Need Leads? Here’s How To Get Them. 

Getting leads is important for any type of business.

Whether you’re selling digital or physical products, if you’re mainly an affiliate for other people’s products, or even if you have an offline business to promote, you need leads. Leads bring income!

There are many ways to acquire leads, build your email list, and then turn your leads into qualified buyers.

Don’t have anything to sell? You can sell affiliate products to those leads or even just send them back to your site over and over to increase traffic for selling ads on your site.

In this post you’ll learn how to get leads for free using social media. First let’s get your lead magnet setup…

Your Lead Magnet

The first thing you need to do is set up a lead magnet. No matter what business you’re in, there’s some kind of information you can offer in exchange for your visitor’s contact information.

For example, let’s say you have an offline business selling golf lessons. You could offer a free report or video with some basic tips for improving one’s golf swing. Then, inside your lead magnet, you can advertise your service and let people know how to get contact you to set up a lesson.

While your lead magnet doesn’t necessarily have to be your very best content, and probably shouldn’t, since people should pay for that, it does need to be valuable. The more valuable your lead magnet, the more people will be impressed by what you know and the more likely they will be to want to buy from you.

Don’t just grab some random PLR report and throw it up, hoping for the best. This content needs to be as unique as possible and really let people know what you’re about.

Your Squeeze Page

Once you have a lead magnet, it’s time to set up a squeeze page for it. There are many styles of squeeze pages you can use. Two of the most common are the standard squeeze page and the video squeeze page.

A standard squeeze page is basically a short form of a sales page like you’d see for the average product at Clickbank. It has a headline, some bullet points, a few graphics, and an opt-in box.

A video squeeze page is similar, but includes a video to entice people to subscribe to your list to get your lead magnet. The video will describe what is contained in the lead magnet and why it will benefit the user. Then it will instruct the user to enter their details to receive their free copy.

It’s a good idea to test multiple squeeze pages until you find the best one.

Just because one squeeze page works like gangbusters for one person or in one niche doesn’t mean it will work for every possible situation. Test several and track results.

Getting Leads from Social Media

Using social media is perfect for generating leads, because you can generally have people amped up to get whatever you’re offering before they even reach your site.

The good thing about social media is that it is very well targeted. If you’re in the internet marketing arena, you can seek out specific internet marketing related Facebook pages to post to, for example. You can build your own following on social media that is targeted to your niche.

You’ll want to tailor your social media lead acquisition strategy to your niche. For example, LinkedIn is much better for acquiring business and marketing related leads, while Pinterest is better for acquiring leads for businesses related to home, food, family, relationships, beauty and fashion.

There are four basic things you must do for social marketing:

• Listening – You must monitor your social pages well
• Influencing – Establishing yourself as an authority in your market
• Networking – Following and associating with other influential people in your market
• Selling – Linking directly to your squeeze pages and lead pages

You MUST do all four of these in order to be as successful as possible in social media. You cannot just sell, sell, sell. You need to communicate with your followers. You need to interact with other important people in your market. You need to share great content, including content that isn’t yours. THEN you can do a little selling.

Let’s take a look at some strategies you can use with the various major social media platforms.

Facebook

Facebook is great for lead acquisition. First, you can start your own fan page or group in your market in order to build your own source of free traffic that you can access whenever you want.

Not only that, you can leverage the power of other people’s pages and groups by posting there frequently and adding to the discussion.

Twitter

Twitter is a bit trickier than Facebook, because there are no actual collections of individuals in a specific market like groups. You’ll need to search for people using hash tags.

If you don’t know what a hash tag is, it’s a keyword (no spaces) with a # symbol in front. It looks like this:

• #marketing
• #internetmarketing
• #blogging
• #webtraffic

When you search Twitter for hash tags, you’ll find people talking about certain topics. You can follow those people, and many of them may follow you back. Again, having a username that is easily identifiable as being in your market is helpful. More people are likely to follow you back.

Pinterest

Pinterest is a good place to get traffic to a squeeze page in nearly any market, but some markets perform better than others there.

Because Pinterest’s market has a higher percentage of females, topics that appeal to women tend to fare better than those that tend to apply more commonly to men. That’s not to say you can’t market to men there. In fact, there are still millions of male users on the site. It just happens that the female market is larger on the site.

Topics that tend to do well on Pinterest include:

• Family and parenting
• Dating and relationships
• Weight loss and fitness
• Health and wellness
• Beauty
• Fashion
• Food and cooking
• Home décor
• Home remodeling
• Crafts

But you’ll find just about everything on the site.

In order to get good traffic from Pinterest, you need good images. This means you’ll need to find images related to your market to pin, and also create them.

It’s important to have clear, legible text on images that lets people know what the image is about.

Let’s say your squeeze page is a free guide to 15 foods that burn more calories during digestion than they contain.

Here’s an example image that would probably be effective:

You could also use photos in your image to grab even more attention. You can take a look at some of the most popular pins to get an idea for what is currently getting a lot of views and re-pins.

To get more followers, be sure to search for keywords related to your market and follow those pinners. Many will follow you back, and other people who view their list of followers will find you as well.

General Social Media Tips

The most important thing you should remember when marketing on any social media website is the word SOCIAL. Social media does not mean spam city. It means connecting, networking, engaging. If you’re failing to engage your followers and reach them on a one-on-one basis, you are never going to be as successful as you could be.

Also, it’s a good idea to share OPC (other people’s content) on a regular basis, and not just your own. This is beneficial in several ways:

• It helps establish you as an authority in your market
• It shows you aren’t just there to sell
• Is builds goodwill in the community
• It gives you extra content to build your own following
• It increases engagement
• The people whose content you share may later reciprocate

Let’s say you’re running a fan page on Facebook. You want to build your followers, but you don’t have a massive amount of your own content you can share yet.

So share OPC!

Other people’s content, as long as it is proven to appeal to a lot of people, will help increase engagement on your page. It will also help build YOUR fans, because when your fans share it, their friends may see it and follow your page! It’s win-win.