How To Capture Leads Online For An Online Business

In theory, business is a simple thing. You create a product or service, let people know about it, take orders and count the money. Of course, in the real world it isn’t quite that easy. The advent of the Internet and e-commerce has greatly widened the potential universe of customers – people from all over the world can now learn about and purchase your goods. But the tricky part is getting leads – qualified people or companies that are ready to buy – and convert them from leads into sales.

Fortunately, the same technologies that allow you to be online in the first place work to your favor in your search for leads. To begin with, you must have a product or service a lot of people will find valuable. This could be as simple as a desktop wallpaper, an informative white paper on your industry, or a discount coupon. These things cost you little or nothing to create but have value to some portion of your audience. Once you have your content, you must establish an easy-to-find webpage to host them on, and seed it with keywords that will show up at the top of web searches and bring the curious to your page.

Now that the potential lead is at your page, what’s next? That’s simple. Before they can download or order the free item, they must give you their contact information. Any webpage designer can create an easy to fill out form that embeds in the webpage. The form is the key. You use it to collect lead information, so it should be very carefully tailored to capture all the details your sales staff needs to close sales. Name, address, e-mail address and cell phone number are the first things that come to mind, plus a few qualifying questions that narrow down their wants and needs. They can’t get at your free content until they fill out the form, so you should make it as simple and short as is consistent with your information gathering needs. They fill it out, click, and are done.

Now you have an ever-growing database of qualified leads, people who have expressed direct interest in your products and who have told you how to get in touch with them. With this in hand, your salespeople should be able to make contact, schedule appointments or take orders, and keep your business humming. You can use this simple technique as many times as you need to, for any number of product lines. It’s fast, easy and works every time.

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