traffic exchanges
Purchased traffic

Plus many many more!

Traffic generation is not an easy thing to master. It will take some patience and education on your end to learn and implement several different traffic generation strategies.

There are many different training organizations, ebooks, manuals and courses online that can teach you how to drive traffic to your websites. Some of them are great resources while others lack in actual 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 training teleseminars and access to the marketing resource center full of step-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 the biggest thing you need to do is track your results. This is really what separates professionals from those that lose money attempting to 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-in and 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 paid advertising campaigns in hopes of generating leads via your custom capture page.

The first campaign is a $200 Google pay per click search engine campaign and the second one is a $200 pay per click campaign from BigCashTraffic.com. If you let these campaigns run together without separating them than you will never know which one paid off the best (meaning generated you the most amount of leads for the money).

So how do you do you track your results?

Well there are several different services that can help you track your advertising. An example of this is HyperTracker. HyperTracker is a service that provides you different tracking URL’s for each of your different marketing campaigns. This is a very valuable tool for online marketing and sells for $19.95 a month.

I would suggest using HyperTracker if you end up building your own capture 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 is already 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 to track the responsiveness of your page, it’s now time to decide where you want to send your prospects after they become leads. This is very important because you want to educate your prospects as much as possible before you ever pick up the phone to talk to them.

There are two basic strategies you can implement:

#1 – Do a simple redirect to your corporate website, movie presentation, or any website that will educate your new leads about the home business opportunity you are involved with.

#2 – Do option #1 PLUS input them into an auto-responder series of emails. An auto-reponder is a software service that automatically sends out follow-up emails to your leads or subscribers without you having to manually do it.

While option #1 is very simple to accomplish and will get the job done, tying your new leads up in a follow-up series of emails can be very beneficial. The top autoresponder companies’ online right now are Aweber & GetResponse.

So there you have it… Its time to get out there and start generating your own leads!

By now your head might be spinning a little bit and you might even be thinking that this is too complicated for you to go do yourself. Relax and take it one step at a time. Generating your own home business leads will take some effort but it can actually become pretty easy if you start using some of the powerful tools outlined in this article.

As you go on your way today, just remember that marketing your home business is all about hitting it from multiple different angles and taking time to educate yourself on how to be successful.