If you are involved in an MLM/network marketing or affiliate marketing business, chances are you've probably been taught that you cannot hope to grow your business without learning how to generate leads. Lead generating is essential to your business' survival and success. Without an effective lead generating strategy, you cannot hope to find any financial rewards in a business that relies heavily on your ability to continuously build contacts.

Understanding lead generating

Lead generating is the process of planning, searching, persuading and recruiting new prospects to join as new members or distributors, become affiliates, make a purchase or produce a referral. These prospects must be able to show some interest in signing up or participating in the proposed business opportunity in order for them to be called leads.

Lead generating is not a one-time process. As long as your marketing business is active, you will continue to use techniques in order to increase your earnings and expand your market.

Building your list of leads

Lead generating is a continuous process. In order for a business to grow, new leads must be developed and generated. Ideally, a business should have a large number of leads in order to sustain itself.

This requirement is often due to the nature of the product or service involved in online-based marketing. A marketer selling a product that only has a periodic demand will find it difficult to survive if he has a limited number of leads.

It's simple mathematics. The more leads you have, the more demands there will be for your products. The more demands, the higher your income. If you earn $50 from just five leads, for example, imagine how much you can make if you increased your number of leads to 100 or 200.

Where to start

Initially, a marketer's list of leads begins with his closest contacts, such as his family, friends, colleagues and acquaintances. You can then build your list from there by asking for referrals. This is a very effective lead generating technique to use especially if you have a robust network of contacts. You can simply build from what you have and expand from there.

In the absence of a good network of contacts, however, lead generating can be quite challenging. You will have to turn to more exhaustive (and labor-intensive) techniques to find and attract your target market. And yes, you might even find that purchasing leads will become a necessary expense.

No small feat

Generating leads may seem like a simple and uncomplicated process but in truth, it requires plenty of effort and is quite time consuming. In some cases, leads can even cost money to obtain. Many marketing companies specialize in selling lead lists to other marketers, the quality of which will depend on the source and on the price.