Copyright 2005 Keith Gloster

One of the toughest challenges online home business owners face daily is generating traffic and leads for their websites.

However, generating traffic and leads for your online business is not at all difficult if you know your product or service, can recognize your target audience and your website is ergonomically designed to capture leads.

Here are six additional tips to help you prepare for generating traffic and leads for your website.

1. Set Up Your Auto-Responder - In order to capture leads and follow-up with your prospects, your website must be equipped with an automated email system, better-known as an auto-responder. When a visitor arrives on your website, you must make it easy for them to subscribe for your information. Therefore, you will need to install a piece of script on prominent pages of your website to create opt-in forms or hyperlinks for them to use to subscribe to your mailing list.

2. Understanding Your Auto-Responder and Direct Email Marketing - Before starting any email marketing campaign, be sure that you fully understand how your auto-responder works. This can be easily accomplished by subscribing yourself to your auto-responder. Be sure that your outgoing messages are in compliance with the CAN SPAM ACT of 2003 and require each subscriber to double opt-in to your list.
Additionally, you must make it easy for your subscribers to unsubscribe and be willing to manually unsubscribe them should they experience problems.

3. Write Compelling Web Copy That Gets Results - Your web copy also plays an important role in determining the success of your traffic and lead generation efforts. In other words, your copy should instill excitement, motivation and curiosity in your visitors. Make it as clear as possible what you want them to do and give them lots of incentives in the form of free bonus gifts for doing so.

4. Generating Short-Term Targeted Traffic And Leads - Once your auto-responder and website are properly set-up, it is time to start directing traffic to your website. The quickest and easiest way to generate traffic and leads for any business is pay per click marketing. Why? First, you only have to invest a minimum of time and effort into setting up your advertising and, once you're done, you can get results near real-time. Second, you have control over the targeting of your campaign. This is very important. You want your ads to reach only the most likely prospects, and pay per click marketing assures you of this because you control which search terms trigger your ad.

5. Generating Long-Term Targeted Traffic And Leads - While pay per click marketing is considered to be the short-term solution for generating targeted traffic and leads fast, it is also considered to be one of the most expensive ways to advertise your business. Therefore, you should consider adding other time-honored and advanced marketing resources to your arsenal such as joint-venturing, co-registration services and article distribution for long-term list growth.

6. Build A Responsive List By Offering Useful Content - When your list begins to grow, offer your subscribers useful content closely related to the kind of products or services that you offer. This information can be in the form of a simple newsletter, article, e-report or e-book. By giving away free content first, your subscribers will grow to know and trust you. Then and only then is it safe to periodically sprinkle your content with offers to buy your new product or service.

About the author:

Keith Gloster provides advice on effective traffic and lead generation tools and techniques. For the creative edge on permission email marketing, traffic and lead generation, and to claim some valuable bonuses, you can subscribe to his popular newsletter at: http://www.free-mlm-leads-generator.com