If you've seen Kevin Costner's film the "Field of Dreams" you will remember how he was inspired to build a baseball field with the words "If you build it, they will come". He built the stadium, and with a little faith, streams of visitors were coming to see his dream.

Sorry to bring you back to the REAL world but this isn't "Field of Dreams" and you aren't Kevin Costner. If you want visitors to your dream website and you want some measure of success online, you need to take some important steps to do so.

Without a regular supply of leads to your business then you just aren't going to make it in internet business, period.

How on earth could you? It would be like setting up an offline business and expecting it to succeed without anyone picking up the phone to call you or walking in through your companies' front door.

Makes sense doesn't it? Of course it does but the majority of prospects I deal with respond with shock horror when I tell them that now that they have set up their business websites they will have to buy leads or work hard to obtain them.

Leads are the lifeblood of your business and a highly targeted prospect can be worth $1000s, especially if you are involved in network marketing.

The way I see it, there are a few things you need to do to qualify leads and turn them into your customers or downline.

Firstly you need to obtain them, and as I can only share my own experiences, I will tell you what I do.

1) I buy leads - This is the simplest way to get leads and obviously will take the least amount of work to do this, because you are buying them from other sources and sending them to your business. These are usually raw leads, meaning they are people interested in starting an online business but not sure how to go about it nor with which company to proceed. It is up to you to convince them to use your product or service to do this.

2) I add them to my followup system - After buying leads you MUST add these prospects to some sort of followup system. This is basic stuff and if you don't do it you won't succeed.

There is absolutely no point in buying leads unless you followup with them. You COULD buy them and send them one email with a link to your business. A very small % will actually visit your site, what about the rest? Adding them to a followup system with at least twelve further messages will help turn your leads into HOT prospects. Some of my autoresponders have up to fifty message with articles, tips and recommendations.

3) I send targeted prospects to my business websites from the search engines - Many of my leads come from top rankings in the major search engines. A full e-book could be written on this alone but basically I set up a domain - obtained hosting - optimised my website with keywords related to my business - submitted my site to the major search engines - added quality home business related content and began a reciprocal linking campaign which boosts my sites web ranking more than anything else. The greatest thing about these leads is they are HIGHLY TARGETED and they are of course free.

Again I have set up a web form at my sites to encourage my search engine leads to add themselves to my followup system. I can then get to work on turning them into my customers and downline affiliates.

There are of course many other forms of sending customers to your website but the two above combined with an effective followup system can virtually put your business on autopilot and free up your time for other projects. They are also the most effective ways that I have found to reach a successful income.

Take the steps as outlined above and let me know how you get on.

Copyright 2004 Mal Keenan