Contact leads are leads where a prospect gives you their contact information. This can include their name, email address, phone number and more. Most contact leads are derived from landing pages or opt-in pages. Some contact leads can be extremely valuable. If you are a business owner, getting new leads, particularly qualified leads, is quite often the lifeblood of your business. Contact leads provide you a way to get in touch with your prospect – be it through email, phone or chat – even Twitter or Facebook! The problem is that many contact leads (also known as “opt-in leads”) are sold again and again. The people who originally filled out the form and gave their contact information have email boxes that are bursting with junk – solicitations from sometimes hundreds of marketers. Leads are sold as fresh and/or exclusive and there is no way for the buyer to be able to verify that. The leads broker can always say that the prospect must have filled out several online forms and that is why you’re unable to convert any of them to sales. The only way to know that the contact leads you’re receiving are fresh and exclusive is to have your own landing page and contact information form. This way, you know that when you get an email with the prospect’s contact information, that prospect filled out your form just a minute or so earlier and that they are looking for the information you promised on your landing page right now. Leads are like employees. A good one is worth more than you paid for it but a bad one is not worth anything. Most people think that setting up a marketing system with a landing page and a contact form is over their heads or too expensive. The truth is that a solid marketing system including keyword research, a pay per click program, a landing page, domain name, hosting and an optimized contact form is very affordable and will undoubtedly return far more in the long run than paying for recycled leads over and over again. The question to consider before diving in to either paid contact leads or setting up your own system is, “how much is this lead worth to me?” If you’re paying for cheap leads but not converting many to sales or not making much profit from those you do convert, than you are wasting both your time and money. The trick is to have a solid business model in place and to know exactly what a contact lead is worth to you before purchasing or capturing them – then you’ll be able to judge which program is best for you. A good way to improve your business with respect to lead captures is to ask those people who become your customers what it was about your site that made them give their contact information. Get feedback from them. Have them tell you what they liked and didn’t like about your form and your landing page. What could be improved on? Was the message clear or were they confused? What made them trust you? Nothing is better than getting feedback from paying customers. Also, test your opt in page and find out which design yields the highest conversion rate- the amount of opt in contact leads divided by the amount of visitors to your page.