Generating Leads-3 Online Strategies

Are you generating enough leads for your business for it to be profitable? If not, you may not have enough traffic getting to your presentation. And let’s face it, the more eyeballs on your offer, the more sales you’re going to get, right?

Difference Between Prospecting & Marketing

First off, there are only two success activities in a business; and that is prospecting and marketing. When I first entered the home based industry, I wasn’t aware that there was a difference between the two, in fact I thought they were the same! But there is actually a huge difference that I recently understood and will share with you.

Prospecting is actively going and looking for new people to see if they are open to having a look at what you have. That means you are talking to people, building rapport, and finding out what are their desires and what they may be lacking in life. There isn’t anything wrong with this at all, but as all things, it has its’ pros and cons….

Benefits Include:

• You control how many people you actually prospect or talk to each and everyday.  If you want to call 20 people or 200 that number is totally up to you.
• You have instant and immediate feedback. Meaning once you show your offer, you know whether they are interested or not in your offer. In that sense you know either to leave them alone, follow up later or get them started.
• You can qualify them instantly as well. This ties in with the feedback. Either they are a perfect match, someone who is ready or almost ready to buy or they’ve no desire for what you have and you move on.
• It’s pretty cost effective. This is probably the cheapest way- you’re not spending any money (except for maybe the internet to use social media or perhaps your phone bill to call people! 😉 ) All you’re doing is talking to prospects, so it’s basically free!

Cons Include:

• There is no leverage. Since you’re talking to people you can’t really leverage anything. The work you do in a day-that’s it, you have to do it again the next day if you want new people to talk with.
• This method is time consuming. You can spend your whole day talking with 50 people and in the end possibly find one person who “could be” interested. I used to work in a real estate office and saw how hard those guys worked-on the phone all day to find buyers for houses and at the end of the week had like 30 appointments booked and out of that probably 10-15 actually showed up. The same is with this industry.
• It’s usually an uncomfortable situation that nobody wants to do. I used to hate talking with people because I felt like I was always just trying to sell them something.
• Lastly it can be done wrong if your not practicing making friends and building rapport. Many new business owners get in and only pitch without even understanding their prospects needs. And if you’re only doing a sales pitch then it may take longer to actually make a sale.

Marketing is a passive method of getting your information out. This is where you put content out-whether it’s a video, blog, paid ad, bumper sticker, social media post, or an article and hope someone will respond to it.

Cons of marketing include:

• This is not as controlled. You can’t say 100 people will look at my stuff today. There could be more, there could be less than that.
• There isn’t any instant feedback. Even if 100 people did look at your offer a day, you wouldn’t know instantly if they are interested in your offer or not.
• No instant qualifying people. Again tying in with the feedback. You wouldn’t know until you follow up with your prospects to tell whether to get them started or leave them alone.
• You will spend some kind of money usually. If you’re blogging-that could mean paying to have it hosted, paid ads, buying that bumper sticker, buying those flyers, etc.

Benefits of marketing include:

• You’ve got way more leverage. You could spend 15 hours doing an awesome blog, but you can continue to use that over and over and get plenty of leads just by 1 awesome piece of content, cool, huh?!
• You can automate much of the process, therefore reducing your time being used to “work” and instead enjoy life more.
• People reach out to YOU instead of you going around chasing people to see if they are even open to your offer.
• It’s not as uncomfortable. Since people are coming to you, you already know they want what you have or are at least interested to find out more.

3 Online Lead Generating Strategies

Social Media Prospecting– this is using any form of social media (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc) to start building relationships and seeing who’s open to your offer and who’s not. And if you want a success tip with using this method-your ONLY goal should be gaining more friends. Don’t go out looking to do a sales pitch, instead just get more friends on your side because the more people who like, trust and know you, the more likely they are to actually buy from you. Go out to meet new people and stop talking!

The Social Media Trap-this method combines active and passive marketing. Usually you’re posting either business related or product related items. I believe many home business owners are in this category. The only issue I see most of the time with this is way too may people are posting branded things. If you want to create curiosity, then remove the name of the company you’re with.

Think about it for a sec- If someone sees you are with XYZ company and selling XYZ product and they are interested, but instead Google it first, what are they going to see? Probably something negative, right? Now they have lost interest because of what Google has shown them about your company/product.

The other scenario is- if they already know what you sell and who you’re with, why the heck should they buy from YOU?! There are 100’s and 1000’s of other distributors out there. What if someone comes along and wants to buy, then all of a sudden remembers their cousin is involved with your company… What’s going to happen now? Well, they are most likely going to call their cousin and buy from them instead of you!

Instead of yelling out your company name or product name-focus on posting only about the BENEFITS of using your product or business; labels and brands removed. That way the only way for someone to know what company you’re with is to actually ask you, and ONLY you!

Attraction Marketing-I know this is quite common in the home based industry. But just think of it as “Education marketing” People are online for 1 of 2 things… Either they want entertainment or some information, they do not come online to buy something-especially if they are on social media!! If you’re doing attraction marketing all you need to do is provide one of the two. Most marketers opt for the educating method, as do I. All you need to do is be a problem solver or entertainer if you want the latter 😉

Final Thoughts

Now you understand the difference between prospecting and marketing as well as 3 online lead generating activities, I want to share one last secret with you….

Most uplines will teach their new rep prospecting only. Why is that? Because it’s a way to leverage their own business with new leads with the new reps most trusted contacts, and because it’s the easiest and fastest way the new member is going to get some results while they are in that “excited” stage of joining a new opportunity.

The problem with telling reps to go out and prospect is most aren’t told the correct way of showing the business to their warm market, and it’s not sustainable. Eventually that rep WILL run out of their warm market and at some point will have to go to the cold market if they want to continue to build the business.

If you want to build a big business for the long run you will need a lead generating system to help you expand past your warm market. So if you’re tired of only prospecting and would like to start putting your business on autopilot like I do, then I invite you to click here to get more leads for your business like this:

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All the best,

–Marie Yovcheva 😀

P.S.-If you LOVE prospecting and would like to know how to build your business this way, then enter your name and email in the form below to learn how to build from start to finish and to keep up with updates!

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