We will discuss New Media lead generation tools which cover the social web, search engine optimization, blogging and more. I find it unnecessary to cover historical ways of lead generation. In addition, the article touches on sales software that assist in acquire sales leads and make a priority of following up with sales leads.

It is obvious that the web is a highly competitive marketplace and the more specific you become in your targeting the stronger your company will usually perform in the financial services market.

Why is the Internet so challenging? Not only do your web designers have the financial services companies planning to beat your company, but there are also affiliate sales people, lead generation specialists that get paid per action, web authors that get paid by advertising revenue, bloggers posting about financial services and others posting lots of stuff that cover the topic.

The 1st tip is what will enable you to compete for targeted financial services sales leads in your area. Write your website to focus locally. It is well known that the union of a service and a city name is an effective strategy because a person that is finding you is probably a shopper that is looking for local pricingand a person that is close to making a buy decision. Your website is doing the searcher a favor because they are Googling for the product locally.

Lots of sales people do not want to limit their sales area. But if you truely want to get new leads you should be more targeted regionally and enjoy local visibility that despite less broad traffic you will be found by actively looking in your market and real prospects more likely to buy most of the time.

Something else is writing a marketing plan with a real strategy around online publishing. I have not said social media. There are numerous types of publishing that are both social and non-social. For example, sending out a press release and posting a news room in your website. This is not a two way social interaction but will help you generate more search engine results. Blogging can be effective with comments not visible when a business does not want them and would be a strategy to improve SEO and traffic, yet the social aspect is turned off.

Do not overdo the social side. With social media, you must be leveraging LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. Do not just use these things to use them. They all have groups as part of the system and they can be used to get involved with online groups and get to network with prospects that are could be in need of your services. Use this to go from a shot gun approach to a highly focused financial services lead generation strategy that will save you time.

Here is an important one. Email is still a great tool. Marketing with email should be superbly effective at building relationships and very affordable. We subscribe to aWeber to put the process on autopilot with leads and offer good value to visitors to our sites, blogs and social accounts that decide to subscribe to the free information or free autoresponder course.

You should take time to understand what is meaningful to your potential new customer. For example, forget about selling, talk about the benefit to the person. Does it cut risk? Or does it help them be healthier?

After the financial services lead grasps exactly how your offering will help them, they become an interested, high value lead ready to buy instead of a cold call.

Lastly, you must look at a customer management software. If you are in a big company in the financial services industry and they should give you access to sales software. However, if that is not the case you should get a free crm to manage your leads and revisit them periodically. You would be shocked to find out how too many wonderful opportunities get lost simply because of poor followup.

1st, do not buy into the standard hype about blogging being about relationships.  For some people that is true, but the biggest benefit of blogging is ever increasing search engine traffic.  It is not that hard to learn how to do search engine optimization with blogs, and if you make your blog primarily focused on lead generation and increasing sales, you will have a positive impact on your bottom line.  After all, blogs are very low cost and the writing can be done during your off hours or even outsourced.

Lead Generation with Blogs is as simple as having a clear call to action (lead capture strategy) and knowing which niche keywords are good targets for you.  Hint:  they will have low competition and steady traffic.

This lead generation strategy does work, and I have seen it make a big difference in businesses in as short of a time as a few days, but usually it takes a couple of months to start kicking in and increasing sales.

Congratulations – knowing the purpose that you are setting a website up for is half the battle.  Now the key for you to successfully build a lead generation website depends on you keeping that goal as your one and only goal.

Lead Generation Websites can be landing pages or organic search magnets.  I happen to specialize in the latter, so lests focus on that one.

To attract organic search results that turn into leads you need to first begin with great keyword research.  Find the popular terms that your target audience is searching on to solve the problem they have – which should just happen to be the product you sell.

Then register a domain using some of those keywords.

Then set up a wordpress blog with tags and categories that are from your keyword research list.

Then write articles every day that focus on those keywords and long tail keywords.

And lastly, but of utmost importance, make a clear call to action.  Have a free download or some other way to encourage someone to become a lead for you.  This has to be in the top part of the page and really stand out.

Now here is where your goal must stay top of mind.  Do not add all kinds of stuff to your blog.  If you want your wordpress blog lead generation strategy to work, there should be very few options of what to do.  Do not add lots of plugins and social items.

This is the basic strategy of developing a lead generation website.

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.

When you are first starting out, the number one rule is not to put all your faith in one marketing technique unless you have your own, independent proof that it is a highly effective small business lead generation technique.

Small Business Start Ups tend to be new to business and they believe that marketing will work on the first try.

For example, you may have $5,000 of start up money and decide to do a direct mailing – figuring if only 5% of those people buy your product, you are doing great.

But remember, it is possible that no one will respond to your mailing.  And unless you have a honed sales process, closing the few leads you generate is still going to be difficult.  So now if that small business lead generation budget was all you had, you are in trouble.

Before you pick a tactic for your lead generation, design a lead generation strategy.  What communication avenues are your prospects using most?  Is it yellow pages?  The web?  Direct Mail?

Then go do research on how to get the most out of the small business lead generation tactics in those mediums.

Then, do small tests and trials to see how it works.

But do not give up after one trial.

The reason is that your skill at doing these things will improve over time, and most marketing efforts take repeat exposure to work well.  The web does not take repeat exposure as often because it can draw a hot lead to you at the time that they are ready to buy.  However, the competition is often fierce and it takes a long while and a lot of effort to build a really good lead generation website.