Acquiring Sales Leads
Sales leads are important to generating sales. Isn’t that a coincidence? When you are able to bring people to your site you have a better chance of landing the sales. I want to discuss ways to help you locate leads and talk about ways to help you close on them.
The great thing about the Internet is its ability to target a worldwide audience. With its popularity, the majority of people in North America now have at least one email address. Statistics from ConsumerAffairs.com on a September 21, 2006 article show that 66% of the US population has some form of high speed Internet (DSL or Cable) as opposed to 44% with dial-up.
Mark Sceats, published an article on Vizmarketing, a search engine marketing company has some interesting figures stating that in July of 2000, there were over 2.1 billion publicly accessible websites on the Internet. They had a projection that in early 2001, this total would double to over 4 billion. These are huge numbers. Imagine what it is today? But also imagine if you were able to capture one percent of this audience to your site?
So how do you bring people to your website? Do you rely on luck where you just check your stats daily to find out how many visitors you have? Or do you actually work to bring them over? Do you even know how these visitors find their way to your website?
Most of us already know about the popularity of search engines and the importance of rankings, but I wanted to discuss a few more options that maybe you haven’t thought of.
Forums – There are thousands of websites hosting forums. Many forums are specialized by category that draw many readers. A major reason that many of these people go there? To find answers for questions that they have. Forums are a great place to start. Of course you can’t go around splattering your website’s URL all over the place otherwise you are amounting to spamming, but you can read the messages from people who are looking for answers and respond directly to them privately through PM and provide suggestions then lead them to your website. This is a reason I stress the importance of setting up your website to be consulting versus “salesy”.
Community Sites -The popularity of community sites is still strong. These are sites that allow people to gather and make new friends or find friends they may have lost touch with. How many of you have ever visited MySpace, Friendster, or Tagworld? My space has over 100 million registered users, and i'm sure a small percentage of these users have an interest in home automation. So how do you seek them out? One thing you can do is set up a profile catering to home automation products and do a search of other users who share the same interest. You can add them as friends or send them direct messages, or even start up communities for these people to find their way into. Capturing one percent of 100 million users amounts to quite a pretty penny.
Blog Sites - The blog explosion started around three to five years ago, and now there are thousands of sites catering to bloggers everywhere. Some of the more popular blog sites are digg.com and livejournal.com (just to name a couple) that host millions of bloggers and the hobbies they write about. You too can capitalize on the popularity of blogging by writing about home automation products, reviews, and other informative things that people can read about. There are even blog search engines that you can submit your site to reach a wider audience. I use pingoat.com which helps to spread my blog to all the other major blog search engines.
Link Exchanges - Nowadays everyone with a website wants to advertise their sites, so are willing to exchange links. Your best chances of earning leads are by exchanging links with sites that offer similar services as yours and draw a lot of visitors.
These are just a few thoughts. If you have other suggestions, we want to hear from you!