I wrote a guest post over on Aaron Ross's blog titled, How to Generate a Steady Flow of Inbound Sales Leads.

I summarized a few points on the HubSpot blog and there are a few relevant comments over there too.

Although I'm an internet marketing guy at heart, if I had to choose another effective way to reach my market, I'd choose trade shows and direct mail. If it works for you, I wouldn't recommend stopping outbound marketing techniques. If they're done right, trade shows and direct mail alllow a marketer to target a market and measure results and ROI. If you can afford the investments, need to grow faster and your competitors are doing it, I don't think you can afford not to leverage these methods.

Doug is a life long direct marketing man and one of the shining online marketing stars in my growing online business network. He wrote a great post on his blog about how to generate leads from direct mail. There's a lot more detail on his post. Here are the highlights.

• Carefully target your audience.
• Buy Mailing Lists
• Focus on your Customer's Needs and solve their most irritating issue. Don't focus on your product.
• Always stress Benefits.
• Immediately Seize the reader's attention! Use an Impactful headline or first sentence.
• Never end a sentence at the bottom of a page in a sales letter.
• Share some "inside" information.
• Feature the offer.
• Give something away for FREE or Run a contest.
• Use a special "before the price increases" offer.
• Make a time-limited offer.
• Base your offer on a limited supply.
• Offer a special deal to the first 100 people who order.
• Make a "last chance" offer.
• "Buy 1 get 1 FREE" always out pulls "2 for the price of 1."

Read his full post.

Previously, my trade show expert buddies, Jason Kallio and Frank Damelio posted a guest blog post about what not to do when exhibiting at a trade show. Here's their insights about what TO DO:

Now we want to show you how to handle the traffic so you maximize leads. To do this you have to HUG All Prospects Masterfully.

H - Handshake: With a smile and extended hand you can increase your leads by up to 50%. Your hand will be left hanging in the air on occasion, but it's not personal.
U - Use their name like you know them: This is the easiest way to stop someone dead in their tracks. Name badges are your best friend at a show.
G - Give a gift: Make sure to hand them a gift not let them grab it from a pile. The value of the gift is that they now feel they owe you a little bit of their time.
A - Ask qualifying questions: Avoid benefit dumping. Have rehearsed questions designed to quickly find their pain.
P - Plan of action: It is critical to post-show follow up that you agree to the next step with qualified attendees before they leave your booth.
M - Move them along: A trade show is a perishable investment. This is not the time to build the entire relationship. Spending too much time with one visitor costs you multiple leads.

Between part 1 and part 2, we have given you 10 tips that do not cost a penny. Using these is the cheapest fastest way for you to get more leads.

Jason and Frank are experts at trade shows. They plan to write another guest post that talks about the systems they use at trade shows.

Do you have a system for qualifying, collecting, following up and tracking sales from your trade show leads? That's what they'll be blogging about next.

Update: Frank has a blog now.  And I'm excited about that.

I have the honor of knowing, not just one, but two trade show marketing experts, Jason Kallio and Frank Damelio. I talk to them quite frequently. Neither are blogging, even though they both have so much great insight to share. So, I suggested they write a guest blog post together:

The Center for Exhibition Industry Research (CEIR) has collected trade show statistics since 1978. Research shows the cost to generate a qualified lead at a trade show is $212 vs. in the field is $308. That is a difference of $96 per lead. Why? Trade shows bring your target prospects to you.

Once you have selected the right show, your challenge is to filter through the traffic to find your best prospects. Here are four simple mistakes to avoid being a PEST to your prospect:

P - Put up barriers: Avoid putting tables or other barriers the long way across the front of your booth. Keeping a clear wide open space allows people to step out of the traffic and into your domain.
E - Eat in booth: Mom always said, "Don't talk with food in your mouth." Visitors do not want to be rude and interrupt you while you are eating. They may intend to return, but they won't.
S - Sit in booth: Visitors don't want to make you get up, especially when they are "just looking". If you are already standing, they are much more likely to engage you in conversation.
T - Talk: You are there to engage attendees not one another. If talking to your team, then face the flow of traffic and break off to engage prospects. Leave the booth to check your phone messages.

These four tips don't cost you a penny. I cannot think of a cheaper way to help get you leads. Just for fun, the next time that you are at a show, walk the floor and see how many exhibitors are being a PEST.

Right now, "How to Generate Leads Using the Web" is the title of my blog. I'll probably change it at some point.

But, "generating leads via the web" is what I am helping my clients do. That won't change. I'm planning on doing a series of step-by-step videos to demonstrate how to do generate leads via Search Engine Optimization, Pay Per Click, Blogging and Engaging in the Blogosphere and on Social Media sites... for the benefit of my clients as well as readers. The knowledge to do this should be in everyone's hands. Right now, the knowledge I'm going to share is not known by many people. I'm about to piss off a lot of search engine optimization and social media marketing consultants. 

To do this stuff right, you don't "NEED" them. However, to do it right, you NEED the tools. Since I'm providing my clients with the tools, I have a lot of reasons to share the knowledge of "how to generate leads" openly. I'd rather educate a few hundred people at a time, than one on one.

The place to start is always with Keyword Research. Using the HubSpot tools, I've been able to help almost all of my clients identify keywords that:

• have a large amount of search volume,
• aren't too difficult to rank for in the organic search rankings,
• and where they are already ranking in the first 100 results in google's search engine result pages (SERPs)

These are the gems because with a little bit of work, it's easy to start ranking high on the first page and start enjoying that free traffic. But, since there are a lot of internet marketers publishing to the web, it's difficult to identify keywords for myself. (Luckily for me, Mike Volpe and the marketing team at HubSpot has done the work to rank for "internet marketing" and a bunch of other phrases, and they supply with as many leads as I can call.)

What I'm struggling with is how to show examples of doing it without giving away competitive advantage. For example, we discovered a few keywords that one of my clients should focus on, he changed his title tags and voila ... he went from result 79 to 9 in the SERPs. I would never share what those keywords are because it would make it too easy for his competitors to duplicate. The actual work he did to rank is obvious if his competitors simply look at his site, assuming they have enough knowledge of SEO. (0ne of his competitors already knew about this keyword and is optimized and ranks for it.)  However, I'm not going to advertise how he did it in a video. 

The struggle is over.

So, I'm happy to report that I discovered a solid keyword phrase, where pc4media ranks "19" in the SERPs and there's approximately 140 searchers per month. I would not have discovered if it wasn't for the integration of HubSpot's keyword research tools and web marketing analytics. A few people came to the site as a result of the search. Then, with one click I determined where I was ranking, how many people searched for that phrase in a month and whether or not it'd be difficult to get to the first page.  HubSpot's keyword tool tells me that it's not that difficult to get higher than I already am and I've already made a change to my site to get higher.

So, I've found a good one. Were you hoping I'd share it? Not until I do my videos. I don't want another internet marketing expert to wreck my progress while I'm making the video. I expect others to compete with me for the keyword after I do the video and lots of people see it. But, that's why search engine optimization is an ongoing process.  Also, by then, I'll have done a bunch of blogging, link building and social media marketing in order to rank. It'll be harder to duplicate my efforts. And I'm sure I'll find more terms to go after by then too. But, this'll serve as a good way to demonstrate "how to generate leads" via SEO.