What Lead Generation Methods Works Best For You?

Yup. Go on elance and pay someone to generate you a list of niche #s to call.

Create a referral system and have leads generated to you on auto-pilot. Offering a fixed fee or percentage based compensation.

Cheers,

~Dexx

1. Calling people doing groupon offers and asking how repeat sales is going
2. Linkedin: search results, group participation, ANSWERS, Advanced Search, (multi group posts)
3. Document Sharing Sites
4. Participation on various social networks
5. Video marketing on Youtube
6. speaking engagements
7. Business Networking
8. Calling people in YP not found on page 1 of google for their heading/classification
9. Offering FREE items of value and syndicating them on the web
10. Exhibitions: Attending, Visiting and speaking at them.
11. An ezine
12. Skype. (People are only waking up to adding their skype address on the biz card)
13. Teleseminars

Some better than others, good days, bad days, but all effective one way or other.

Hope that gets you thinking...



Fraser

1. Business Mixers
2. Speaking
3. MeetUp Groups

Anytime I get slow, I attend 1 or all of these 3. I went to a SEM meetup group last night, got 3 leads/prospects that I am following up on today.

Free lance portals are the best option for finding clients.As Cold calling is time consuming you will get results but it will take you a bit of time.

What is your product/services you are searching clients for?

I'm surprised no one mentioned PPC. So easy to throw some ads out there with a good solid ad copy telling them why your service is better than anyone else out there. After the copy, insert a lead capture form in the form of a "request a quote form." Then, anyone you contact, has explicitly asked you to contact them, no cold calling.

If you get too many tire kickers, ask for more info on the form and you'll pay more per lead, but less time wasted contacting prospects that aren't really interested.

If you want to get maximum leads, ask for name and email only, and have the request a quote form also subscribe them to an autoresponder sequence that sells your service, educates them, and offers free info, for a few weeks.

The method that works best for me is the method I spent most time working.

It is NOT the method that "works best". I just want you to be clear of that.
For me, I tend to do really well with classified.

My second best performer is youtube.
Then more recently, facebook.

It is IN THIS ORDER, because of how I invested my time. I spent more time in classifieds than anything else. A bit less time with youtube. Then a bit less with facebook.

My next large investment will be PPC.
SEO is also something I invested time in, but I invested enough time to just learn the basics. SEO is never something I would waste my own time doing. I just want to know about it, so I know how to outsource it effectively.

It all depends on HOW you invest your time.
No methods are really different, only our skills.
And the only thing that seperates our skills, is how each man invests his 24 hours.


Here is my most important piece of advice. Every person, every marketer, needs a "safety shield". My safety shield is Craigslist. I have invested so much time into it, that if I'm running into problems getting leads in other areas, I always fall back on CL. I amp up my marketing in that 1 area, which gets me back on my feet as I go back to other areas to further master them.

I have many resources when it comes to CL. All those resources I have are soley attributed to TIME I have invested in the past. Which is why other people will use CL and fail miserably.

For instance, all my accounts. I have a lot of them. And I don't abuse them with spam (although I use to).
Or all my tested copy that took months to test. Knowing what headlines I need to use rather than figuring it all out from scratch. This is a huge "safety net" for me.

Having MY OWN personal data for what time frames & days are the best to post. You can't rely on other peoples data! They are marketing for different niches, in different locations, to different people, which changes a lot of things imo... so you NEED your own data. I always get a huge response on mondays & tuesdays. Tuesdays tend to be the best for me. I still haven't figured out why. On my facebook, I'd see tons of people online on sunday morning. So I made the error in believing that would be the best time/day to get leads on CL. Untill I realized it wasn't, tuesday was lol.

The point is though, all my #'s TELL ME, to post on TUESDAY for MY SPECIFIC NICHE and MY SPECIFIC AREA. You may find that most people look for a barber or landscaper on thursday/friday, and a mold contractor on monday/tuesday. Never make generalized correlations. Always do your own tests. These types of tests will only make your "safety net" thicker.

Anyway, I'm getting into a rant. But those are some things to keep in mind. Always have a safety net, and always learn new skills on the side. Never focus on 1 method 100%. You can have a dominant method, but it should never be your only method. I've gotten really good response with youtube too, but for some reason there are a ton of haters on youtube. A ton of dirtbags. Like people complain about getting flagged on CL, I get that problem more on youtube (no idea why). Many of the videos I outranked over the last month, have triggered a storm of backlash. We had "customers" leaving negative comments, then checked their names in our records and realized they were all fake. People are flagging our videos. We know its our competitors trying to attack us.

We're even dealing with a company who said we violated their trademark and asked us to take one of our most successful youtube videos down. Well I am not stupid. The video is of our company, in a clients home, ripping THEIR defective system out. We simply show the logo on their broken system. They've been hassling us for 4 weeks now asking for the clients information, and telling us to take the video down. I told them our lawyer would be speaking to them soon, but I'm not taking it down till he tells us we have to, which he hasn't. They can kiss my ass. If google can't stop people from making websites about why google sucks, then this company can't stop me from making videos about why their systems suck. And we don't even say that, the customer does. Even if our lawyer tells us to take it down, I have a legal plan B thats 1,000 times worse. The problem isn't that we hate them, its that they make cheap/shitty systems. They want their entire reputation online to look pristine... when their service sucks. Its not happening.

/end rant

-------------------------------

My favorite way is having an influx of business from free leads that are highly targeted and already qualified.

A bit like referrals but the key is to find people who want you to succeed with a new client..because it is good for them if you do

Posting in classifieds is quite good as well as long as you have posted the ad in right category and under right city. People in classifieds do want to purchase and this sure can help them and it can help you.

Lead gen for you or for a client?

I found that once we got to a certain tipping point that referrals where the best lead gen system for us.

When we where doing paid advertising our client acquisition cost was $168 per client.

Then we got to the point that we had a self sustaining system with referrals our per client acquisition cost went down around 30-60 dollars (didn't really track - guesstimate)

We would reward clients that referred us business with pens, lunches, buy ad space for them... it would depend on what the client was into.

Again this doesn't work so well if you don't have any clients yet, but I would keep it in your back pocket and start asking each one. Prospects and clients.

OH this was awesome for us because we closed about 1 out of 8 for prospects but we closed closer to 1 out of 3 for referral prospects.

Endorsed relationships are where is at