The TRUTH About Home Business Leads

Are Home Business Leads A Good Way To Build A MLM Business?

There are a wide variety of opinions regarding the validity of home business leads when building your MLM downline. Some leaders swear by them as a fantastic way of building a business from home. Others feel that they are a waste of time and money. The question is who is correct?

The fact is, both of them are correct. I know a number of leaders who have generated and/or purchased leads of people interested in home businesses successfully. I know of other leaders who have dabbled with them, but simply didn't have the success they were looking for, so they moved on to other strategies for building a business.

First, you must understand that there are two different ways to generate these types of leads for your business. The first way is to purchase them from a leads vendor. The second way is to generate the leads on your own.

I do both and have done both throughout my entire almost five year career in the MLM industry. Here is what I have discovered as far as my experience with these two methods of lead generation.

The Truth About Purchasing Home Business Leads

Purchasing home business leads is the easiest way to get leads. All you have to do is come up with some money and you can have a steady stream of leads for your business. The problem that I found is that the quality of leads in my experience fall anywhere from ok and decent to flat out horrible and a waste of time.

The reason why is because of the way that lead generation companies use to get these leads for you. These companies participate in what is known as a CPA network or Cost Per Action network. These networks compensate website owners to place advertising on their web page. For each website visitor that completes a certain action (in this case, fills out a home business survey), the lead company pays the website a commission.

The problem with this approach is that it is very easy to manipulate the system. A website owner can play games with the system so that they can earn higher commissions. Some of them are just flat out unethical and will fill out fake names to generate commissions.

Others will offer incentives to get people to fill out the survey. For instance, they might say that anyone who fills out the survey will be entered into a drawing to receive a free laptop. With the incentive, the people filling out the survey may not actually be interested in an opportunity, they just want the free incentive.

Now there are some lead vendors that offer some pretty decent quality of leads. These are companies that rely mostly on their own advertising to generate their leads and use CPA networks to only supplement their marketing efforts.

A good example is Cutting Edge Media, who has a number of websites and magazines that they own that they can use as tools to generate leads for their clients. CEM produces a number of Home Business magazines and periodicals that they get out to hundreds of thousands of people a month. You'll pay $1 on the low end up to $5 on the high end. You are also going to need at least $100 to order a minimum number of leads.

Another company you can use is MLM Lead Specialist. Their leads aren't as good as Cutting Edge in my opinion. However, they are a lot cheaper and they do some specials all the time. I've gotten as many as 60 phone interviewed leads for $40. One of my business partners is one of the top 5 recruiters in her state in my company and this is the lead source that she uses.

The Truth About Generating Your Own Home Business Leads

Generating your own leads is definitely the way to go if you want to work a higher quality lead. It's even better if you are able to generate your own leads consisting of specifically people that are interested in the exact business opportunity that you are a part of.

This can be very expensive and/or time consuming. I remember, I was spending like $8 to $13 a lead off pay per click search engines. However for me it was worth it because I was converting them at a profit and I was able to talk to less people then I would have to if I was buying business opportunity leads and get retail customers and new business partners.

The challenge with generating your own leads is that it requires a new set of skills. These are skills that go above and beyond the set of skills you already need to actually acquire new retail customers and distributors for your business opportunity.

To generate your own leads, you will need to learn how to set up lead capture pages. You will need to learn what things like "conversion ratios" and "click through rates" are. Most importantly, you will need to learn how to generate traffic to your website so that you can get leads to begin with.

What I do like though about generating my own leads is that I don't have to worry about them being "surveyed" to death. This is when the person who is the lead fills out a bunch of surveys and gets a bunch of phone calls from a bunch of unprofessional MLM distributors that have no clue how to work leads effectively and vomit all over the prospects with their opportunity. Generally, a lead that I generated is usually filling out my lead capture form only at that point in time.

Another benefit that I like about generating my own leads is that you can replace financial equity with sweat equity. This means that even if you don't have any money, you can make up in work effort and know how what you lack in cash.

I also like the fact that many of the techniques that I use to capture leads have what I like to refer to as a residual effect. What this means is that I do that activity one time and it generates leads for me forever.

For instance, I wrote an article back in April. Since then I have had over 1000 people read that ONE article and I have had hundreds of people visit my website, some of which resulted in free leads for my business opportunity. These visitors continue to come into my website on a daily basis just from that article that I wrote one time!

Try going to your leads vendor and telling them you want to pay one time and get leads every single month for the life of your network marketing business. It simply doesn't exist.

Finally, most lead vendors that you purchase leads from will replace leads that you buy in cases where you have someone that puts in the wrong phone number or fake information. When you generate your own leads you are on your own in this area and you would be amazed at how many people actually put in fake information, especially phone numbers.

So in conclusion home business leads do work. However, you need to be aware of the advantages and disadvantages. That said, they certainly aren't the ONLY way to find prospects for your business opportunity. I know many leaders who have build wildly successful businesses without ever having to purchase a lead and without ever having to generate their own leads online.

In fact leads is only one aspect to my business. I have actually identified 7 strategies that I've personally used over the years to generate thousands of contacts for me to talk to about my business opportunity. If you are interested in learning more visit my website and download my free MLM prospecting report today!