Direct Marketing Strategies - Generating Leads on the Internet

In this article, we offer an overview of the various sources of prospects for network marketing or any type of business using the Internet. To do this we took a look at some of the latest marketing methods, techniques, suggested lead sources available today on the Internet. Here is an overview:

* Facebook/MySpace/LinkedIn - The largest social media sites are excellent, representing millions of possible free leads for your business. The most amazing feature offered by these sites are availability of profiles of people worldwide who need your product or services. The new Advanced Search functionality on Facebook, as well as MySpace's more all-embracing search capabilities can quickly locate affinity groups, geographic proximity, age, and other demographics to quickly find prospects most likely to be your prospects.

* Video Marketing - Videos on YouTube can be one of the quickest ways to develop viral content. Video marketing not only can be used to publish your informational content to hundreds of highly-ranked sites, but also creates backlinks to your primary website or blog.

* PayPerClick Marketing - This is a paid strategy using Google, Yahoo, and Bing paid ads. We recommend this method only after some training, since it can be very expensive. It can also be the quickest way to generate business leads.

* Blogging - Self-hosted Wordpress.org blogs are a core part of the personal branding strategy for many people. Blogs are among the easiest sites to rank quickly. It is simple to setup a Wordpress blog with most hosting companies, but we recommend you choose one that uses CPanel (very common) and then find one of several tutorials available on YouTube for step-by-step instructions.

* ListBuilders - This is a paid strategy in which you can simultaneously create a personal subscriber list while having the "right" to periodically send your ads to a larger community owned by the ListBuilder company.

* Ezine/Solo Ads - Ezines, or electronic magazines, provide a mechanism to send your ad, or devote an entire issue to your offer. A solo ad can sometimes generate over one thousand leads from a single blast to the list. The advantage of this method, is that the list is pre-qualified and receptive to your offer, if carefully chosen.

* Forum Marketing - Many high-profile marketing forums exist on the Internet, such as Mike Dillard's Better Networker, the Warrior Forum, freelancemom.com/forum and others. High quality content can be published in these forums including your signature file.

* Content/Article Marketing - There are hundreds of online article directories that will accept short articles from 300 to 1,000 words. At the end of your article, two back-links are normally permissable, allowing you to "promote" your offering(s). Submitting duplicate content can be minimized and the submission process automated using tools such as Automatic Article Submitter.

The Internet offers a rich environment for the professional marketer, and has many excellent tools to automate the process. When getting started, it is recommended starting with one method and perfecting that before moving on to additional methods.