Free Leads Versus Paid Leads

I was looking in a small business forum recently where someone was seeking advice on purchasing a list to help build his business.

Virtually every online business opportunity today talks about the importance of building lists of leads, but for someone just starting out this seems to be a problem and as a result these people often resort to purchasing leads.

The quality of leads from a purchased list ranges from fair to useless, because the source is questionable.For example anyone with time on their hands can make a list, you can do a quick Google search http://www.google.co.uk/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&rls=GFRD,GFRD:2007-41,GFRD:en&q=%2a%40ireland%2ecom and this gives 94,000 email addresses in Ireland at the press of a button.

It is quite common for people to harvest email addresses and then sell not once but multiple times.

Some leads lists are compiled as a result of surveys with people encouraged to submit their email address in order to get a free gift, often the IP address and date are also captured as partial proof the email was collected legally. However some of these submitted addresses do not exist and often in other cases the person is only interested in the freebie and nothing else. When you contact these people you are unlikely to get any response.

The only way to get real leads for your business is to capture your own and that way you will know where they come from and how they were captured, I use a variety of tools to capture leads and my systems generate 1,000's of opt in leads a day. http://freeleads.davidogden.org

You need to take care to protect yourself when contacting these free leads to ensure you do not get accused of spamming.

The best way to do this is to send out a verification email to obtain permission to send them your business information/opportunity. Under no circumstances send them any offer in your first email, not even in your signature file.

You can expect that between 1-2% will open the emails and reply and these are the contacts that become part of your list.

Once someone has subscribed to you list you can then send them information, but you must ensure that all correspondence has a way for them to unsubscribe themselves.
Using a Better home based business opportunity you will learn more about how to usefully market on the Internet
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One area of lead generation that does cause confusion with novice users is what to do with leads that are generated from your own FFA. such as FREEFFAS. Generally speaking anyone who submits an entry to an FFA agrees to receive one message from the owner of the FFA. Normally this would be a verification email as mentioned earlier so you can add them to your list.

If you do not have a sophisticated mailing system you can send out a one off offer, thanking them for adding data to your FFA and explaining that they have not been added to you list and will only hear from you again if they take up your offer or submit to your FFA


David Ogden Internet Marketing Mentor
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