Online business leads are leads that are generated from the internet. Visitors to web pages fill out contact forms, giving such information as name, email address, phone number, etc. Contact forms can be very short- asking for only the visitor’s name and email address- or they can be several page long questionnaires. They all serve the same purpose- to create sales leads for businesses. The beauty of online business leads is that the person who has filled out the contact form has taken three critical steps towards identifying themselves as a potential buyer of your product. First, they have searched for a particular keyword or group of keywords using a search engine. An example of this might be “home business opportunity”. Next, they have clicked on either an advertisement or an organic search result on the results page offered by the search engine, such as Google. Finally, they have filled out the contact form. This means the contact has taken three distinct actions towards buying your product or service before the lead comes to you. This is a great thing to know when you go to contact them. They must have a real interest in what you are selling to have taken these steps. Online business leads can be used by all sorts of businesses- literally any business that uses leads to get new business should be getting at least a portion of their business leads online. However, here’s a word of caution. Just because your business is capable of getting online business leads does not mean those leads will be profitable. You must consider the cost of the clicks, the percentage of people who fill out the contact form and the percentage of leads that you are able to close. Finally you must consider the lifetime value of the customers you are deriving from the online business leads. This value must be great enough to pay for the clicks, the web page optimization and the management of your pay per click program. If you’re buying your online business leads rather than gathering them yourself, your cost of the leads you purchase must be considered. The problem with buying online business leads is that the same leads are sold over and over to different businesses. This can greatly diminish the value of the leads. People who fill out a simple online form and are then hit with phone calls and emails from dozens of companies non-stop are not very good potential clients. After a while they stop taking the calls altogether. The best way to get your online sales leads and online business leads is to have a system set up for you that is capable of delivering fresh, exclusive leads to you at an affordable price. This is accomplished by combining a pay per click campaign (using a targeted set of keywords) with a landing page, sometimes referred to as an “opt-in” page. When you have your own lead generation system, you don’t have to worry about your online business leads being sold all over the internet- they will be all yours.