Work from Home Business Opportunities - Three Ways to Generate Internet Leads

This article provides a classification of the three best ways to generate Internet leads in a home business. In a previous article we made the case for the best home based business being in the field of network marketing. However regardless of the particular business model being used, MLM, or not, the Internet is now a great place for generating sales leads.

What are the most valuable ways to generate leads for your home based venture? We cover three main ideas from an excellent webinar presented recently by Ken Cobb of Next Level Enterprises. Next, we describe the 3 main ways to generate Internet leads::

1. Paid methods - Within this categorization, there are generally 3 main methods including ezine articles, banner advertising, and pay per click (PPC). PPC includes, of course, Google Adwords among others and is a main revenue source for the search engines. Banner ads have declined lately. Banners are paid spots on very popular, high traffic websites, using banner impressions as a criteria for billing. Ezine ads are widely available in almost any niche and remain an excellent way to generate leads for work from home business opportunities.
2. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) - SEO is becoming very popular, since it is unpaid advertising and also produces the best quality leads. SEO services are time and labor intensive, whether accomplished in-house or using a consultant, however. Within SEO, the primary methods used are blogging, article marketing and press releases.
3. Closed Social Networks - Everyone is familiar and most have membership in new websites such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Internet marketers have discovered and are now quite effectively leveraging Facebook, which is not just an incredibly popular social networking hang-out to reconnect with old friends.. Similarly, Twitter is not just micro-blogging, but an incredibly powerful markting tool. Similarly, LinkedIn initially focused on networking for 9-5 jobs is now a great way to generate new contacts and sales leads.

Online creation of leads in a work from home business opportunity has many similarities to more traditional sales methods, except that online technology now available adds incredible leverage to the equation. Internet marketers should be careful about misuse of these powerful tools and adhere to generally accepted Internet etiquette rules.

In the Internet's early days many leads could be generated by usine "email blasts." No longer. Inexperienced marketers soon discover this, finding their Internet "rights" completely cut-off. Spam filtering is now very effective against once viable email marketing tactics.

Spam filtering is employed against all three current methods of Internet lead generation as well, whether paid, SEO, or closed social network. For instance, an inexperience marketer may join a social network and begin immediately sending out his links related to his or her products and services. There is no quicker way to get dropped as a friend and excluded from online networks. Marketing training and education becomes paramount as more and more amateurs enter the world of Internet marketing in a work from home business opportunity.

Jim Green is an SEO consultant with focus on work from home business opportunities. His passion is in the automated generation of Internet leads for MLM, francises or traditional work from home businesses.