MLM leads are the driving force behind any home business owners success. Run out of leads and prospects, and you are effectively out of business. Is it enough to just get a ton of leads? Not if you can’t convert them to distributors and customers. The key to conversion is to take an interest in each prospects story and why they are interested in a product or the business. If you understand their pleasures and pains, you will be able to sell them anything you want.

MLM lead generation is critical to keep the sales pipeline full. There are a number of ways to generate leads. I am going to go over my top three that I use daily to generate a steady stream of leads for my business.

Article marketing is one of the quickest and easiest ways to generate free MLM leads online when getting started. Write an article a day, post it to your blog, then rewrite it and upload it to some article submission software. The submission software mixes and matches paragraphs with the original so you are able to have hundreds of unique articles from 3. The software then submits to hundreds of article directories. Be sure to stagger your submissions especially if you have a new site so you don’t get in the Google sandbox.

The next technique that is close to being my favorite is SEO. Search engine optimization is a traffic technique that won’t get leads overnight like some other strategies, but if you are looking for long term benefits, SEO is the way to go. Do good keyword research and structure your site correctly and you will be ahead of 75% of the advertisers on the internet already. Once you begin to rank in Google for specific keywords, your traffic will be amazingly consistent.

Digg, twitter, and reddit are all the rage these days. Therefore, social media syndication is a great way to drive traffic. The reason for this is that the search engines are starting to look at social relevance when ranking content. They feel that if people on the internet think enough of a piece of content to vote or digg it, then it must be relevant. Getting content syndicated could be a daunting task, but I use some software that helps to automate the process. My content begins to gain traction in the search rankings once it gets syndicated, which drives me more leads.

Now that we have driven traffic and captured leads using the strategies above, how do we convert the leads to business partners or customers? The first thing that I do with new leads is to contact them and find out more about them. My initial first contacts are not for selling, but for building rapport and learning my prospects story so I can get a better understanding of their pleasures and pains. The only time I even talk about my opportunity or any products is if they are already convinced to purchase without building a relationship. Realize, this type of prospect is rare, but it does happen and it is okay to talk shop with them at that point. For the rest of your MLM prospecting, find out why the prospect is interested in joining the opportunity. Are they trying to make a few hundred extra dollars a month, or are they trying to change the lifestyle of their lives for their families? Determine what the prospects hot buttons are and you will be able to close I higher percentage of people.

There is a cost to all lead generation. It might not be monetary, but time is as valuable, or even more so, than money. The key to good generation is to pick 2-3 methods and master them. Once you have generated the leads, take the time to understand their stories and you will be able to convert a high number of the MLM leads to customers or business partners.

Eric McMillan is an entrepreneur and internet marketer who takes genuine concern for people. Use these suggestions to save yourself time and money when generating MLM Leads. If you are looking for training and mentorship so you can get on with your prosperity, visit Eric McMillan’s Genius MLM Lead Generation Explosion.