Instead of waiting for leads to come to you, go to them! Many people just build an opt-in page or a squeeze page and wait for leads to sign-up or reach out to them – so instead of waiting for people to find your store and buy from you – actively go out and find prospects.
Look for questions that are being asked, which are relevant to what your business provides, on forums, Q&A sites (like Yahoo Answers or Quora) and social media such as Facebook and Twitter.
Now take a couple of minutes to answer those questions, making sure you provide value first and foremost. This will help you gain extra exposure for your business, help build you up as an authority in your niche, start to build trust between you and possible customers and potentially land you some sales.
For example, if you have an SEO service, look for questions on the best ways to optimize websites. Then you could leave an answer such as, “Here are 3 tips I find work well…(insert your tips here). If you’re after more information, I help people with their SEO, through information and doing it all for them, and here’s a link to an article I wrote listing 17 tested ways to improve your search engine optimization.” You’ve already given great information and value in your answer, making people more likely to click through to your site.
Another example would be if you were a chiropractor, you can find people complaining about back pain and offer a couple tips that you think might help them, followed by an offer to stop by your clinic for a free initial adjustment or consultation.
Or if you were in the weight loss niche, you could find people asking questions on the best ways to lose weight, give them a few tips, and then link to a longer video or blog post of yours mentioning even more tips perhaps with an offer to sign-up for a free newsletter, which can be used to try to drive them into your main offer.
One last example, of an awesome way to go to leads instead of waiting for them to come to you, was when I first started out online, I decided to just be an affiliate for some diamond sites (where I’d earn 5% to 15% per sale through my link). I would search the internet for leads of people asking questions on diamonds, trying to see if they found a good deal, etc., and then offer to do a free analysis for them. I would often times end up finding better deals through one of the sites I was an affiliate for (sometimes I’d even have a coupon or discount through the site), pass on my affiliate link to the specific diamond, and make a nice commission when they bought it. All this was done while coming off as being a super nice guy helping them out (even if I mentioned that it was an affiliate link).
Don’t underestimate the power of going to leads instead of waiting for them to come to you! In fact, it’s important to note that this doesn’t just have to be done with consumer leads. You can apply the same methods to finding other businesses to partner with, for instance, and proactively reaching out to them to try to land a deal. Or even proactively going out to leads in the media to see if they’d want to run an article or story on something that you’re an expert in related to your niche. Even taking just an hour or two a week doing this can have huge benefits for your business.
Although you can manually search for leads out on the internet, if you get serious enough about this technique, there are tools out there like WebFire.com that can help you do this and more.
Go looking for leads, instead of waiting for them to come to you. Look on forums, Q&A sites (like Yahoo Answers) and social media (such as Facebook, Twitter, etc.) to find questions being asked that are relevant to your offer. Answer those questions, providing good value, to increase your exposure and potentially make sales.
For help with finding leads after what you offer, you can check out a demo of WebFire’s tools here and grab a special deal! Web Fire