7 Ways To Generate Leads Online

If you are looking to grow your business online, there are many avenues, channels, and platforms you can use to market yourself. Today we will discuss 7 ways any business owner can use to generate traffic online.

Now, there are main spheres of thought when it comes to generating leads and traffic online.
The first one is the free one, which is not necessarily free. It involves time, effort, and some could say, sweat equity.
The second one involves cash.
We are talking about Organic versus Paid marketing.
Now let’s break down a few ways that you can generate leads organically online and a few ways you can generate leads through paid traffic online.

Organic

Number 1. Facebook

Facebook is an advertising platform used by billions of people around the world where you can connect to up to 5,000 people for free and market to them through what is called the News Feed. Facebook doesn’t charge you to connect to these people and you can target particular business owners by searching hashtags and searching in groups through the Facebook’s Social Graph Search function. If a large group does not exist for your industry or market on Facebook, you could even create a Facebook group and use that to generate leads while building a relationship with an audience and providing valuable content to them. Another way you can utilize Facebook to generate organic leads is through the Facebook Messenger app. Messenger allows you to essentially send a message to people you are friends with an even people you aren’t friends with. So this makes millions of possibilities when it comes to generating organic leads on Facebook with some time and effort.

Number 2. Other Social Media Channels

It depends on who your audience is, but there are millions of people on Instagram and Linkedin that you can connect and engage with, just like on Facebook, with the ability to connect, message, and market to business owners or customers in your industry. There are people on Pinterest, Twitch, and TikTok that will buy from you if you connect with them and present them your offer in the right way.

Number 3. YouTube

YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world. It is owned by Google, which is the first largest, so what that tells you is that people go to YouTube for information. You can use YouTube as a platform to educate your audience and potential prospects by providing tutorials, resources, and how-to’s and connect with these people by getting them to subscribe to your list. Once these people subscribe to your list, you can continually re-market to them and promote your products and affiliate links in the video description and comment section.

Number 4. Blog sites

There are so many communities of people online searching any particular topic under the sun. You can find them on places like Medium, Reddit, Quora, and anywhere in between. What you need to do is go and find the blogs that are helpful to the people in your market, or the places where the people you want to connect with are hanging out online. Next, start talking with them. Engage with them. Provide value to them. Answer their questions. In turn, these people will become curious and visit your profiles and social links. These are organic leads you will generate by offering value upfront

Those 4 above methods of lead generation are completely organic and only require your time, energy, commitment, and effort.

The 3 below will require you to spend money.
The goal is to create a return on your investment. It depends what product or service you are selling, what your sales process is like, and how you target your advertising, but one thing is for certain. Millions are being spent and billions are being created.

Paid

Number 5. Facebook (Paid)

Facebook has become the largest, most-targeted advertising platform we have ever seen in the history of humanity and mankind in modern times. With this platform at your fingertips, you can specifically target the people that you want to reach and pay Facebook to get in front of them in their News Feed. The benefit of using Facebook is the amount of data they have collected on their users. You can dial down and create a return with your campaigns and there are many ways to do it. This isn’t an article on Facebook ads, so I would highly recommend going to YouTube and watching Peng Joon’s facebook ads campaign if you would like to learn more or how to increase your revenue through paid lead generation using Facebook.

Number 6. Google (Paid)

Google is the largest search engine in the world. People are constantly going to Google to look up things they need and things around them. With paid advertising on Google, you can make sure your business shows up at the very top of the search when someone is looking for your service. Whereas Facebook is more like a billboard on the highway that people drive by and may stop, Google is like a drive-thru, serving you hot customers and very warm leads. The difference between the paid traffic from Facebook and Google is that Facebook is interruption-based because these people are not necessarily seeking you or looking for your product or service, whereas on Google, the lead is intent-based. They actually typed in and searched for this specific type of product or service. That makes the lead a thousand times hotter.

Number 7. Taboola

Have you ever seen those weird websites at the bottom of an article that have those weird looking pics that just make you want to click? You know those catchy headlines and odd photos that just make you think, ‘What the heck is that’? Many of these ads are distributed by the Taboola metwork. Now I’m not saying all Taboola ads are clickbait, but what I am saying is that Taboola ads are served on many websites and you have probably seen them before but just didn’t know what they were. As an advertiser, the ability to access the Taboola network can put your brand and business in front of your customers everywhere on the internet. When they click your banner, you can send them to a landing page to capture their email or to book a calendar to get in touch with that lead.

Depending on who you are, what budget is, and you are on your journey, these 7 methods of online lead generation can help you.
There are many more ways to generate leads online and this is barely scratching the surface.
But I wanted to point out some things you can do immediately today to move your business forward online.