For the small business owner, there are plenty of lead generation tactics to increase profits. It doesn’t have to cost much to find new customers via:
- Online advertising
- Radio commercials
- Newspaper adverts
- Trade shows
- Word of mouth
This article is about online lead generation - the most far-reaching, low cost and consistent kind of advertising available today.
Online Lead Generation Tactics
Online lead generation techniques can be used by anyone with a product or service to sell. Even offline businesses can benefit from an internet presence in today’s fast-paced world, as corporate and private customers migrate to the web.
There are four powerful online lead generation tactics that are overlooked by many small business owners to increase profits. These are: social bookmarking, SEO content writing, blogging and Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising.
Social Bookmarking
There are already thousands of social bookmarking sites on the net (such as Digg, Delicious, Facebook, Furl, Reddit, StumbleUpon and Technorati). But social bookmarking needn’t be a daunting task.
The first step is to sign up to a dozen major social sites and submit the website homepage, then news, articles, and any other web content which people may find interesting. This helps the website get recognized by lots of internet surfers, who tag it and recommend it to others. Free customer leads!
Perhaps more importantly, social bookmarking creates lots of inbound links, which Google absolutely loves. It rates the website more highly and places it higher in search pages, which also creates more online exposure.
SEO Content Writing
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) content writing means placing the most valuable keywords in website content in a very specific way. This pleases both Google (and the lesser search engines like Yahoo, MSN and Ask) as well as internet surfers who find the exact content they are looking for. Good SEO content writing means better Google rankings and more exposure. Hiring a professional copywriter for SEO articles makes this a great value form of online lead generation.
Blogging
For many people, blogging is rarely an efficient way to increase profits and make money online. It is far better to build a website and go about it properly. But in the case of online lead generation tactics, niche blogs can be exploited to drive traffic to a specific website.
With good SEO articles in hand, approach some relevant bloggers and see if they want to link to the content in context on a website. This creates more inbound links and is an excellent form of free online advertising, coming as a personal recommendation from the blogger and costing absolutely nothing!
PPC Advertising
Besides others, Google runs an affordable Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising program where sellers only pay for the number of clicks to their site. The links appear among search engine results and on other websites, and can be hidden once a daily PPC budget is met. This highly selective form of advertising is easy to use and won’t break the bank, with online advertising limits starting at $10 per month.
Further Reading
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