Get 200 Business Leads Every Month While Watching TV In Your Pyjamas

Yes, you heard me right.

I gather roughly 200 business leads a month for free without getting off the sofa.

Hear me out.

I’m in marketing (sort of). I started a website a few years back called Trek NI, through which local walkers and hikers can discover amazing new trails across our little country.

Northern Ireland is small but the craic here is mighty, in case you hadn’t heard.

After a while, the website (and its associated social media presence) began generating significant traffic, and I decided it’d be sensible to monetize it in some way.

Google Ads was an option, but I’d used them before and didn’t like how messy they made my previous websites look.

So instead, I started offering local businesses the opportunity to essentially “rent” ad space, and before long our Explore page was born.

Then the pandemic hit.

Suddenly, business owners had to massively strip back their spending in order to stay afloat while their doors were closed during the lockdown. And naturally, one of the first things to go was their advertising budget.

I understood, of course — they had to prioritize the welfare of their employees and the future of their business ventures. But it sure as heck dried up my Trek NI-dependant income.

So I was faced with a difficult question, one that I didn’t immediately have an answer for: how do I generate client leads in a period of unprecedented financial turmoil?

I tried a variety of approaches. Cold emailing (it works if it’s done right, but it requires enormous volume); Facebook ads (only useful if you have the cash to burn, which I didn’t); even cold-calling (which I’ll never do again!).

Nothing seemed to work.

It was a serious dilemma. How was I going to connect with and convert businesses into partners for Trek NI?

How could I generate income when the people I was reaching out to weren’t reaching back?

Finally, at my wit’s end, I fired off a bunch of direct messages to local businesses on social media, assuming I’d continue to be met with the same steely silence as before.

Instead, I got responses.

Not many, mind you. And not always positive.

But the silence was finally broken.

So I sent more DMs, and I got more replies. Business owners were intrigued. They, too, needed to boost their income during the brief open periods between our various UK lockdowns (fun times, right?), and I was able to offer them a direct connection to an engaged local audience for a more-than-reasonable price.

It made sense, and many saw the potential.

I too saw the potential in the direct-messaging approach, so as all good experimental digital marketers should, I doubled down on it.

I invested heavily (time-wise) in finding and contacting local accommodations, eateries, and experience providers across Northern Ireland, purely via Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. It was a straightforward process that usually went something like this:

“Hey there, I love what you’re doing! Can we partner up? My audience would definitely be interested in what you’re offering.”

Those weren’t my exact words, but you get the picture.

If the business owner was interested, I asked if I could email them, and we took it from there.

Not everyone converted into actual partners, of course, but enough did to keep my head above water.

Fast-forward to today, and after years of constant testing and experimentation, I can confirm that direct messaging on social media (though it can have obvious drawbacks if the person you’re messaging doesn’t like to be approached that way) is one of the most effective methods of gathering leads for your business.

Think about it. If you send, say, 50 direct messages to 50 businesses, and 10 come back with their email address, you’ve just generated 10 engaged leads.

If only one of those leads converts into a partner, that’s still the equivalent of one lead per day.

And let’s say each of your partners is worth an average of just £100 — if you acquire one per day for a year, that’s £36,500 worth of income.

Even if you only send DMs on weekdays, that’d still gather at least 260 new partners a year, putting an extra £26,000 in your pocket (before the tax man comes along, of course). And if those partners are recurring, you can build on that exponentially.

And that’s only if your leads are worth £100 each. Imagine if they were worth £1,000.

You can gather super valuable leads from your phone while watching a 45-minute-long episode of your favorite TV show each day.

You don’t have to be at your desk. You don’t have to use a computer. You can be in your pajamas, if you like.

If you haven’t tried it already, I highly recommend exploring direct messages as a viable avenue of lead generation.

One word of caution, though: make sure to nail down the right wording and tone before going full-steam ahead with it. You could lose a lot of valuable leads from the get-go by annoying (or getting ignored by) your potential clients.

If you do manage to gather email contacts from potential clients, use a reliable platform like GetResponse or ConvertKit to stay in regular contact with them.

Have you had any experience with direct-messaging businesses? Let me know in the comments below!

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