Leads are the life-blood of any business. Without them, there are no sales and no profits. Even if you have two or three good way to generate traffic and leads to your website, a few more can never hurt. With everyone raving about SEO, Facebook, Google +, and Adwords, you’d think that popular ad platforms and organic search are the only ways to gain any traction in your marketplace. Not so.

Use Surveys

Surveys are a very underutilized method of getting leads. They work because you can sort your prospects before they ever sign up for anything, and the survey itself is a very low pressure, unsuspecting lead generation tool. By asking the right questions, you can steer your prospects towards one of several email lists that can then target those leads based on interests and desires that you uncover during the survey.

It works because you’re not asking prospects for their email so that you can spam them. No, you would never spam people, but most people have been burned by phony guarantees and promises so they’re suspicious. They shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, but they do. They see a landing page and alarm bells go off. A survey that asks just one question instantly disarms them.

Once that one question has been answered, another question pops up. Before long, they’re answering 20 questions, and you’re ready to pop the question: “will you sign up to my email list to get instant feedback about the survey you just took?” Usually, the answer to that question is “yes.”

Back To Direct Marketing

Everyone is fixated with online marketing, but it all started offline. Call up a list broker. They’re lonely these days. Ask for a compiled list of prospects that fit your ideal target market. Then, devise a simple postcard or direct mail piece and mail it out. Direct people to your website for a special offer, survey, or free download, and watch the leads start pouring in.

Online marketing is just a digital version of direct marketing. Whatever works online will work at least as well in print. The main difference is cost. While some online campaigns can be run fairly cheap online, offline tends to be more expensive. That doesn’t mean it’s inferior. In many cases, the offline space is far less crowded. Most marketers in most niches online never venture into the offline space. It’s wide open. Wide open. Take advantage of that fact, and you can really cash in. Your leads will be more motivated because they’re not getting blasted with mail by your competitors.

Answer Questions

Yahoo Answers and LinkedIn are awesome places to answer questions and drop a link back to your site. The trick to making this work is to provide really high quality answers on topics that you are an absolute expert on. Only answer questions that you are 110 percent confident you can answer. After providing an absolutely epic answer (seriously, it needs to be of stellar quality), drop a link back to your site for “more in-depth information.” Rinse and repeat. Then, congratulate yourself because you’re about to get a fire hose of traffic unleashed on your site.