The Tools for Lead Generation

Guest contributor WebsiteBox says:

Once you buy into lead generation as a process involving site content, premium content and techniques to get your suspect site visitors to give you their name and email address, you must then figure out the tools to get them to sign up. It's doubtful that those tired old "sign my guest book" forms on websites ever worked at all. They definitely won't work these days with the experienced web information-seeker. They've been exposed to entirely too much spam content and too many spam emails already.

However, as real estate professionals, we have a major goal for our websites and blogs, and that goal is lead generation. What's a lead? It's certainly not a suspect wandering around your website. It's only a lead once you move them from anonymous suspect to an identified prospect. No analytics tool does this. The only way to do this effectively and in a customer friendly way is to get them to voluntarily give your their contact information. This is a two-step process:

1. The offer for trade: This is an offer of special content or services if they'll tell you who they are. This is usually some type of special report, premium content, newsletter subscription, or market statistics. You make this offer, and it's normally delivered via email, so they must give you their email address to get it. It's highly effective if your offers are of value and they have developed some trust based on your other site content.