Many small businesses started with the concept that if you built a better mousetrap and put it on the Web, the world would beat a path to their door. Unfortunately, what they soon find out is that just hanging out a shingle on your web page or on website search engines is a sure path to anonymity and a stunning lack of sales revenues. They needed to learn what many sales professionals feel is the most important rule to successful selling: you must fill the sales revenue pipeline with as many sales prospects as you can afford. This effort is generally known as lead generation.

So let's discuss various lead generation strategies that have worked for me in a variety of online and offline business endeavors. I will list the various approaches in descending order based upon quality of the leads that they generate, in my experience:

1. Customer Referrals -- There is nothing better than getting a lead from a happy customer. The customer knows what you are offering and probably has a good idea of what the prospect that s/he is referring needs. This means that the lead is probably well-qualified. Beyond this, you will have tremendous credibility with the prospect since you come well-recommended from someone that they know and trust. The downside to this method is that if you are just starting up a business or have very few customers for whatever reason, you will be limited in the number of actual referrals that you can expect to achieve.

Website Lead Generation/Introduction/A Better Mousetrap/Referrals and Other Methods/More Methods You Can Try/Conclusion