Author: Robert Eckert

For 15 years off and on, I bought leads. Especially if you are involved in network marketing, you most likely have bought leads.

Ask yourself a question. Does buying leads work? I have lost money every time. If it works for you, you are one of the lucky ones. Let's be honest. Buying generic leads is too risky. If you can't pre-qualify your leads with your own ad, you shouldn't be buying.



I will lay out several problems with buying leads in the rest of this article and some suggestions on how to turn that around and do something about it. In other words, this is not really a negative article. I want to give solutions here, not just gripe.

First, we can all agree that leads are necessary to run a business, whether a Fortune 500 company or a home-based operation. Even doctors and lawyers advertise these days, but there is a huge upswing in both profits and word of mouth with these types of businesses. It's not the same with a small business, especially network marketing.

Friends and family members often spread the word passively about products and services they like, but the simple truth is that most businesses either don't have mass appeal, quality products, or reasonable prices.

If what you are promoting doesn't have all three or doesn't dominate one of those areas, you are treading on dangerous ground when you pay for advertising or buy leads.

So, if you want to stop this risky, shortcut mentality, then all you have to do is create a system where you get your leads for free. This is the golden road to net profits. More about that later.

Okay, let's break down some other problems with buying leads. First, let's go with these generic email leads that are being sold everywhere these days. This is probably the worst strategy of all. If someone receives an email and has no idea who you are, you can almost forget selling to that person.

One honest marketer has even said that he had 40000 generic network marketing email leads. Of all those people, he had gotten a measly two people to join his main program. This method doesn't work. Period.

Fortunately, there are ways to get better leads without paying for them. We will discuss that later.

Next, we have the people who buy phone leads. These are typically more expensive, but some people can make money with these leads. The key here is to know yourself. Can you call people on the phone, establish rapport, and get them to join your program? This is where self-knowledge is paramount.

In this case, you must know your own abilities. If you are great at calling up people and closing sales on the phone, then these phone leads may very well be good for you. If you don't have the confidence in both yourself and your program, you are risking your money big time.

However, if you set up a free lead generation system, it is possible to not only pre-qualify your leads, but also get their phone numbers at the same time. If you can do this, then your only expense would be the long distance, which is pretty cheap these days. Again, though, you have to know yourself. If you don't have the confidence or you get frustrated when you can't close sales on the phone, you might not want to call people up.

One possible solution would be to pay someone a flat commission for calling up your leads and closing the sale. There are many forums where people might want to JV with you. You create the leads, and they just close the sales.

Now, let's go to postal leads. I'm talking about snail mail here. In fact, the first mistake that many people make with this is that they mail out an entire package to an unqualified lead. If you are going to buy and send to postal leads, it's best to send a postcard first. This way, you aren't spending money on people who may have joined your program already or who just aren't interested.

Frankly, though, I have also lost money sending postcards. It's really hard. But, again, there are ways to create your leads for free, put them in an autoresponder like SendFree, and then mail them a postcard later. Simply buying leads and mailing them postcards is one of the biggest money losers for thousands of people.

Pre-qualify, pre-qualify, pre-qualify. This is the lesson. Generic leads don't work because you can't pre-qualify them for your offer.

Okay, I mentioned methods of getting your leads for free. First, don't just start emailing people. This is dumb and doesn't usually work. It's also spam. Instead, what you need to do is set up a lead generation page (often called a "lead capture page" or a "splash page").

http://www.lasertargeted-leads.com/leadpage.html

The page above is what I use to get leads. Next, you use traffic exchanges, forums, and any other way you can find to drive massive traffic to that page and get people to opt in to your list. Bam! You no longer have to buy leads.

If you want to take the risk out of your business, set up a lead generation page and learn how to drive traffic to that page. If you have no risk and you make at least some sales, that's not just profit. That's a net profit, which is exactly what you want to achieve.

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