How To Make Money By Generating Online Leads For Companies

Generating online leads for companies isn’t as complicated as it sounds. In fact, you may already be doing it. Simply put, you’re sending traffic to an advertiser’s website and the advertiser will ask them to join their mailing list or complete a survey or some other type of simple action. And there are almost as many methods for making money with online lead generation as there are Internet marketers on the Web.

A lot of the affiliate programs you promote are for lead generation purposes. When you send someone to a toolbar download or to get a free horoscope reading or download a discount coupon, those are lead generation techniques used by advertisers to gather up all the email addresses. They don’t mind paying you a dollar or two for each of your clicks as long as they keep getting those addresses. Just like you, advertisers need to build marketing lists, too.

In order to generate leads, for companies or for your own business, you’ll need to drive traffic to the offer. There are two types of traffic you can capture: Organic traffic and paid traffic. Organic traffic is traffic generated through linkbuilding and creating content that appears on the search engines. Paid traffic is traffic that you get from using paid ads, like Adsense Ads, to drive traffic to the lead generation page.

How to drive organic traffic for lead generation

The benefit of organic traffic generation is that it doesn’t cost anything but time. Use relevant keywords to create articles and blog posts to bring search engine traffic to your blog. Use article marketing, blog and forum commenting, and Web 2.0 properties to create backlinks that will also index for your keywords and at the same time they’ll help raise your site’s overall ranking.

The downside of organic traffic generation is that it takes a lot of time to create all of the content you’ll need to pull in a large amount of traffic and it also sometimes takes days or weeks for that content to show up on the search engine indexes. However, if you use your keywords properly and attract tightly targeted traffic your blog will produce income for a long time.

How to drive paid traffic for lead generation

Again, you’ll need to create some quality, keyword rich content for your blog or website but you won’t have to worry about the off-site linkbuilding unless your goal is to build up a long-term niche blogging business.

The keywords for paid traffic generation are important. You’re going to be paying for keyword rich Adsense ads to drive traffic to your site and the content you link to from your ads must be relevant. Otherwise, as soon as the reader hits your site they’re just going to click away without bothering to click through to the advertiser’s lead generation form.

The keywords you use for your ads will also be used to determine what sites your ads appear on. So let’s say you’re trying to attract traffic who will be interested on handing over their name and email address to that horoscope business that’s paying you to generate leads.

Use relevant keywords in your ad so it appears on other sites where people might be looking for information about horoscopes. Those are the people most likely to click on your ad, visit your page, and sign up for the advertiser’s offer.

Use relevant keywords in the content on your blog so when the traffic arrives they’ll stick around long enough to click on your lead generation page.

Send your traffic to a landing page

One mistake that a lot of marketers make is to send all the traffic they generate directly to the advertiser’s landing page. That’s great. The advertiser gets their email address and you get a buck. Whooppeeee!

Put a landing page between your visitor and the advertiser so you can get their email address, too, and add it to your own list of business leads. Advertiser have all the fun?

This is also a good idea if the advertiser has a crappy capture page that isn’t converting as well as you’d like or if he’s maybe asking for more of a commitment on the offer. By sending your traffic to a landing page you can pre-sell them a little more on the offer so that when they do go to the advertiser’s page they’ll be more apt to follow through.


Generating online leads for companies is usually a pretty easy way to make money online. Use paid traffic generation techniques for trendy-type offers, where you need to get eyes on the page fast before the topic falls out of popularity. Use organic methods for a long-term, residual income type niche blog. But above all, try to get a landing page in there wherever possible so you can benefit from the leads, too.