You need to spend a good percentage of your time on your business to generate leads so you can grow your business.  You will spend more time in the beginning to set up your marketing to generate leads and over time you can spend less time as you develop a steady flow of leads.

I just want to say up front that all marketing works.  It just might not work for you at that time either because of the implementation of the advertising or you are not advertising to your target audience. You just have to find the avenue that works for you and your product or service.

To generate leads you have to advertise your site or product.  There is a multitude of ways to advertise either low cost or free to the very expensive depending on your product, customers and budget.

Before you start advertising to generate leads, sit down and write out your prime target person or audience.  Be specific as the more specific you are the less money it will cost you to advertise.  Gender, age, weight, nationality, location, have a drivers license, own a home, have medical issues, whatever is needed to determine your target person for your product or service.

After choosing your target audience you need to develop a marketing message that targets that audience that you have the answer and can solve their problems.  Also show the benefits you provide, what sets you apart from the others, how you get your results and proof of your results.

Now that you have narrowed down your target you can advertise to that person instead of just advertising to everyone.  As I said earlier there are so many ways to advertise that I can’t go into all of them here and now.  I will just break out a couple to give you an idea of places to look.

Free advertising includes sites like craigslist and backpage.com.  You can search on the internet for free advertising sites to get a sense of what’s out there.  The free sites do take up some time so don’t get lost in them.

Paid advertising on the internet include Pay Per Click (PPC), banner ads and other type of ads on websites.  The pay per click option from the search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN can be used to laser target your audience based on the keywords you use and the simple three line ads you write. You only pay when someone actually clicks on your ad so this can also be a cost effective way to advertise but Pay Per Click is an advanced form of advertising so don’t try it unless you have time to master it so you don’t waste a lot of money on this form of advertising.

These are paid advertising venues where you pay based on when someone clicks on your ad.  You create small, simple highly specific ads and your ads are displayed on search engine results based on the keywords you choose.  These keywords are searched by your customers and your ads display for them.  They click on your ad and go to your site.

You pay per click so you can set a budget.  This is highly targeted advertising.  Just make sure the ad relates to your keywords and also relate to your website.  There is nothing worse then clicking on an ad expecting one thing then getting on the website that is completely different.  Not to mention wasting your money on the ad.

2. Craigslist and other free sites.

There are many free advertising sites on the internet. Craigslist is one of the biggest. On these sites you place written and image ads in different categories like small business or want ads.  You list your website in the ad for your customers to find you.  You can also just list an 800# or email address. Other free sites include backpage.com and adlandpro.com.  You can search on the internet for free advertising sites to get a complete list.

3. SEO – Search Engine Optimization

This is the process of improving your website to attract more of the natural or “un-paid” traffic.  With this option on your website, people find you in the natural listing on search engines based on the keywords they enter.  This is technical including programming in HTML.  You will have to hire someone to do SEO to your website.  Do your research and pick a reputable service as there are a lot of SEO scams out there.

4. Bandit signs or Yard signs

This is another very inexpensive advertising venue.  You order the signs with your message on them.  Keep it less then four lines and put both your website and 800# on it.  Place 20-25 signs at a time in the area you want to market on a Friday night for best lead generation.  Place the signs at busy intersections with stop lights so people have time to look at the signs. Also target expressway exits.

5. Put website on all your printed materials

Put your website on all your printed materials such as your business cards and marketing drop cards.  Also brochures, flyers, newspaper ads, newsletters, magazines, direct mail, posters and more.

6. Add website to your email sig

One of the simplest ways to get your website out there is to add it to your email signature.  That way you are connecting to your contacts already for other reasons and if they are interested in what you are doing they can click on your website.  This way you are not selling them anything.

7. Write articles and link them to your site

This is another great free way of getting website traffic to your website.  Write articles of about 500 – 700 words based on your keywords on your website.  Write each article based on one keyword.  Post the articles on the article submission sites and link each article to your website.  Articles based on a specific keyword will show up higher in the search engine results.

8. Banner advertising

Banner advertising is those little banners on all the websites that have an ad on them and are clickable.  When someone clicks on the banner they are sent to your website.  As you are browsing the internet and come across a site you like and want to advertise on with a banner you just click on the link at the bottom (usually) that says advertise.  You will need to pay someone to make the banner itself and get it in the three or four standard sizes for placement on websites.

9. Content Content Content

The simplest way of getting website traffic is to list high up on the search engines in the natural (un-paid) listings.  To move your website up in the natural search engine results you have to put compelling and unique content on your website. Compelling content is content your visitors  find interesting and stay on your site longer and/or do what your most favored response is like filling in the contact form or signing up for your newsletter.

This is just nine ways of getting website traffic directed to your website.  There are unlimited ways or driving traffic to your website.  I recommend choosing four and learning them until you are an expert.  If you want more then you can learn new ways as you have the time.

This is part of a marketing strategy to generate free leads.  With article submission you can generate unlimited free leads based on how many articles you submit and how well you incorporate compelling content in your articles.

Listed below are the sections of an article required on the submission sites. Write your articles in some type of text program. Don’t forget to spell check!

Title – The title of the article.  Make this as compelling as possible so people click on it when searching the internet.  The title must contain your primary keyword.

Article Summary – A small description of what the article is about. 2 – 3 sentences and must contain your primary keyword.

Body – The main body of your article. This needs to be 500 to 700 words.  Make sure you sprinkle your primary keyword throughout the article including in the first sentence.  Don’t over due it. If it is 1000 words or more break it up into multiple articles.

Signature or resource box – The author signature or resource box is where you add a little blurb about yourself and a link to your website or blog. You should put at least two links.  One to your website or blog and one to the original article this article was taken from. Which means you should post this article somewhere on the internet.  I suggest using it as an article on your website or blog and link to it there.

Category – Choose a category that is appropriate for this article from the list of categories the particular site offers.  Some sites are specific to a particular niche, other sites are more general and cover many niches or subjects.

Keywords – Add keywords so people can find your article through the search engines.

Keywords are words that relate to your article and its topic and are interspersed in the article itself. In general, your main keyword should be listed in the title, in the first sentence, sprinkled throughout the article and in the last paragraph. The secondary keywords just have to be sprinkled a little throughout the article.

Now that you have your article what do you do with it?  You need to submit it to the different article submission sites.  These sites hold articles that people write and the search engines crawl the sites and show the articles in their search engine results.

To submit articles to the article submission sites you need to set up an account on each site.  Just go to the site and fill out the registration with your name and email address and set up your pen name. Once you have registered you can log into that site and submit an article.  Click on the link for submitting articles, copy and paste from your text file article you wrote to the different sections in the submission form.  Follow the rest of the direction and submit the article.

Below is a list of some article submission sites.  These are some of the bigger sites.  You can submit to these site and get free lead generation. You can search on the internet to find more niche specific sites for your needs.

Amazines.com
ArticleCity.com
GoArticles.com
ezinearticles.com
articlealley.com

Have you ever wanted to do more with the ads you place on craigslist?  Like add a picture or even add a video… To make your ad stand out from the rest?

Image ads are made up of HTML code but you don’t need to know anything about HTML to make a great ad.  These ads can either have a picture in them or not, it is up to you and what your most wanted response is, whether to click on the ad or call your 800 number or email response.

You can not actually add a video to your image ad but you can trick it to look like it is a video and send people that actually click on your ad to the video on your YouTube channel or website.

OK, let’s get started.  Here are the steps to making the image ad.

1.    Make the actual image of your ad.  I use Microsoft PowerPoint but you can use any presentation program or other type of program that allows you to save the file as a jpg file.

Start adding your text or pictures to the page and be creative!  Change the fonts, change the coloring, be unique and fun and imaginative.   Remember you want to stand out from the crowd.  If this ad is not to be clickable, then make sure to ad your phone number of email address if that is your most wanted response when people read the ad.

If this ad will be clickable (clickable means when someone clicks on the ad they will be taken to where you send them, either your website, your video on a video sharing site or anywhere else on the net.

Once you have the ad looking like you want it, save the file with the .jpg extension.

2.    Now we will generate the html code for your ad.  Sign into your photobucket account or if you don’t have a photobucket account go to www.photobucket.com and sign up for an account.  Upload your jpg file you saved from step one.  After uploading the file (don’t worry about adding the title and description), hover your mouse pointer over the file you just uploaded, it will expand to show the different types of code available.  Highlight and copy the html line.

3.    Paste the html code into a text editor like notepad and save the file so you have it.  If this is an image ad that will not be clickable then you are done and can start posting this ad on craigslist where they allow image ads to be posted.

4.    If this is to be a clickable ad, you will be adding the link where you want to send them when they click on the ad, to the html code.  To do this, first delete everything between the first set of quotes (the section that starts with <a href=”http: and ends with .jpg” delete everything between the quotes.)  Then copy your link to your video or website and paste between the fist sections of quotes.  That is it.  You can now post this ad to craigslist.

For an image ad that looks like a video, the picture you insert into your ad on step 1 above is an actual picture of your video on YouTube.  To get this type of picture I use a free program called Jing which is a screen capture program from www.TechSmith.com. Bring up your video on YouTube and use Jing to capture the video picture and save as a picture, don’t forget to add the video controls in your picture so it looks like it is an actual video. And the link you add to the html code in step 4 above is the url that is listed for your video on YouTube.

Just a couple of thoughts on posting on craigslist.  Craigslist constantly changes its requirements for posting.  At this time I believe you can post one ad per account per 48 hours.  This means if you want to post 20 ads a day you need 40 phone verified email accounts (to post to the small biz ads on craigslist they require you to have an account.) You can get phone verified accounts by using pay phones.

You can also use these ads on any site that allows html in their ads.  I know that backpage.com and I have come across others as well.

This is also the process through which most if not all millionaires have made their fortunes to become millionaires.

Let’s talk about the different sources. You should have one primary source of income that will be your main steady money maker so you have a base of income to work with.  You want to have money to start your other income sources. This can be a job that you love or not but keeps steady money coming in.  Then you start adding other sources such as a part time job, or selling something you can make or if not something you can resell at profit.

There are many ways to make money on the internet. You can resell products or services using the many affiliate programs that are available, some for no money or investment.  Another way is to sell intellectual property such as writing an e-book on a subject you have good knowledge.  You don’t have to be an expert on a subject; you will still have more knowledge then others that would pay for that knowledge.  You can even make an e-book out of others knowledge.  Just research a subject and become knowledgeable on it and then write the e-book.

Keep your eyes and ears open for opportunities at all times.  You may overhear a conversion of someone looking to buy something, then another conversion of someone wanting to sell something.  You can bring them together and make money as a broker.  I guaranty that if you keep yourself open to opportunity it will present itself.

Make sure that any source of income such as selling a service or item to another, that item or service has to exceed the expectations of the buyer.  Over deliver on all your transactions and you will attract much more in return.

Remember that your primary source of income should be kept separate from your other sources so they won’t interfere or jeopardize your primary source of income. Then at some point you will have multiple sources bringing in more money then your primary source and you can either quit your primary source or use your time developing your other sources and starting new ones.

How many sources of income should you have?  I don’t think there is a limit, I suggest starting with a few and working towards 15.  Much of your sources of income should be automatic.  Set up processes that run automatically 24/7 so you don’t have to spend much time on them.

Here’s a good suggestion, make an e-book that sells inexpensively, say $14.95.  Advertise and spread that e-book all over the internet.  Have clients enter their email address as part of buying the e-book (make sure you put a disclaimer that you will be sending the emails but not selling their email address.)  Use this email list to market your other products or affiliate programs.  I will cover this concept more in depth in another article.

Multiple Sources of Income will eventually free you from working a JOB allowing you to live the life you want.

You can also use article marketing to dominate your niche or to dominate keyword and keyword phrases (also known as long tail keywords.)  This is what this article is about.

I had the good fortune to be on a webinar a couple weeks ago with David Wood.  He discussed this very topic.  He had some specific things to do to dominate your market.

To dominate your market, write articles specific to your niche with keywords you research that are the most highly searched for.  You need to write a lot of articles.  Submit one article a day for 100 days and you will dominate your market. Now this sounds like a lot and it is, but after you start writing these articles and find ways to make yourself write them everyday it becomes easier as you go along.

First off he uses and suggests using a blog instead of a website because they automatically rate higher in the search engines then websites do.  Unless you need a website for another reason you can set up the blog to do anything you need including having a data capture form to get people on your list.  Also you can post all your articles on your blog as the main holding area along with submitting them to the article sites.

OK, now to the articles and submitting.  Write your articles using the correct article format such as Title, Body, Keywords, and The Resource Box.  Once you are done writing your article you have to submit it to the article submission site.  To submit to the article site you have to first register with the article site. After you register you can post your articles to that site.

Research the article submission sites so you can submit your articles to the sites that are specific to your niche if possible, if not,  just post to the sites that have categories that correspond to your article and market.  Pick the article directories that have a higher Alexa rating and page rank.  You should post to at least 5 different article submission sites and if you want to post to more then change your article a little so the same article isn’t all over the internet which the search engines will think of it as spam as it is everywhere.

One way to submit articles to many different sites at the same time is to use article submission software.  If you want to use this software, look for software that also helps you spin the article so you are posting different articles to all the different directories at the same time without the search engines looking at your article as spam.

That’s it.  People search the internet for a subject, they click on your article and read it if it is compelling and of interest to them.  They then click on your links in the article that send them to your website or blog and that is how you get the traffic to your sites.

I don’t know if you have this issue or not with Google content. You have some ad groups that cost you more than others without the conversions.  I would like to see which keywords are getting clicks and which ones are getting conversions.  But all you can see in the content network is the statistics for the total per ad group.

What if you had a keyword that was getting a lot of clicks but no conversions
and other keywords that were getting very few clicks but many conversion? You would want to remove or pause the keywords that were getting clicks but no conversions so you could maximize your conversions per costs.

When setting up the Google content campaign, you research the keywords to add to each ad group.  My problem is you can’t get reports on which keywords are working for you per ad group.  Which means you can’t easily remove keywords that are costing you money without any results.

Try this simple tweak when setting up your campaigns.

1. Decide what the campaign will target.
2. Name the campaign the target word.
3. Set up the ad groups.  The ad group names will be the keywords you
researched that were the best for your campaign.
4. Add the keyword to the ad group. You read that right!  I said to add the
keyword to the ad group, one keyword, not keywords.

Each ad group is named for the keyword in the ad group and each ad group only has that one keyword that is the same name as the ad group.  Now when you look at your reports you can quickly see the keywords that are performing and which are not.  Now every two weeks you can do your reports and either pause or remove the ad groups that are not performing and add new ones.

This tweak will keep you laser targeted on keywords that work for your ads
which will keep your campaigns costing less and getting you more conversions.

This translates to making more money.  Who doesn’t want to make more money while spending less?

I hope this helps with your Google campaigns.  You should now be able to
spend less time working, updating and evaluating your campaigns.

I learned this technique from my good friend David Varrone.