Autopilot Online Success » Online Lead Generation

Exposed: 3 Popular Myths About Generating Online Leads

Karen Sielski — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 20:33:57 +0000

There are numerous methods for generating online leads and growing your business online. Before you decide on an approach you should consider these 3 popular myths.

Online Lead Generation Myth #1: There really aren’t any free online lead generation strategies. You’re probably thinking “But Karen, there are lots of ways to generate free leads on the internet like article writing, forum postings, press releases, safelists, blogging, online videos, classified ads, social networking, etc.”

Let me explain. While it is true there are methods for generating online leads that do not cost any money, there are hidden costs most people do not consider.

The hidden costs are time, leverage, effectiveness, and lost opportunity. When selecting your online marketing strategies, it is crucial to look at more than just the dollar cost of the method. You need to take into account your marketing budget and net profit of each strategy.

Online Lead Generation Myths Busted

Let’s look at a hypothetical example. If you start online advertising with solo ads in ezines, it could easily cost you hundreds of dollars a month of advertising. But you could get hundreds of leads or more and lots of sales.

Assume you spend $500 on solo ads in a month and you get 800 opt-ins from those ads. You make 16 sales and you have a profit of $50 per sale. In this scenario you would have a net profit of $300 (16 x 50 = $800 – $500 for ads). You spent about 6 hours researching which ezines to run ads in and writing your solo ad.

Now in scenario 2 you initiate a “free” article marketing campaign. You write 20 articles in a month and submit them to a top article marketing directory, sending readers to an opt-in page. You have no out of pocket costs since you write the article yourself. You get 100 leads and 2 sales with the same $50 profit per sale.

You spent 30 minutes writing each article and 10 minutes submitting it to an article directory. Overall you spent 13 hours on this approach for the month. In this scenario you have a net profit of $100 (2 x $50 = $100 – $0 cost). This scenario is free but you have spent more time and have less net profit at the end of the month.

Now this is a hypothetical example and there are additional factors to consider. In no way should you assume solo ads are better than article marketing. The point is to show you that while some methods have 0 dollar cost, they may cost more in time, produce less profit, and have less residual income.

Bottom line, don’t just look at the initial cost of your online advertising.

Online Lead Generation Myth #2: Relationship businesses can’t be done on the internet.

This is absolutely false. There are many ways to build online relationships. Online video is extremely effective for online relationship building. When done correctly, email can be effective as well. And of course, social networking is growing at an unprecedented pace.

Instead of focusing on the quantity of your online connections, focus on quality and non-spammy marketing approaches. You can have 10,000 friends but if you come across as a spammy marketer you will not get any sales. On the other hand, if you have 100 connections and work to build relationships and add value to those 100 people you could have many sales.

Online Lead Generation Myth #3: It is not possible to generate high quality, low cost leads online. Fortunately, this is not true. There are many ways to build a responsive list of prospects without spending a fortune.

Actively participating in forums focused on your industry or niche is one great way to build a list of hyper responsive prospects. There are many others. It does not have to cost an arm and a leg to generate high-quality online leads.

Bonus Tip: Get FREE step-by-step instructions on generating hyper-responsive online leads. Just enter your name and email address below and you’ll get immediate access.

Yours In Online Success,

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5 Step Formula For Generating Real-Time Leads Via Social Marketing

Karen Sielski — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 12:30:37 +0000

There are numerous ways to effectively grow your business using social marketing. Social networks like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, MySpace, Tagged, and the professionally oriented LinkedIn are all the rage today.

When used properly, social networking sites can provide massive leverage to grow your business. But for many people, social networking can also be a huge time sink if you don’t know how to connect the dots and have people in your social networks buying from you.

You need to present your business in an appropriate way, without spamming or turning off your online friends, and potentially damaging your relationship with them forever. You’ve got to get them to know, like, and trust you before they will buy what you are selling, especially online. Your online success depends on this more than anything else.

Now I’m going to give you a 5 step formula for getting massive amounts of targeted, free real-time leads. I assume you’ve already chosen the appropriate social networks for your industry or business, opened your accounts, and established some friends.

What’s the next step? One of the best ways to form a solid business relationship with your network and get more sales is to host an event. It can be a webinar, teleseminar, or even an in-person event.

If you live in a remote geographic area, it will be more difficult to get a big turnout for an in-person event, but if you live in a populated area you can get a good turnout by following this formula. The potential is obviously huge for online events, especially if you do a webinar format.

Let’s dive into the details of the online success 5 step formula.

Step 1. A few weeks before the event write an online press release and submit it to a few free online press release sites like PressAbout and PRLog. Setup a google alert on the keywords you used in the press release. The keyword alert will automatically tell you when your press release gets published.

When the free online press release gets picked up, then go to paid online services like PRWeb and WebWire. You should start getting free, targeted web traffic from the press releases immediately.

Step 2. If you have a website or blog, write about the event on your website. Take the blog entry and turn it into an article and post it on social sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Post your event on EventBrite.com.

Step 3. Tell all of your social marketing friends about the event, and ask them to share it with their friends.

Step 4. Create a short Powerpoint presentation about the content of your event and yourself. Post the slides at SlideShare.net with a transcript.

Step 5. Turn the Powerpoint presentation into a video and submit the video on YouTube and TubeMogul.

Make sure to send people to your social marketing site or blog page that tells a little bit about yourself. Have people register for the event and send them an email reminder the day before the event and the day of the event.

Follow these 5 steps to generate free real-time leads, then provide valuable content at your event and you will be leveraging your time on social marketing sites into business sales, not just hanging out and having a good time.

To Your Massive Online Success,

PS – To learn more about how to generate tidal waves of traffic to your blog or website, get FREE Instant Access to the 15 Ways To Generate Endless Leads Training Series when you fill in the quick form at the top right. It will only take a few seconds, go do it now!

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How To Use Twitter Marketing To Promote Your Blog or Website

Karen Sielski — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 16:52:33 +0000

If you are trying to figure out how to correctly use Twitter marketing to promote your blog or website, watch this video. You’ll learn step-by-step how to get started, what tools to use, and what not to do. Enjoy!

To Your Twitter Marketing Success,
Karen

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Video: How Important Is Social Media?

Karen Sielski — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 20:55:27 +0000

In this mind-boggling video, you’re going to learn

1. The tool 80% of companies are using as their primary tool to find employees.

2. What celebrities have more twitter followers than Ireland, Norway, and Panama

3. The type of recommendation 78% of consumers trust

4. What successful companies in social media do differently

And much, much more. You’ll hear some cool music too. But before you watch the video, I want you to answer the following 2 questions:

1. Do you think social media is a fad?

2. On a scale of 1-10, with 10 the highest score, how important do you think it is to grow your business using social media?

Now click play to watch the video…

Now answer the 2 questions again. Are you answers different than the first time?

This is a very thought provoking video, and one that can have a profound impact on your marketing. I would love to have you share your thoughts and comments on what you have just watched…

Success!

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Online Video Marketing – Don’t Get Shut Down By YouTube!

Karen Sielski — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 21:10:18 +0000

The online video marketing community is buzzing these days because YouTube is on a rampage. They are shutting down accounts right and left, without any warning whatsoever! Thousands of online video marketers have been affected by this, hopefully not you.

Online Video Marketing Slap

Imagine putting long hours into creating online videos that get you on the front page of Google and create a steady stream of free targeted web traffic on a daily basis. You followed the advice of the pros and life is good.

Now imagine trying to log in and finding out your account has been permanently disabled and there is no way for you to get it back. And the worst part is your videos are gone just like that, so unless you have a copy on your hard drive, you have lost all your content too!

All of your hard work is down the tubes, no pun intended. You are no longer on the front page of google, or any page for that matter. And your online video leads are now a big fat 0.

If you don’t want this to happen to you, here are 7 online video marketing guidelines for avoiding the wrath of YouTube:

DO NOT create multiple accounts. Only create 1 YouTube account, no matter what you have been told in the past. The rules are changing. You can still have multiple channels within your single account.
DO NOT upload the same video with a different title, keyword, description, etc. Unless you want to get shutdown and lose everything. Only 1 upload of a video.
DO NOT use software to add friends on your channel.
DO NOT use software to add comments to your videos.
DO NOT purchase YouTube views. Create good videos, use viral networking, and get views naturally.
DO NOT spam your video description, title or tags with keywords.
DO NOT use Traffic Geyser to upload your videos to YouTube. However, you can still use Traffic Geyser to upload to other video hosting sites.

Bottom line, create a single account, upload a video once, and avoid software such as TubeBlasterPro and Traffic Geyser. If you try to “game” the system, the penalty is very high. Don’t do it!

To Your Online Video Marketing Success,
Karen

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Online Article Marketing Super Tip: Submitting Your Articles For Maximum Effect

Karen Sielski — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 19:19:35 +0000

I am a huge fan of online article marketing because it flat out works and gets me results each and every day on autopilot. But, there are ways you can implement online article marketing that will magnify your results 10 fold or more.

If you are going to take the time to write articles, you want to get the maximum results. Here are some great tips for you based on personal experience.

Online Article Marketing - EzineArticles.com

Let’s assume you’ve written some keyword rich articles, a topic we’ll cover in detail in a future post. Now what do you do with your online articles to get the most visibility and results.

If you are strapped for time and money, you can just submit your article to ezinearticles.com to get the most bang for your buck. ezinearticles.com currently gets over 15 million unique visitors a month. You only need a small fraction of those to get excellent results.

If you have a little bit more time, or you can afford a very inexpensive internet virtual assistant, you can submit your articles to the top 5 online article marketing directories.

Here are 5 of the top generic online article marketing sites, in order of traffic rank, with the best at the top:

1. Ezinearticles.com
2. Articlesbase.com
3. Goarticles.com
4. Articledashboard.com
5. Searchwarp.com

If you are writing about a particular niche, you may want to find article sites directly related to your niche and see what results you get submitting your articles.

As an FYI, I pay my internet virtual assistant less than $4 to submit an article to the top 5 article directories and have found the increased traffic and back links to my site well worth the cost.

Now, if you REALLY want to get results from your online article marketing, and have the budget and time for it, you can use a tool such as Unique Article Wizard to create hundreds of unique versions of your article and submit them to hundreds or thousands of online article marketing directories.

This last approach is absolutely KILLER! What kind of results can you get with it? I know someone that got 673 opt-ins in 2 months using this approach coupled with social bookmarking and online video marketing. And they will continue to get opt-ins even if they don’t do anything else. They are on the front page of google for over 100 niche phrases from submitting 45 articles using this method. Not bad, eh?

This last method is so powerful I will be devoting an entire post to it in the near future. If you don’t want to miss it, just provide your name and email below and you’ll receive an email when new articles are published here, and you’ll also get incredibly valuable strategies and tips for generating online leads and growing your business online.

Yours in Massive Online Success,
Karen

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5 Surprising Split Testing Results For More Online Income

Karen Sielski — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 07:22:00 +0000

After mastering traffic generation, split testing is the next most important skill you should learn, master, and implement for massive online success. Split testing allows you to generate more opt-ins, more conversions, and more money with the same amount of traffic.

In this article, I’m going to share with you some very powerful information. I’m going to give you 5 split testing tips that you can use to increase your income right away!

Split Testing For Online Success

Tip 1: Try lengthing your guarantee to increase your sales page conversions. But don’t just look at your sales conversion number, also look at your return rate. Here’s why.

Increasing your guarantee to 365 days may increase your conversions 5%, but it can also reduce your return rate 38%. Whoa! That’s huge.

Tip 2: Use an Amazon style buy button. It can increase conversions by 14%. People are used to buying in Amazon so it will seem comfortable and secure to them if you use a similar button. And make it big.

Tip 3: Provide many buying opportunities in your sales page, not just one. Place the first buy button or link after the first testimonial. This has been shown to increase conversions 31%! Another good location is under the guarantee, in the order box, and in the PS at the very bottom of the page.

Tip 4: On your order page, dispaly an image of your product at the top of the page. This can increase conversions 15% as well as decrease order cart abandonment rates drastically.

Tip 5: Don’t forget about your customers after the sales. Create a follow up autoresponder series. In these messages, teach them how to use the product.

Tell them what to do. Send success stories. Request testimonials. Include how-to videos. Most returns are becaues the user didn’t use the product, not because it isn’t a good product.

This is extremely valuable information that can make a huge difference in your online income. But don’t just take my word for it. Be sure to validate this information with your product. Do your own split testing with your sales funnel. You will be amazed at the results and your increased income.

To your massive online success,
Karen

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Twitter For Online Marketing Success

Karen Sielski — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 07:14:15 +0000

Twitter is the hottest micro-blogging service on the planet right now but how do use twitter for online marketing success? Twitter can be a terrific marketing vehicle if used correctly. And it is a wonderful vehicle for building your tribe via tribal marketing.

Twitter can get your business more visibility and it can help you get more influence online. Influence is the key to getting anything you want. If you have influence, people will trust you and they will buy what you have to offer.

If you have not incorporated twitter into your online marketing arsenal and are wondering what it is all about, check out this video.

To Your Twitter Success,
Karen

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5 Ways To Get Free Targeted Traffic In 3 Days Or Less

Karen Sielski — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 18:40:46 +0000

Getting your great product or offer on your website is only half of the equation for online success, the other half is getting a steady flood of high quality, free targeted traffic to your site. Without this you will have zero sales and $0 income!

I’m going to share 5 no cost ways you can get high quality, free targeted traffic to your website. That’s right. All 5 of these tactics are completely FREE and they can produce quality traffic to your website within 3 days of less.

Let’s get started!

1. We’re going to focus on getting free targeted traffic when our potential customers or prospects search on terms in Google, Yahoo! Search, or Bing. These are called keywords, or key terms if there are multiple words. Good examples are “online guitar lessons” or “how to improve my golf swing”. We want our website to show up when someone enters this type of search.

The key is to be specific with our search terms, and not general. If you pick “golf” or “guitar” those terms aren’t specific enough and our website won’t show up in the search results because there is too much competition.

Free Targeted Traffic Chart

2. After you pick your key terms, write a page in your blog or website for this key term. Use the key term in the title, the first sentence, and every few paragraphs.

3. Now bookmark this page in social bookmarking sites like digg.com and stumbleupon.com.

4. Modify your article a little bit and submit to a Web 2.0 content site such as Squidoo.com, HubPages.com, or weebly.com.

5. Modify your article again or write a new article on the same key term and submit it to a few of the top online article marketing directories such as EzineArticles.com, GoArticles.com, Articles-Dashboard.com, etc.

In your resource box, link back to your website or blog page. This will boost your website ranking and get you free targeted traffic from the article directories. Sweet!

6. Now take your article and make it a PowerPoint presentation. Record a video of the presentation and submit the video to video hosting sites such as YouTube and Vimeo.

Video is hot. People love to watch videos and it can provide very quick free targeted traffic.

7. Find a forum related to your niche, open a free account, create your profile, add a link to your website page or blog post in your signature. Comment on 5 discussions in the forum.

The 5 methods outlined here to get high quality, free targeted traffic to your website are social bookmarking, Web 2.0 content sharing sites, article directories, online video, and forums.

After you’ve done these methods they are quick and simple to implement. And they work like a charm! But don’t just take my word for it, go do it yourself and then watch the traffic increase to your website.

Then just rinse and repeat for other pages and you’ll have a steady stream of free targeted traffic that you can convert into sales and income, and a ton of online success!

In future posts I’ll be writing detailed instructions for each method, and covering additional things you can do with each method to have an ongoing flood of traffic to your website so be sure to subscribe to the RSS feed by clicking here or enter your name and email in the form at the top right side of the blog and get details on 15 easy ways to get targeted traffic to your website.

We’ve just started to scratch the surface on what’s possible…

To Massive Online Success,
Karen

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6 Factors For Evaluating Lead Generation Strategies

Karen Sielski — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 07:42:32 +0000

Online lead generation is one of the most important aspects of growing your business online. There are six critical factors you should consider when evaluating the many ways to generate leads online – time, cost, leverage, quantity, speed, and lost opportunity.

1. Time – Time is money, and for many people it is their most precious commodity. There are many free online lead generation strategies, but manyof them require a significant time investment to implement. Conversely, there are many paid online lead generation strategies that can be implemented and maintained with a small time committment.

2. Cost - How much money is it going to cost to implement the online lead generation strategy? There are many free online lead generation methods such as blogging, social networking, article marketing, press releases, traffic exchanges, online classified ads, forum posting, etc. Others such as banner ads, ezine ads, and pay-per-click have a relatively high cost.

Online Lead Generation

3. Leverage – Do your online leads come to a screeching halt if you stop your daily lead generation actions? Or does your strategy allow you to do the work once and then the leads continue to come in over a long period of time?

Can you leverage the work in various distribution channels and formats? For example, can you write one piece of content in your blog, make some changes to it and submit it to online article directories, then make a PowerPoint presentation on the content and turn it into a video and podcast?

I love online article marketing, but there is a significant amount of work required to write a large number of articles and post them to article directories. But, after the article is published on the article sites, it can continue to generate online leads for many months or even years. On the other hand, free classified ads, only tend to be effective for a day or two and then they stop generating leads. You then need to remove the old posts and submit new posts.

Decide whether you want to do some work upfront and then let the strategy do the work for you for a significant amount of time, or whether you want to have to continually take action to keep generating online leads.

4. Quantity – Do you want to generate 100 leads a month or 100 leads a day? This is a very important question and will impact your choice of a lead generation strategy.

If you only need 100 leads a month, or roughly 3 leads per day, forum postings may do the job. If you need 100 leads per day or more, then you need to consider strategies such as banner ads, a well funded PPC campaign, ezine ads in large publications or partnering with large JV’s.

5. Speed - How quickly do you need to generate leads? Some strategies, like pay-per-click, can generate a consistent flow of online leads almost instantaneously. Certainly in the first day. Other strategies such as blogging and article directory posting take time to generate a consistent flow of leads.

6. Lost opportunity – This is an important but often overlooked factor. If you select a method that generates a small number of leads, or takes a long time to generate online leads, your business will grow slower. This may allow competitors to jump in and grab some of your marketshare and impact your growth in the future.

This principle is especially important to network marketers. The faster your business grows, the faster your compounding makes a significant difference on the size of your team and your income.

When you are evaluating online lead generation strategies, make sure you look at all 6 of these factors – time, cost, leverage, quantity, speed, and opportunity cost, as well as your skills and interests.

Special Bonus – Learn 15 cool ways to generate an endless supply of high quality, targeted leads when you fill in the form at the top right and click the “Give Me FREE Access” button. One method can generate 76+ leads/day for free and it only takes a few seconds to get access.

Online Success!

Karen

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