What you think your website will be it will be. It just takes a bit of hardwork and dedication to get your site where you want it moving forward. However, if you think about your site as a big time lead generator then you will start to use it differently.

What Is Lead Generation? There are two things that need to happen in order to generate a lead, at least as far as I’m concerned. Part One: You make an offer. Part Two: Someone indicates they are interested in the offer. That’s what I call a lead. In fact, that’s a pretty hot lead! And one that you will want to follow up on!

The Exact Nature of an Online Lead When it comes to having a successful website you will need to understand that in order for that to happen you have to have traffic coming to and from your site. Once you get them to your website then you will need to make sure that you obtain some type of contact information so that you are able to follow up with them. If you don’t there will be no way to get them back to your site.

Lead Generating Offers However, with all the spam emails that people get when signing up for things online, some will be hesitant to give out an email address when they come to yours. So in order to get an email address you are going to have to give them something in return. You will want to make sure that the offer that you provide to the consumer is of value to them or else they will not feel like it’s the right thing to do.

What it comes down to is you can’t just ask people to subscribe to your newsletter. Granted, there will be a few who will anyways, but most of the consumers out there want something in return. Just remember that most of these people are already overwhelmed with all the information they have in their inboxes. So your offer needs to be something they really want to see.

Get the Offer In Front of the Visitor There is little point in hoping that a visitor will stumble across your website, search for and find your newsletter sign-up link and then subscribe happily to your newsletter. It just isn’t going to happen! Here’s the kicker. The MAJORITY of websites DO EXACTLY THAT! Have you heard the term landing pages? Well, YOU GENERATE YOUR LEADS ON YOUR LANDING PAGES! That’s right. Give your visitor the option to subscribe to a list that is relevant to the content of your landing page, with an offer that is also relevant and valuable.

Lead Generation IS List Building This article is about lead generation marketing. There are a lot of online marketers that call this effort List Building. It is that, but I prefer lead generation as it makes me think more specifically about whom I’m trying to interest with my offer and how I’m going to follow up with them. You may have heard the saying ‘The Money Is in the List’? Well, the list is the end result of your lead generation efforts. And yes, the money is in the list, but you have to know what to do with the list and how to do it.

Stephen Tickner is an online marketing expert who would like to give you free information, with how-to video tutorials on Lead Generation Marketing. His company specializes in competitive affordable lead generation marketing services venice.

Viral games are much easier to seed successfully

Because of the many high traffic online games community sites and portals that are constantly looking for new content it’s easy to get you game featured. These website will often feature new games on the front page, providing massive amounts of traffic to your viral game and potentially getting your game played by millions worldwide. Try getting on the front page of YouTube or any of the other high profile video sharing sites and see how far you get. The sheer volume of submissions the video sharing sites get makes it virtually impossible to get anywhere near the front page, which means your video just gets lost amongst millions of others.

Viral games get consistently higher viewing figures

The ease of seeding and the fact that there is less competition means viral games typically get many times more views than videos. Millions (or even tens of millions) of worldwide plays are commonplace with viral games. Getting those sorts of numbers with viral videos is impossible for all but a handful of the very best viral videos.

You can put web links into viral games

It’s easy to insert clickable links to your business or product website into your viral game. And people do click them (usually in their thousands). Typical clickthrough rates on a viral game are over 10% (many times higher than banner ads). It’s impossible to include a clickable link in viral videos, the best you can do is include your web address within the video and hope people visit your site. The actual traffic generated this way can’t hope to compete with direct clickthroughs from a viral game.

Viral games are interactive

A good viral game engages your audience much better than any video by allowing them to not only see, but interact with your brand. This increases the impact of the advert, makes it more likely to stick in the viewers mind and makes return visits much more likely.

Viral games are much more cost effective

Given the above and the comparable production costs, viral games are generally much more cost effective than videos. You can expect your marketing message to consistently reach a much larger audience, for around the same cost.

You can easily, accurately monitor results with viral games

The success of viral videos can be very difficult to monitor accurately over multiple sites and trying to determine additional viewer information can be nearly impossible. Its easy to incorporate a viral tracking system into your viral game code in order to monitor detailed statistics about your campaign. Using either one of the free or paid tracking systems devised specifically for viral Flash or even Google Analytics, you can track exactly who is playing your viral game, what country they are from, how long they play for and how they interact with the game, such as web link clickthroughs. This is invaluable for keeping track of how well your viral game is performing. This sort of accurate data just isn’t easily available with viral videos.

Viral videos can be used to promote games but not vice versa

This may sound like a slight contradiction, but viral games can actually utilise viral video marketing to increase plays with little additional cost. We often use gameplay videos to get extra traffic to a viral game. Because it’s literally a video screen capture from the game there is very little work (and therefore cost) involved in adding this to a viral game.

Although videos are the first thing that spring to mind when you mention viral marketing, games are definitely more effective and worthy of your marketing budget.

Simon Walklate is a partner in UK based online game designer The Motion Monkey who specialise in viral game design.