Sales lists are lists of prospective buyers. These lists contain the prospect’s contact information such as their name, their email address and their phone number. Some people refer to sales lists as “leads lists” or “sales leads lists”, because the people on the list are really leads, they are not yet sales. Sales lists are usually purchased from list companies. These lists are sold over and over again. List companies like InfoUsa (which owns Sales Genie) have gotten rich selling the same sales lists millions of times. If you own a business, you may want to consider an alternative to buying your sales lists. You might want to set up a system where you are able to generate your own sales lists and sales leads lists. If this sounds like something that is much too complicated for you, you are making a mistake. Building your own sales lists can be quite simple once the proper system is put in place. This system needs to include two things- traffic and conversion. Traffic is simply a name for the visitors to web sites. The more traffic your website gets, the more people who are likely to give their contact information, thus making them part of the leads list or sales list. You get traffic to your website by either buying it in the form of a pay per click campaign or by having people come across your site for free through a process called search engine optimization. Buying your traffic is a lot less complicated (although doing it well requires experience) than trying to have your website come up “naturally” in the search engine results through search engine optimization. This is because thousands and sometimes millions of other web pages are competing for the coveted “first page” of the organic search results. If your sales are profitable enough to justify the expense, you can just pay the search engine to guarantee that your ad appears on the first page of the results. The best thing is that you only have to pay for the searchers who click on your ad- not everybody who sees it. Conversion refers to the amount of people you are able to “convert” from just being visitors to being real live leads. You do this by having a contact form on the landing page of your website. Visitors are encouraged to fill out the contact form or to call your business directly. The amount of people who do this divided by the total amount of visitors to the page is called the conversion rate. The higher the conversion rate, the less expensive your leads are. Through a system like this, which is optimized for both traffic and conversion, you’ll be well on your way to building your own sales lists. In addition, you’ll know that your leads are fresh and real and have not been sold to your competitors. The best sales leads always come from your own sales leads lists!