Collect Leads: Make Your Clicks “Stick”

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Our friend Paul Colligan would be a retired multi-millionaire today if he had thought of this at the time.

MTV’s Spring Break Weekend 2000 was sponsored by the folks over at www.GotAJob.com. Back then Paul owned www.GetAJob.com – only one letter different. He hit pay dirt. Nearly naked bodies cavorting around on the screen, and MTV was telling viewers, “Go to www.GotAJob.com!” By the time those people got to their computers, they couldn’t remember which was which.

Paul was able to cash in on the literally thousands of visitors per hour who came to his site via the typo. He was making money hand over fist, all the while getting a mach-two lesson in online marketing.

What Paul didn’t realize at the time, however, was that he was making another very, very expensive oversight:  if he had simply collected names and email addresses from those hundreds of thousands of visitors, he would have had a gold mine to go back to for years to come.

But he didn’t. So the money he made – and it was terrific money – he made just once. Had he known to collect names at the time, he would be a multi-millionaire today. He would have built an asset.

Do you want to create a growing asset that you can go back to again and again? Don’t pour all of your energy into just making the sale. Instead, offer something of legitimate value up front to your website visitors for free, in exchange for their contact information. You’ll get literally ten times as many people to cooperate, and you’ll grow a valuable list of leads and prospects. Having done that, you can communicate with them – and sell to them – again and again.