Lead generation is at the heart of any internet business. Without leads, you can't make any sales – and without sales, you don't have a business. But what is lead generation really all about?

The process of generating a lead – or a customer who has given you their information for follow-up – isn't a complicated one (although some internet marketing “gurus” would have you think otherwise). Simply give your prospect a persuasive and valuable reason to give you their contact information and they will.

Squeeze pages are the most common method of lead generation in internet marketing, and are among the most effective. There are other methods, such as co-registration and “buying lists”, but they are less effective (and more costly) because the leads you get from these methods are less targeted than the leads you get from other generation practices.

To generate effective leads, you have to generate targeted leads. To get targeted leads, you have to quality your prospects first. This is done by offering something that only your ideal prospect would be interested in. Offering a diet book to internet marketers wouldn't produce a targeted list – but offering that same diet book to people who want to lose weight will produce a list of qualified people interested in losing weight.

It is not difficult to build an effective list once you learn how to effectively and efficiently target your message to your ideal prospect. Do that, and your results will soar.

Outsourcing is the act of hiring someone else to do something for you, without getting them to work as an employee. They are on a contract for the project, and after that you are not accountable to each other.

Why outsource? Because as the old saying goes, if you're a “Jack of all trades, [you're a] master of none!” Don't try and do everything in your business – do what you're good at, and outsource everything else.

For example, you want to create a new ebook. You like researching niches and doing joint ventures, but you absolutely hate writing ebooks and can't design a website to save your life. No problem! Hire a freelance writer, a minisite designer and a copywriter – and everything you can't (or just don't want to) do will be done for you.

Some people will have a knee-jerk reaction to this type of thinking, and automatically tell themselves they can't afford to outsource. WRONG! You can't afford NOT to outsource!

Think about it. When you are doing what you're good at, you are building profits in your business. When you are doing things like writing articles or ebooks, or designing your website, you are doing things you don't want to do or aren't very good at. Someone else – someone who does those things full time – can do them much faster, and much better.

What you have to decide is how much your PRODUCTIVE time is worth. Every hour you spend doing things that make you more money is a productive hour. Divide your total weekly earnings by the number of productive hours you have, and that is how much your time is worth. If you can hire a freelancer for less than that, you will have more productive time and your profits will go up! Its a simple calculation, but it can grow your business exponentially!

Don't be afraid to outsource. If you're not working on your business, you're working in it – and that isn't making profits for anyone.

Writing copy for your sales letter can seem like a hugely daunting task. But if you follow a few crucial steps, you can create copy that can pull in results – almost as good as some of the copywriting gurus.

First, you want to use benefit bullets liberally – as many as you can. Make sure to separate every few bullets with a bit of text. For example…

• bullet
• bullet
• bullet

 and you can also…

• bullet
• bullet
• bullet

Using this technique will break up your text and make it easier to read, while giving the appearance of less text and inviting your prospect to read the whole thing instead of scanning.

Use powerful subheads. Make sure that anyone scanning your copy will be interested enough by your subheads that they will stop scanning, and start from the beginning. Avoid subheads like “and…” or “Guarantee” - that won't get anyone's interest.

Focus on your market, not yourself. Avoid using the words “I”, “me”, “we”, etc. because your prospect has absolutely no interest in YOU – they care only about what is in it for them.

Avoid using big words and jargon. Words like “pastiche” and “solitude” might make you sound smart, but your prospects won't care – especially if they don't know what the words mean. Stick with basic descriptives – words like “imitation” and “alone”, words that most of your prospects understand. Remember, the reading level of the average American is 7th grade at best. You might be smarter, but don't assume that everyone you are writing to is.

Finally, use a powerful headline. Make sure it grabs the reader by the throat, and pulls them into the copy. That is the ONLY job of the headline. Throw away any ideas of being creative with puns, or sounding funny, or using a headline just for shock factor. If the headline doesn't get your prospects to read farther, its useless.

Follow these 5 crucial tips, and your copy will be better for it.