I learned the hard truth about lead Generation and I want to share with you what eventually worked for me and how you can jump ahead of the game and not make the same mistakes as I did.

So let’s crack on… But first, if you think you can jump on and hit a winning lead Generation system overnight this is not for you.

1,939 Followers From Free Traffic In 12 Weeks, 182 Profile Visits in 7 Days

When I first started Instagram everyone was giving me advice how to get more followers, the problem was after 4 weeks I had 15 followers I couldn’t get things working I hunted YouTube videos, Udemy course and this turned it around for me.

First, the advice they gave me was to not use automated software to get follows as you will get your account banned.

Yet on the training course I did it told me to use follow adder a cheap product which follows 100 people per day on a Hashtag you pick for your niche and it waits two days then un-follows people who do not follow you back.

On the back of that software running, you need to do a daily post to keep your followers interested in what you do. Now I’m at 1,900+ followers.

The one piece of advice I would give anyone is, to keep your content relevant to one theme or niche or you end up risking your lead Generation source being about all things and master of none.

On the back of this I got 8 email subscribers from posting to Instagram daily to writing this blog, the last 4 email subscribers were in the last 7 days.

The lesson here is now I know what’s converting to email sign-ups, I can now test paid advertising.

Yup, I know many people go paid advertising first for fast targeted traffic and get faster results as they fail faster and test faster.

However, that’s not what this test is about, as when I first tried paid advertising I spent $1200 and made $200 on selling a product which means I spent all my cash getting a working conversion funnel, then ended up $1,000 out of pocket as my product price point was too low, but that’s for another day.

Today is all about email sign-ups from Instagram.

Just know I tested free traffic over 12 weeks to get a new campaign working and now it’s working I can use paid advertising.

This is the hard truth that doesn’t sell and most people don’t talk about. And that is what it takes to make a new idea convert. The testing, changing and testing again.

If you have done this before, you know to have a budget to test on paid advertising, if you haven’t done conversion testing before, I would tell you to pick a free traffic source and focus on the 200% till you get it converting for you.

Then move to paid advertising to upscale fast.

New Funnels Are Broken. It’s How You Fix It That Makes Or Breaks New Leeds

On my traffic increase, I was seeing more and more followers liking my photograph posts but no one was visiting my Instagram profile (photos and text made on Canva a free app and website).

The thing is with Instagram; it only allows you one link, and that link is on your profile. So you must drive visitors from your photograph to your profile. From the profile link to your website which will more than likely be a landing page with an offer of a free PDF download in return for the visitor’s email address.

It was only when I put a white bar across the bottom of my photos with the text. “Free download in my profile” that I got visitors on my profile.

The amount of visitors I got jumped from a couple of visitors a week over 150+ profile visits a week. But still no email sign-ups.

It was only after trying different ad text on my profile which matched my landing page that eventually I saw people subscribing to my email list from Instagram thank goodness.

So, you need to be prepared to try 5 or 6 profile descriptions, written in Ad format with free Instagram traffic to see what works best for you.

The more Instagram traffic you get, the faster you can test. So keep looking for popular Hashtag in your niche.

First, I would search for a Hashtag of interest, in the example I chose #socialmediastrategy first, then I moused over all images to see their love count, looking for images with the highest values e.g.

Once I find an image with a high love count, I click on that image up and look at the description and copy the hash tags and post them on my next post.

This is how I get my images in front of lots of viewers.

  Your lead generation questions Define Your Business Model

I keep seeing people when I give them a-like, automatically they send me a direct message telling me they can build my list for me which is crazy I don’t even know them and they want my money in return to build my Instagram follows.

At first, I thought this method was amazing but testing showed this method does not work, I quickly realised all I did was annoy people and quickly switched this off.

I then gave one tip in one photo each day, which was The Turning Point for my Instagram likes and profile views.

My testing has shown me that in a world of people wanting everything now that patience is the best process. What I man by this is, give value, and only offer to help when you have done it yourself.

Best Lead Generation Sources But Only If You Get Them To Work For You

I could tell you the best lead sources from Pinterest to YouTube and Instagram but unless your message has an interest to the readers.

Your message won’t be read. An example of this as when someone is looking for weight loss, there are lots of pages offering advice and nothing stands out.

If you talked about, how weight loss made you feel physically, you are now different from the other pages round about you which makes your page stand out.

When you take this approach, more people like your page and click the share. As sharing becomes beneficial or easy for them to find should they want to reference again.

Which on its own has benefits as their followers see their shares which includes your page? So you need to be thinking what’s round about your message so you stand out when looking at traffic sources to test and use to see what works best for you.

A Note To Marketers Looking For An Overnight Win

When I wrote blogs, especially when I posted blogs on other sites, I expected to see a burst of traffic overnight.

Here’s what happens. Your Paige gets seen by a few and depending on the site algorithm and how the reader uses your content by view time spent or shares depends on how the site algorithm sees your content and gives it more views whether that be promoting on its own search or users sharing your content for others to see.

It’s a slow process which could take a couple of weeks rather than overnight or longer.

The best advice here would be to keep writing and check back on a fortnightly basis to see how many views your content is getting and what content is working best for you

Software I Use And Why

One benefit of being experienced and lead Generation and email Marketing is when you’ve been in the game long enough you have tried a lot of different software and you have your favourites your favourites may be defined by options or they could be because of a lack of options that easy to work with below is my personal favourites and why I like them.

• Activecampaign because the automation is easy and I love to tag my emails against the blogs they visited so I know what email address I looked at what blog meaning when I email that address I can focus my emails to a group of interested people with the right email.
• Instagram has been great at driving Leeds to my landing page but only after a lot of trial and error which I covered in this page it may seem frustrating but it’s well worth hanging in there as you will see great results at so far for me at 0 cost however Instagram is always changing and I can’t guarantee how long I will keep getting free traffic from them but for now it works and I like it.
• For my hosting I use WordPress on solid state hard disks with a service called rocket space because they are affordable let you host multiple websites worth fast performance.
• Namecheap.com for Domain name hosting. I like this site as the response time to initialise the domain name when typed into a user’s browser as fast also the management console in the back-end is easy to understand and let me do a sub-domain forward for my tracking software which is a benefit and easy to set up.
• CloudFlare I always create a free account and add my website to that free account as CloudFlare gives you a free SSL certificate for your website what you need when using Google and padlocked provides safety to your readers for visitors there are many other benefits to CloudFlare as they are the number one security website so any hack attempts get routed Elsewhere and not to your site giving you an added protection of safety and that just under 3 plan I don’t take out a paid plan as the pre-plan works just fine.

Conclusion

My conclusion on lead Generation is, it’s powerful but don’t expect overnight wins and keep up consistency.

I understand this may seem frustrating. most times, it seems like you are writing and writing and writing and not seeing any benefit.

just keep checking on a two-week basis, what I mean by that is don’t write content check your results in two weeks then change it.

I mean, right content checking in two weeks to see where it’s at then check in another two weeks to see has it gone up or down and then change it.

I hope you found this article useful and if you feel I’ve missed anything out please leave a comment below. To your success and have a great day.

David Arm I don’t want your education on email marketing to end here. There’s so much more to know and there’s so much we can get into on the tactics. So I’ve created this free email Cheat-Sheet. It’s eight tips in one Cheat-Sheet instantly emailed in seconds. Click here to get it.