Lead generation

I agree with JA. Depending upon your specific needs it may be worth your time to get in contact with a local technology expert. There are many excellent products available that will help you target your contacts as well as data tracking.

To get in contact with a local expert who can best assess you needs, you can find one using the PinPoint Tool

Best of luck in finding the tools that work best for you!

Pinpoint tool to help you find technology experts and special applications: http://bit.ly/bsF7q7

Cheers, Rebecca The Microsoft SMB Outreach Team v-jelind@microsoft.com

It depends on the type of leads you're planning to generate.

If someone is looking for advice on best web hosting, then you probably can get away with a few affiliate links and get paid when some one follows one of those links and signs up for service.

I run a site that deals with highly specialized market research. Often we outsource qualified leads to firms capable of fulfilling the project. Often email request is the first step, followed up with Account Executive's call back, who takes it from there.

Answering someone else's question and just saw your one. I think the first thing is getting people to your site. Make sure you have a contact form on there so people can fill it in, any way you can capture the data is better.

We actually use some lead generation software that creates a form that captures peoples details and then automatically sends them an email. After 2 days, 7 days, 14 days it sends them follow up emails and assigns a call back to me on the second day. It's called an email campaign, where you set the number of days an action happens after the lead signs up. It took me about 20 minutes to set this all up as well, although I could do with some help on wording those emails a bit more.

At least if you're getting a few leads the software can chase them up for you, you'll still need to make the phone call. The software is Intrabench and it's a sort of CRM package or ERP but all these 3 letter acronyms confuse me!?

I actually just came across an interesting site called Unbounce. Dont worry, I dont work for em :). Looks like a good way to create landing pages that have lead gen capabilities and to A/B test them.

I agree with RH and JA. What kind of leads you looking to get? As an application, I use a simple keyword-targeted desktop lead generation software that is great for B2B if you just need to scrape all the contact info of people in a particular niche or industry such as real estate, chiropractors, auto sales, etc. It can be turned into a Web-based app, but I understand the engines/directories change their formatting very frequently so this kind of app would be hard to maintain. It's not a set-it-and-forget-it kind of software. It's great for personal business use, but not fun to program it or keep it current.

Depending on how readily available the leads are -- one way is to outsource the work on a site such as elance.

Another method would be to create an affiliate program and pay a commission for leads.

For a quick and simple (and cheap) solution, you can download a template and gather emails of perspective customers. You would obviously need to give them a compelling reason to fork over their email address.

Good luck