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If you ever stop and think about where companies that sell lead lists get their leads, you may become disillusioned about the quality of the leads. First, consider where the leads come from. Many times on the internet ads offer the chance to win a free, insert expensive product here, and people sign up, offering their name, address, email address and phone number, thinking it is part of the required registration process.

Now, look at the product you are selling. How of the people that registered to win a free whatever, are going to be seriously interested in what you are selling? Chances are not very many and most marketers play the numbers game, meaning they will send out thousands of emails to uninterested individuals hoping to score a response from 10, for instance and a sale to one or two. With the cost of lead lists, this can be an expensive proposition, not to mention the time involved in buying the lists, sending out the information and following up with the few returns.

The best way to generate leads for your marketing business is on your own. Believe it or not, buying leads may not always be the best way to generate sales. There may be a small boost in traffic immediately following an email campaign to the newly purchased leads, but sales are only going to come in strong if the leads are for people interested in what you have to offer.

Before internet marketing, companies would attend trade shows where they would have people sign up to win a drawing. The entry forms became their leads and while not everyone who signed up were interested in their product, the odds were better because they were at the show. For example, car shows draw a lot of people, typically having an interest in vehicles. A raffle offering a free oil change or other vehicle-related service or product would generate leads from people interested in cars.

While selling a new car takes time, getting people into the showroom is the first required step of the process. The company sponsoring the raffle just paid the price of an oil change and their booth at the show to receive potentially thousands of leads from automobile buffs. The leads they generated are better suited to their target market than those bought from a company who was offering a raffle for a free bottle of hair dye.

The sale of leads is big business on the internet as all internet marketers need to leads to keep their business going. It is the quality of leads that is just now beginning to come into question. More companies are finding they can improve sales as well as their reputation by focusing their marketing efforts on people who can actually use their products.

Generating leads by offering a product or service specific to the industry may not generate as many leads as buying them from others, but the surgical approach to pulling out customers can be more financially rewarding than using the old shotgun approach, hoping the individual BBs actually hit an interested potential customer.