“Most small business websites are not well designed at all for lead generation” – Chris Schwarz, Adwords Specialist.

If you’re going to spend money on paid advertising channels such as Adwords, it makes sense to set things up so that you get the maximum return on your money. One of the most important parts of that is setting up a landing page which is fine tuned to appeal directly to your target customer and push them towards a conversion without any distractions.

In this week’s episode of the Lead Generation Podcast we’re talking with our Adwords specialist; Chris Schwarz about how Landing Pages can be utilised to boost conversions in your Adwords campaigns. This is a follow up on Ep#5: Adwords – The Holy Grail of Online Advertising.

This episode is brought to you by our Lead Generation Strategy report. If you have a small business and you’re looking for a new marketing channel to generate more leads, this is the best option for you to help you get started. Once you’ve ordered your report we send you a list of questions about your business and situation and then do some research and analysis to determine the best lead strategy for you. Go here or click the banner below to order yours today.

Mentioned in this episode;

* Ep#5: Adwords – The Holy Grail of Online Advertising (our previous episode with Chris)

* Our Adwords management and landing page services

* Landing Page Software examples: LeadPages, UnBounce, Instapage

Transcription coming soon.

There’s many ways to get leads but often there’s some uncertainty and hassle involved. What if you could skip all of that and buy leads directly? The last five years has seen the rise of the ‘quote comparison’ or ‘get quotes’ business model which uses various techniques to attract customers on behalf of the member businesses then on-sells those leads to those businesses for a fee. This bring a much more predictable return for the member businesses, like you, than something like an online business directory.

In this week’s episode of the Lead Generation Podcast we’re talking with the founder of Service Crowd, Daniel Duckworth, about how small businesses can leverage quote comparison sites to get more leads.

This episode is brought to you by our Lead Generation Strategy report. If you have a small business and you’re looking for a new marketing channel to generate more leads, this is the best option for you to help you get started. Once you’ve ordered your report we send you a list of questions about your business and situation and then do some research and analysis to determine the best lead strategy for you. Go here or click the banner below to order yours today.

Mentioned in this episode;

* Service Crowd

Daniel Duckworth on Linkedin

* Service Crowd Business Signup – Get Quotes Screen

* Service Crowd Directory

* Article about Amazon and Google entering home services market

* Amazon Home Services (US Only)

* Article about Freelancer.com entering home services market

* Article about Ebay entering home services market

* Cost guide example (drapes)

Transcription coming soon.

We all know that the physical YellowPages directory is barely used anymore, but what about online business directories? There’s thousands of them out there including some big brands, a lot you’ve never heard of and plenty of industry specific directories as well. Can they be a valuable source of leads or is advertising with them a waste of time and money?

In this week’s episode of the Lead Generation Podcast we’re talking with the founder of Service Crowd, Daniel Duckworth, about online business directories and whether small businesses should consider them as a lead generation source. This is the first part of our interview with Daniel, the second part will be included in our next episode where we will talk about the ‘Quote Comparison’ or ‘Get Quotes’ type of websites.

This episode is brought to you by our Lead Generation Strategy report. If you have a small business and you’re looking for a new marketing channel to generate more leads, this is the best option for you to help you get started. Once you’ve ordered your report we send you a list of questions about your business and situation and then do some research and analysis to determine the best lead strategy for you. Go here or click the banner below to order yours today.

Mentioned in this episode;

* Service Crowd

Daniel Duckworth on Linkedin

* Top Ten Australian Business Directories article

* Directories mentioned: Yellow Pages, TrueLocal, Hotfrog

* Local citations from business directories can help improve your business’ local search rankings. Here’s our list of directories where you can get citations

* Service Crowd’s Home Improvement Guides

Transcription coming soon.

Adwords is the holy grail of online advertising due to its incredible reach, comprehensive tracking and laser targeting. Most advertising is based on interrupting people and hoping to attract their attention. With Adwords, you target your ads to people who are actively seeking a solution to their problem and have buying intent.

In this week’s episode of the Lead Generation Podcast we’re talking with Wicked Cow Marketing’s Adwords specialist: Chris Schwarz about the holy grail of online advertising: Search Engine Marketing, focusing on the Adwords platform.

This episode is brought to you by our Lead Generation Strategy report. If you have a small business and you’re looking for a new marketing channel to generate more leads, this is the best option for you to help you get started. Once you’ve ordered your report we send you a list of questions about your business and situation and then do some research and analysis to determine the best lead strategy for you. Go here or click the banner below to order yours today.

Mentioned in this episode;

* Adwords Platform

* Our Search Engine Marketing services

* Adwords phone tracking capability

Transcription coming soon.

A small businesses cannot survive without a solid sales strategy. If you’ve been putting your’s off for far too long, jump back in by listening to this episode of the Lead Generation Podcast with James Martin from Insider Foundry.

We had James on back in episode one where we talked about lead generation strategy and this episode completes our chat by talking about how to turn your new found leads into sales. The topics we cover include;

* How to choose a sales method

* How to diagnose problems with your selling

* What tools and resources you can invest in to take your selling to the next level

This episode is brought to you by our Lead Generation Strategy report. If you have a small business and you’re looking for a new marketing channel to generate more leads, this is the best option for you to help you get started. Once you’ve ordered your report we send you a list of questions about your business and situation and then do some research and analysis to determine the best lead strategy for you. Go here or click the banner below to order yours today.

Mentioned in this episode;

* James’ business Insider Foundry

* Our previous episode with James (Episode 1: How to Generate Leads)

* 80/20 Sales & Marketing by Perry Marshall (Book)

* Sales Marketing Profit Podcast

* Super Fast Business Podcast

Related: Get your target market right by creating customer personas (read our post on how to create customer personas)

Transcription

Coming soon.

Direct Response Copywriting is all about structuring your words (copy) in such a way that the reader is compelled to take an immediate action (direct response). Direct Response has been around for many years but with the proliferation of the web its become even more relevant because website technology helps to facilitate the action more resulting in better ‘responses’ than ever before. In this episode, we talk with Stefan King from Vivid Web Copy about the ins and outs of direct response copywriting and how a small business can benefit from it.

This episode is brought to you by our Lead Generation Strategy report. If you have a small business and you’re looking for a new marketing channel to generate more leads, this is the best option for you to help you get started. Once you’ve ordered your report we send you a list of questions about your business and situation and then do some research and analysis to determine the best lead strategy for you. Go here or click the banner below to order yours today.

Mentioned in this episode;

* Stefan’s business; Vivid Web Copy

* Vivid web copy ebook (and sales page)

* Influence by Robert B. Cialdini (book) – Six Principles of Influence

* Customer personas (read our post on how to create customer personas)

Transcription

Nick: Welcome back to the Lead Generation podcast. Today, we’re going to be talking with Stephan King from Vivid Web Copy about direct response copywriting. So thanks for joining us Stephan.

Stephan: Thanks for having me, good to be here.

Nick: Stephan specialises in creating web copy and landing pages for Software Companies but the techniques and strategies we will be discussing today are going to be applicable to many different types of businesses. So, hopefully many of our listeners will be able to learn something from this. Let’s get started by defining copywriting. Stephan, so, what is direct response copywriting?

Stephan: Direct response copywriting is when you want to have the visitor of the page to take action immediately. It originated with the traditional sales letter that you send out in the mail and you want people to act immediately when they read it, based on very little trust but a lot of information. This is in contrast to copywriting for branding where, for example, if you place a Mercedes advertisement in a magazine, then you’re not going to expect to have the readers run to the store immediately after they see it and buy the car.

It’s more like, because the boy throughout his childhood and then adulthood sees a lot of Mercedes ads in magazines and other places, he begins to form a connection with the brand. At some point in the future, when he can afford to buy a new car, he’ll just naturally know that the Mercedes is right for him – so this is at the extreme end of the spectrum. In between, you have TV advertising and radio advertising, where you make people slowly familiar with a certain brand name over time so that brand is top of mind when they are ready to buy. So that is branding advertising and that is in contrast to the direct response advertising where you just want to have people act immediately. You ask for a significant action from cold traffic based on information.

Nick: Cool, cool. So, this sounds like it’s definitely applicable to the web, where people often have the ability to take an action right away a...

Search Engines are a great way to get leads because they are widely used and people often have a commercial intent which means they’re motivated and actively looking for solutions rather than just being interupted by an advertisement. Most businesses will find that their customers are using search engines so getting yourself ranked and in front of those customers is a great way to gain their business. In this episode Nick and Amanda discuss the basics of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and how you can apply it to your business.

This episode is brought to you by our Lead Generation Strategy report. If you have a small business and you’re looking for a new marketing channel to generate more leads, this is the best option for you to help you get started. Once you’ve ordered your report we send you a list of questions about your business and situation and then do some research and analysis to determine the best lead strategy for you. Go here or click the banner below to order yours today.

Mentioned in this episode;

* Barnabas Smith Music

* Google Webmaster Guidelines

* Google Keyword Planner

* Google My Business (aka Google Local)

* Page Title or ‘Title Tag’

* Business Directories (Australian)

* Our SEO Services

Transcription

Coming soon.

Welcome to the very first episode of the Lead Generation Podcast. In this episode, we’re going to be talking with James Martin from Insider Foundry about lead generation.

Mentioned in this episode;

* Insider Foundry

* Insider Guides

* Sales Force

* Aweber

Transcription

Nick:                                       Welcome back to the Lead Generation podcast. My name is Nick Morris and today, I’m here with James Martin from Insider Foundry. This is our first episode so thanks, James, for joining me today. And we’re going to be talking about how to generate leads in this episode. So this is a podcast all about lead generation and about turning those leads into sales. And we’re talking with James again in a few episodes time, more about the sales and other things. Today it’s lead generation.

Perhaps before I get started with the questions, James, can you just sort of introduce yourself and your business and what you have to do with sales.

James:                                   Yeah, sure. I run a company called Insider Foundry, which makes products for the international student market here in Australia and those overseas that are thinking about coming to Australia as well. So, one of our major products is the international student guides and we started this business about six, seven years ago, giving away a free annual guide book to international students to help them better assimilate and integrate into Australian cities.

It’s completely funded through print advertising. So my role has been to sort of grow that pie of print advertising sponsorships and major commercial relationships. Also, yeah, I’m the managing director but also the main, so the salesperson, and, yeah.

Nick:                                       Great. well, you’re certainly pretty well-known here in Adelaide in entrepreneurial circles, so, congratulations on your success so far with that. Let’s perhaps get started through basically and so, define what is a lead, when talking about lead generation. How would you define a lead?

James:                                   Yeah. Sure. How would I define it. That’s an interesting question because there’s a lot of different, sometimes people refer to leads and someone has no idea about. And so, I refer to a lead as someone who has a pretty good chance of converting.

And I basically try and accumulate them in one spot and try and go for them. So I think that’s where a lot of people fail, is that they don’t identify what leads are, where are the right leads for their business. And that’s my, and those are the reasons they fall down.

Nick:                                       And so, with the lead, I mean a lot of people might say, it’s just having someone’s contact details but you go a bit further than that. So that they also qualify in some way, is that what you would say?

James:                                   Yes, that’s right. Yeah. I would say that it’s not necessarily easy to go on odesk and get 1,000 email addresses of everybody. You know, a lot of people do that and they wonder why they didn’t convert because the leads were not good to begin with, and they probably shouldn’t have tried to convert those leads at all. So yeah, I’ve definitely put a lot of emphasis in talking to the right people from day one.

Nick:                                       Cool, cool. If we’re talking about a business that’s just getting started and they are going to want to generate some leads, what are some of the things they should already have in place?