It doesn't matter what business you are trying to build online, you will need sales leads if you are ever going to make sales, and sales leads are what you are trying to generate if you are marketing on the internet. In order to survive, any web site needs a steady flow of qualified leads.

The single biggest most important reason of any lead generation campaign is to build your mailing list. Internet marketers often say "the money is in the list", which is totally true. A list of responsive buying customers that trust you is worth its weight in gold!

While spam filtering has lessened the impact of email marketing, it's still a viable means to getting your sales messages out there. A major advantage of email marketing is free, although of course its costs you in terms of your time. Although with a good autoresponder you can have your messages delivered automatically at specific intervals that you set up.

The theory behind email marketing is that by giving away something, such as a free product or some other incentive, you can direct interested parties onto specific products and services.

When you consider generating leads via an email campaign there are basically three avenues you can explore: email signatures, joint ventures and safe lists. One word of warning though, and that is avoid spam at all cost, one spam complaint can seriously damage your online business. You should familiarize yourself with the laws concerning spam, and at the very least ensure you include a un-subscription link in All your marketing emails. Due to spam, it is advisable that you avoid buying leads, no matter how reputable the company, buying leads can easily lead to a spam complaint. I do know of one source that I use and they only offer double opt in leads that want more information regarding specific niche markets.
That source is Go-Ahead Mailing.

In its simplest form, email marketing is a matter of putting a signature in all your emails that contains a link to your main product.

If you are looking to vastly increase your list quickly then a joint venture (JV) may well be the key you need. In its simplest form, in a JV you supply the product and a fellow marketer supplies the leads and you share the profits. Hopefully, you will then get the emails of your fellow marketer's customers, so you can then mail them with further offers.

When considering a joint venture there are many considerations you have to think about, but the main one, before you consider contacting anyone about mailing to their list, is "what's in it
for them", not "what's in it for me". Never write to a fellow marketer unless you can offer them something of value in return for their help, and that is not necessarily just a share of the
profits, be inventive!

Finally you have safe lists. A safe list is a list of people that have agreed to receive marketing emails in return for being able to send their own marketing email. The value of this form of
marketing has never been that good. After all, you are trying to sell to people who are only interested in selling to you! I have never used safelists but I know some that do and they tell me the response is not very good other than to get their product seen by other marketers. This does get a few leads for marketers that will need your particular product.

You can use pay per click advertising such as Yahoo Search or Goggle Adwords to advertise your site and draw in interested leads. Be careful with PPC as you can end up spending way beyond your budget. Many marketers rely to heavily on PPC marketing. Your goal should be to trying to get as much free advertising as possible. Try using keywords that have the least competition. Most keyword suggestion tools can help with this. Yahoo has an excellent keyword suggestion tool.

One other highly effective way of generating interested leads is posting in forums that are related to your area of business. Include a link to your site in your signature and people
interested in your niche market of business will often click it if your forum post was interesting. A disadvantage with forums is you need to be careful to stay with-in the forums guidelines. Sometimes it may be hard to post without your post looking like an ad. Some forums frown on advertisements.

Three other popular sales lead generation techniques are submitting articles to ezine publishers and article directories, press releases and testimonials for products in your target market. make sure your signature and website URL is included in all your articles and press releases. This will not only increase your traffic, but it will also increase your back links to your site. Search engines like Google love this and it will boost your page rank and position!

No matter what lead generation technique you employ you will need a way to capture your leads email address when they arrive at your site.

The traditional method has been to use a pop up or pop under which contains some incentive to get someone to sign up. With the invention of pop up stoppers their effectiveness has dwindled and therefore unstoppable pop ups (also know as hover ads or slide in ads) have evolved. This new generation of pop ups are built into your webpage and as such cannot be stopped. Simply do a search on Goggle for "unstoppable pop up" and you are sure to find a
software solution to produce these types of pop ups for you.

The other alternative is to use what is called a "name squeeze page". This is no more than a pop-up page that you would want to load when someone leaves your site without making a purchase. This would trigger the pop-up. The pop up page would have a short informative article that will generate interest in the prospect. If the prospect wants more information, they need to leave their name and email address and submit that to you through a subscriber box. This should go to an autoresponder that once the name and email address is entered, the free report would be automatically delivered. This serves 2 purposes, one is to build trust and second, to get the prospects name and email to send more information regarding your products.

In essence a name squeeze page is a web page whose sole purpose is to capture an email address. They generally contain a small amount of information about the product or service you are selling as a "teaser" for the reader and will contain a sign up form, with a message like "to find out more simply fill in the form to be immediately directed to further details on this amazing product".

A name squeeze page not only helps build your list, this information can also be used with certain software to help personalize your site for your visitor, a technique that has been
shown to increase sales. Again, simply do a search for name squeeze page generators.

The more authentic information about lead generation you know, the more likely people are to consider you a lead generation expert. Read on for even more lead generation facts that you can share.

No matter how you generate sales leads there is one thing always to bear in mind, and that is, to be effective your leads must be in your targeted market. If, for example, you are selling
internet marketing products, then it's no use advertising on a site that is all about scuba diving!

When you start to build your online business, ensure you include a well thought out sales lead generation strategy from the beginning. Do not make it an afterthought; this should be in
place from the very beginning if you want your business to be a success.

Don't limit yourself by refusing to learn the details about lead generation. The more you know, the easier it will be to focus on what's important.