Often, people want to use Buzz Marketing techniques and they think that if there is a lot of buzz, things will just happen.

Sometimes that may be true – but more likely you will generate some interest that will quickly fade and result in little actual ROI.  However, if you craft a lead generation technique and then use Buzz Marketing to increase the exposure of your lead capture tool, you can show a huge ROI.

What this means is that you are not doing a Buzz Marketing Campaign unless it is part of a well crafted sales process.  Buzz Marketing, Social Media and Content Marketing are great for getting people to come to the top of your sales funnel and take a look.  But unless your sales process is good at generating leads and following the sales process through to a transaction, you are going to be spinning your wheels trying to grow your business on casual interest and no clear outcome.

To counter this problem, work first on perfecting your lead capture and sales process.  You can use something like aWeber to capture information and build a list.  You can get a CRM package and build a better sales process.  There are many, including SalesForce, Zoho, vTiger and SugarCRM.  I personally have used all of these and currently use SugarCRM on Bluehost and used oDesk to hire a programmer to set it up for me.

Set up was under $210 and monthly is less than $9.  Not too much to get a tool that is enabling me to grow my business very fast.

Lead Generation and Sales must be your first focus if you are looking for ways to increase revenue.  Get those processes well defined and proven, and then invest in Buzz Marketing, Viral Marketing or any other interest creating technique you want.

Before I list the lead generation tools, I want to let you know how to generate leads with the tools.

The idea behind these is that you publish a good, targeted article on a topic your clients might be searching on.  While reading the article, either within the article or at the end of the article you have a link to your website that captures leads.  For example, if you are selling organic gardening, you could end the article by saying, “For 10 more tips on organic gardening, visit…”  That way someone that is interested in the topic knows where to go for more information.  And to get those additional tips, you should require their email address.

So where can you publish these articles to get high visibility in search engines and dive people over to your lead generation engine to make you more money?

1. eZine Articles – Very popular article publishing location.
2. Squidoo - Great way to add an article and also integrate your RSS feeds.
3. Hubpages – This one requires that you are careful in your writing as you are not supposed to promote yourself.
4. WordPress.com – Write a free blog and use tags to get higher visibility and more leads.
5. GoArticles – Another article repository that is popular.

These are just some of the free online lead generation tools you can use.  Remember that they only work well if you have done a good job of building an online lead generation engine that is producing results.

On the web you can effectively do strategic lead generation with content marketing.

Content marketing is a web-based lead generation strategy that works amazingly well because you are attracting people that are searching for a solution to their problem.  While you are giving away part of the solution for the problem through your free information, you are also positioning yourself as an expert on the subject and someone that is there to help them solve the problem.

This is one of the most strategic lead generation techniques you can use and it is very cost effective.

The hardest part of content marketing is the creation of fresh information and articles.  You cannot just write a couple of pages and stop because Google looks at the freshness and number of article on a particular topic within your site.

What I truly love about content marketing is that it is a good way to use your time after hours or during a slow period.  During business hours, focus on lead generation that works in the traditional ways for your business.

For other times, write articles that will draw leads into your sales funnel and give you more people to follow up with.