There’s plenty of ways to generate leads online. In fact, there’s probably an infinite amount of ways to generate leads online.
All it takes is a little creativity and an overarching strategy and you’ll be hard pressed to find that your work isn’t paying off in spades.
If you’ve gotten the strategy down, here’s 23 ways to get the creative juices flowing…

23 Creative Ways to Get Leads Online

1. Landing pages are crucial to online lead generation. Make sure the pages where you capture your leads have all the elements of a great landing page. Most of the tactics on this page will require a landing page of some form or another where the potential lead will enter their email address.

2. Use strong calls-to-action to make every page on your website lead (eventually) to one of these landing pages.

3. Write a special report that provides a solution to a problem your customers have. The goal here is to answer a small problem within a big problem. The big problem should be solved by buying your product. Require and email address to read it.

4. Write a white paper that does basically the same thing as above. You might be surprised at the results of labeling it a “white paper,” though. Read Mike Stelzner’s book if you need help. Again require an email address.

5. Put together a few Squidoo lenses about issues in your industry that your customers care about. Make sure your Squidoo profile has a link back to your site…or better yet, a lead generating landing page.

6. Take some blog posts (or articles) about a high traffic keyword phrase in your industry and put them together on a page that’s optimized for that keyword phrase. Use Scribe (affiliate link) to optimize the page if you don’t know anything about SEO. Tell readers to subscribe once they’ve read the resource.

7. Use Gotowebinar to host a webinar that (again) solves a problem for your customers. Require an email to register.

8. Use WordPress to create search optimized mini-sites that dominate search results for keyword phrases in your industry. Have the mini-sites lead back to your main site and prospective landing pages.

9. Contribute to online forums in your industry. Answer questions, be helpful, and be generous. Make your forum signature link back to your site and/or landing pages.

10. Create a buyer’s guide to a type of product you sell. Make it honest and useful. Be confident enough to show your strengths and weaknesses in all their glory. Be objective about you and your competition. Give this one away to be shared for free in pdf format. You don’t need to require an email address as long as you make sure there’s a link back to your site somewhere in the document.

11. Make a powerpoint presentation, present and record it with Camtasia, then slap it up on Youtube or Vimeo. Use Youtube’s annotations to add links back to your site.

12. Start engaging with potential customers on Twitter. Again, answer questions and be useful. Direct people to content that solves problems either on your site or someone else’s. Once in a blue moon, direct traffic to a landing page that captures leads.

13. Write an ebook that teaches people what your business has learned over the years. Be open and honest. Give it away.

14. Hold a virtual conference where a few key players in your industry get together and chat about issues, problems, and solutions to your customers greatest needs. Use Eventbrite and Gotowebinar to set the whole thing up. Require an email address to register.

15. Make a Facebook Page (not to be confused with a profile) for your company. Use the FBML Facebook App to create a landing/welcome page that captures leads. Use Involver to connect your blog feed (not full text blog posts), Twitter feed, and any other social networks you’re engaging in. Once you’ve done that, use your wall as another touch point with potential customers.

16. Comment on blogs in your industry. Be intelligent and answer questions. Never link back to your site in the body of the comment. Put your site address in the site address field and nowhere else. Eventually your comments all over the web will leave bread crumbs for leads to follow.

17. Create a manifesto. Make it your about page. Tell readers to subscribe to your blog or newsletter if it resonates with them.

18. Use your blog to address every question a potential customer could ever have about your product. Ever. When you’re finished answering questions, keep writing useful, valuable articles and stick them up there too. Every blog post is a step towards getting a lead out of your readers. Blogs tend to snowball as well so the more posts you write, the more leads you’ll get in the long run.

19. Write objective reviews of products, services, and providers in your industry. Post them on your blog.

20. Have someone code up a little information box with a call to subscribe to your blog or newsletter that shows up at the end of every blog post. Link it to a landing page. You can also include sharing links to spread the post.

21. Use VBulletin (probably the best but not free), Vanilla Forums (free), orBBPress (free) to create a support forum on your site. Encourage your customers to ask questions there. After a while, you’ll have a huge amount of content that attracts traffic, answers questions, and works to build rapport with potential leads. Advertise your lead generating landing pages in banners or text boxes on the forum.

22. Create a free course that’s delivered via email autoresponder. Write 10 articles that show your customers how to do something, make them into emails and have them set to go out over the course of 10 days every time someone subscribes. Email is probably the best online lead generation tool the world has ever seen (and maybe ever will see). At the end of the autoresponder have a message with a strong call to action for the next step in your sales process. Use the email list you grow from the course as an ongoing newsletter. Keep sending great content to that newsletter and you’ll have a never-ending source of potential leads. Use Aweber (affiliate link) to manage the whole thing.

23. Come up with your own ways to generate leads online. All you need to do is figure out different ways to deliver value over different online mediums. Couple that with a strategy to direct potential customers to the right lead generating places, and wham! You’ll get those leads. Tell me about your ideas in the comments.

Tactics From the Comments

24. Implement a pay-per-call and/or pay-per-lead affiliate program. –Geno Prussakov

Source: SCRAPPY PENCIL MEDIA