Are you like most entrepreneurs marketing online looking for the latest “secret” internet marketing strategy that’s going to make you thousands of dollars?

Do you chase after all of the “gurus” buying up every product that promises to teach you the latest way to generate leads and increase website visitors?

If so, you’re missing the most crucial part of marketing and sales – The first step that you should take before you even start to build your sales funnel.

You see it doesn’t matter how you build your sales funnel or what traffic generation strategy you use if you don’t even know the biggest problems your target market is facing.

This is very important…

First, who is your target market?  What problem do they have that you have a solution to?  Are they willing to buy what you are offering?  If so, are they even financially able to do so?

These are all questions that you should already have the answers to BEFORE building your sales funnel and BEFORE driving traffic to your website.

You can’t give someone a solution if you don’t even know what their problem is…and whatever you do, don’t assume you know! The only way that you really know is if you take the time out to research your market.

This is the very first lesson that I teach my students (along with teaching them how to do the research).

So stop worrying about generating leads right now and start doing some research on your target market. The more research you do, the easier it will be to convert your website visitors into buyers.

To learn more about converting your leads into sales by building a profitable online sales funnel visit www.profitablesalesfunnel.com

Home Business Entrepreneurs are so caught up in marketing on Facebook and Twitter that they don’t even realize that there’s more to social media marketing than social networking sites. Using social bookmarking and social news sites (from here on out I will just use the term “social bookmarking” for both terms) will allow you to increase your website’s rank in the search engines, making it easier for your target market to find you online.

The fact of the matter is that people on Facebook and Twitter are not actively looking for what you are offering.  However, people who “google it” are actively looking for a solution to their problem and if  your website offers that solution, they are more likely to not only become a lead, but become a customer or business partner over time.  Sure, you can generate plenty of leads on Facebook and Twitter, but the leads that you generate from the search engines are higher quality due to the fact they are actively searching for something.

That is why you want to use social media marketing strategies that will push your website higher in the search engines, such as with utilizing social bookmarking techniques. The reason why social bookmarking helps with pushing your website higher in the search engines is because you will generate backlinks (one way links pointing to your website) to your website from high quality sites (the social bookmarking sites).  The more quality backlinks a website has, the easier it is for it to gain more authority in search engines like Google.

Don’t misunderstand me and think that I’m telling you to stay away from Facebook and Twitter, because that’s not what I’m saying at all.  What I am saying is that you should add social bookmarking to your overall social media marketing campaign, and here’s how you do that:
1.    Create a blog as your online home (your main website)

2.    Post to your blog regularly

3.    Turn your blog post into an article and submit it to article directories

4.    Make sure that you article includes a link to your blog post

5.    Submit your blog post url and the url of the article at one of the article directories to social bookmarking sites such as digg, stumbleupon, and the sites found at socialadr

It really is that easy (but there is a lot more to learn) and these are the type of techniques that everyone who works with me personally learn.   If you are not yet familiar with these techniques and you would like to learn more, click here to get immediate access to my free training videos and learn how to create a profitable online sales funnel.