Are You Generating Your Own Leads?

I’m seeing a growing trend of companies generating their own Internet leads. Even those currently buying leads from large lead providers and marketing companies are learning the business. I think there are two major factors driving this trend:

1. Blogging platforms (i.e., WordPress) driving barriers to entry for a professional Web presence to nearly zero
2. Social media becoming a viable targeted (and cheap) traffic generation methodology

Sales People Generating Leads

The other sub-text in this growing paradigm of smaller scale online lead generation are individual sales people engaging in personal marketing. These folks are quickly generating credibility, trust, and thought leadership with simple blogging platforms and social media traffic feeding profiles.

In a matter of a few of hours to set-up these marketing systems and a couple of hours a week in content production they are padding their sales pipeline. More interestingly, these are potentially more qualified leads since they chose you and your service/product offering. And we know people buy from people.

Learn Lead Generation, Become a Better Lead Buyer

The point is this, whether big or small you should be getting into the online lead generation business. It doesn’t have to be major volume or even offset your current lead buying. However, it can give you a significant advantage in buying leads.

Here are a few examples:

• You learn the mechanics of lead generation
• You can ask better questions and negotiate more intelligently
• You can learn what does and doesn’t work for your business
• You may figure out a better way to generate and convert
• In all cases, you will have a few extra opportunities

Marketing Must Be a Core Competency

I think marketing has to be a core competency of any company or individual. Foregoing the opportunity to learn how to do that online as well is forfeiting revenue. No one wants to be guilty of that.

What are you doing to generate a few extra leads a month on the Internet? What marketing venues are you most interested in hearing more about? Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, others?