The Best Way to Get Leads in 2024

Every dollar you’re ever going to make in business will start as a lead. So lead generation is crucial if you want to make money as an entrepreneur, solopreneur or freelancer. But what’s working right now? What’s the best way to get leads for your business? Well, I’m going to help you with that. In this episode of The Digital Nomad Entrepreneur. Now that’s me. I’m Eric. I’m a full time digital nomad entrepreneur traveling around the world with my wife and four kids and having an amazing experience. Are four teenage kids? Well, almost all 14. One of them is just going to be 12 soon. But we’ve got some older kids and just having a great time introducing them to different cultures and countries, exploring with them, spending a lot of very intense time together. And just it’s it’s been an amazing experience and we’re able to do it and continue to do it because we have a business that supports us. We we bring in leads. And so having these leads come in is super important now. Lead generation is one of five business processes that you’ve got to have nailed for your business to succeed. Now, in episode three of my podcast here, I unpack the business engine. The digital marketing are the digital business engine that it takes. These are the five systems you got to have in place to really get a growing business. And those five are leadership, lead generation, lead conversion, collecting and managing money and project management. When you get all five of those in working and then you start working through improving each one of those, then your business will grow through the six stages of business. The six stages of business. That first stage is the the ideation and the dreaming phase. Then we go into the second phase, which is the weekend warrior kind of phase, where you’re learning and experimenting and trying and starting that side hustle while you still have the 9 to 5. Third stage is the all in. You ditch the 9 to 5, you’re out there. It’s all in. It’s all on you. It is. This is 100% what the way you’re going to make a living from all end. We go to Team Builder and we start building a team around us, developing, you know, people to to work for us and as part of our team. And then we move into C-suite, where we are now leading our frontline team through a layer of other leaders. And then finally, we move into legacy. Now, that’s the typical journey. Not every business is going to go through that process. But from my experience, the entrepreneur that tends to listen to this type of podcast, they that are running a business, leading a business in the digital space do tend to kind of go through those six stages the majority of the time. Now some of them stop it all and some of them stop it. Team Builder But there is a pathway to go further for those of us that want to. But what does stay true for all businesses are the five systems leadership lead gen, lead conversion, collecting, managing money and project management. Now today, I want to focus a little bit on what’s working right now. What’s the what what is the best approach, the best way to get leads in 2024? And I’m going to say that this isn’t only the best way to get leads in 2024. This is the best way to get leads in 2024 and beyond. Now, I know this is of interest to people. A lot of people, one of my most or one of my my best performing email magnets or lead magnets that I have out there in the world is on finally leads. Dot com. Finally leads dot com. And it’s five strategies for 30 leads in 30 days. And that gets downloaded on a very regular consistent basis by new people because they’re very interested in this. And we all realize we need leads. We all realize we need leads. Now, unfortunately, a lot of people focus just in on that. On the lead leads is just one of the first five metrics that really make a difference. And I’m not going to get into a lot of detail on this in this episode. I do want to like I said, I’ve got seven specific points to make to help you with with lead gen and 2024. But a lot of people think the the success of business is more leads more leads, more leads, more leads. We just the other day I was working with one of my one on one coaching clients and I was sharing my screen and I showed him an Excel spreadsheet that we we walked through his numbers. We put in his five core numbers, the, the, the number of leads he’s averaging per month. That, that is one the average number of sales that he’s making per month from those leads. So that’s his lead conversion. Then the third number we looked at was the average sale. You know, what is the average contract worth to him? You know, what does that what does that say look like? Then the next number we looked at was his margins. You know, what is the what is the profit margins he is making on those? Okay. And so with when we looked at all of these numbers across the board and we multiplied them out if we wanted to double his profit, doubling his leads didn’t do that. But I showed him if he just made a 15% increase, 15% and each of the metrics across the board, he would double his revenue. So it’s not just about leads. And I would I would propose that for most people, starting at the far end of the equation is is the best where you’re really focused on your margins and then your average sale amount and then on the way back to leads. But it still does start with a lead. But again, you’re going to have to have a system for lead conversion, collecting and managing money, delivering, you know, project management where you’re controlling margins and profits and repeat business because of the quality of work you’re doing. And these systems all work together to to really grow a business. It’s why you can’t just stay focused on one of them in too many times. We think that leads is the answer. It is just a small part of the equation. All right. So what are seven ways to get more leads by the end of the year? I’m I’m recording this in June of 2024. So I’ll say, you know, what’s the best way to get more leads? Not just like I said, not just in 2024, but but really very quickly, almost right away, you’ll start to see a difference. But I would say definitely, if you follow these seven things for the next 3 to 6 months, you’re going to be blown away with how many more leads you’re getting, how much better you’re doing, and lead conversion. So what are the seven things? Here are the seven ways to get more leads. Number one, stop changing your plans. All right. Stop changing tactics. Stop changing strategies. Have a strategy and go for it. There are so many people I talked to in there or I’ve tried Facebook ads and then they see, you know, that then they try cold emailing, then they try cold calling. Because what happens is they listen to each of these different experts that are out there that have their way of generating leads and they see an ad for it. They hear a person talk. On a podcast. And this person gives these amazing results that they get through their ads or through their, you know, outbound marketing or, you know, through their their content strategy. And so what a lot of specialist solo producers and freelancers try to do is, is they they try this thing and they try that thing. And as soon as it doesn’t get the exact results that they want right away, you know, they they buy into a program on Monday, and by Friday they have only $50,000. So they’re ready to jump on to the next thing. Now, I’m exaggerating that a little bit, but but not a whole lot. It’s unbelievable to me how many people change their strategy. I’m just going to tell you right now, the the honest to goodness truth for you is this. Almost all you know, the vast majority of the I’m using air quotes, gurus. And I don’t mean that in a derogatory way, but the experts online that have plans, have courses, have masterminds, have, you know, all of the stuff. And they’re like, oh, we’re going to teach you to generate leads with with with Facebook ads. Or, you know, maybe you’re seeing ads for like something like a leads guerrilla source or, you know, somebody going to, you know, emails you and they can they’re going to guarantee you so many, you know, setting you so many appointments a week and, you know, whatever that is. You know me, I am a huge proponent, especially if you haven’t left your you know, that’s especially but very specifically, you haven’t left your passport country and you’re just starting out and you’re in that that dreaming or the weekend warrior the all in. Nothing beats local networking marketing. I mean there’s just there’s just that’s the thing. And if you’re going to not be location independent, if you’re not going to move around, I just I love that strategy. But the thing is, with all of these strategies out there, it doesn’t really matter which one you choose. What happens is you choose something and you do it half heartedly. You do it, you know, part way. You just kind of dabble in and it doesn’t work. So you go to travel the next one. So let me tell you something. Stop looking for the easy road to money. All right, man, that there is no easy road to money, my friend. It takes it takes work. And you’re you’re not having success because you’re not sticking to it. You keep changing plan. So the first way to get more leads in 2024 is pick a plan and stick to it. And honestly, it doesn’t matter which one you pick, choose one that you like, choose one that you know you can do for the foreseeable future and commit to it. Stick to it. Stop looking at others. If the grass is greener on the other side, they have a higher water bill. Okay, so stop looking over at what other people are doing and comparing yourself to them or what results they’re getting. Comparison robs you of your joy. Pick a strategy and become an expert at it. I mean an expert at it. If you’re going to do Facebook ads, learn the stink and system, learn ads manager, learn all the business tools and Swedes and how every little bit of it works and the like. There’s a lot of technical jargon in there. You have to become an expert at it. If you think you’re going to go in there and just drop out an ad next week and boom, that’s it. You’re gonna start getting leads. You’re fooling yourself. I’m sorry. It just doesn’t work that way. You have to become an expert around every part of a lead gen strategy. You have to master it once you master it, and you’ve got it so stinking honed in that it’s on autopilot and it doesn’t need your attention. Then you can move on to a new strategy and add on a layer if you want to. But right now you’ve got to start changing plans. You’ll get better results consistently doing one thing. Then you’re going to get inconsistently with five things, I guarantee you. And if in if you’re saying they’re wrong, you don’t, you know, thinking that maybe I don’t know what I’m talking about, you know, I don’t know if that’s true. Well, you know, I’ll just say this has what you’ve been doing. Is it is it been working for you? Probably not. Or you won’t be listening to this episode now. Maybe you haven’t even started yet. And you’re like, Dude, I don’t I don’t know. It’s start. Well, you’ve saved yourself all kinds of headaches. Just pick a plan and stick with it. Stop trying to find the perfect way The best way. The perfect and best way is what you choose. What aligns with your vision, your mission, your core values, your. Your ethics. Just pick it and stick to it. Number two, do less with more. Do less with more. Don’t try to do seven things. Don’t even try to do two things. Do less with more. Focus for my digital marketing agency. We have a singular strategy, and we we stick to that. And every Friday, when we have our leadership team meeting, we talk about that one strategy and we look to how can we make it better, what can we make, what can we tweak, can we do on this to get a better result? Too many people, they’ll they’ll start something. And again, this kind of goes back to number one. They’ll just instead of tweaking it and making it a little better, they they try to do another thing and another thing to find success in your lead gen do less with more focus. If you’re going to have a YouTube channel, then you need to be an expert on the YouTube creator studio. You need to know every single button, every single setting. You need to study it, know it. You need to be an expert on the whole platform. Most people just like almost our YouTube channel. So they go in and they they they know just enough to post a video and they’re missing out on maximizing all of the possibilities and potential because they’re trying to do too many things. They don’t have focus. So to get more leads this year, do less with more focus, do less things with more focus on the thing you choose. Number three, if it doesn’t work, tweak the system. Don’t start something new. All right. Now, you might be thinking, you know, oh, what is this? How is this different than number one? Number one, you said stop change you plans. Well, this is this is kind of the other side of the same coin. If you’re not going to change plans, then you’re going to stick with less than that. If you’re gonna stick with doing less with more of focus, well, you’re going to have to tweak. And I’m telling you right now, every sustained business challenge you have is going to be a systems challenge. So always be tweaking the system, always between the system. Don’t think it’s the strategy that’s a problem. Don’t think that it’s the people that’s the problem. It’s human nature that it’s a problem. It’s always going to be a systems issue. And so you have to tweak the system. Now, the thing is, one of the reasons we’re attracted to new things is because new creates momentum, which is really what we want. At the end of the day, we all want momentum in our business, but new is the only way to create momentum. All right. In fact, the best way to create momentum is to be new and improved, to constantly be making improvements to your system, not a whole new thing. Not throwing out the baby with the bathwater and starting all over new. Making just one part of your system a little bit different, a little improved. A new way to think about it, a new approach to it. And you keep tweaking. So you want more results. Stop changing plans, do less with more, and make tweaks to the system. Focus on the system. Number four, the fourth of set, the four of seven tips that I’ve got for you. Two for more leads this year is actually before I share that, I just wanted to quickly say share with you this week’s featured resource and this week’s feature resource is Open Phone and very specifically on open phone. Open phones, misc called text back feature. I absolutely think this is amazing for a very, very low cost, a few bucks, you can have a separate phone line for your business. That is an app on your phone. And I like this as a digital nomad because this just automatically works wherever I am in the world, because it’s solely it’s voice over Internet. It works great. I’ve never had anybody complain about the call quality. What I am on the phone with them, you know, whether I’m in in Istanbul, Prague, Peru, Costa Rica, doesn’t matter. I’ve got my UC number and people come right to it. You do all kinds of things with open phone. You can port and an existing number you can get a new number. But one of the features in there, one of the settings is you can set up this call, text back. So if somebody does call your phone, you can you can actually set up two different versions of this. And I’ve got both of these set up for mine. If somebody text during our calls during business hours, I let them know that I’m I’m sorry. I’m currently in a meeting, which is about one of the only reasons I wouldn’t answer my phone. I use my phone as my my webcam I. And so with that, if somebody calls. You know, and it can’t come through because I’m on a zoom call. Then I have an automated text message. Thanks for reaching out. I’m in a meeting. How can I help? And that text message goes to them. So if somebody is calling me and I didn’t answer and they’re thinking about calling one of my competitors, now what’s happening right away is they’re getting a text back and I’m saving that opportunity. If the call comes in during my off business hours, then I just let them know, Hey, thanks for reaching out. Sorry I was able to take your call. I’m currently off right now. I’ll be back in touch with this with you as soon as I can. Did you have a specific question? And that goes out to people during office hours. This is an amazing feature, especially if you’re a solopreneur or a freelancer. Have a small team. The number of the phone calls are primarily coming in to you. You got to check out open phone D and E podcast dot com forward slash open phone again Danny podcast dot com for slash open phone. I’ll put a link in the show notes. You’re going to get a savings using that. They’ve got a special offer for my listeners. So go to Danny podcast dot com for slash open phone and that’ll redirect you right to the page with the special offer. But you can also learn more about all of the features there of Open Phone. I would strongly encourage you check it out. It works so much better than Google Voice. It’s just absolutely fantastic about if I change SIM cards and I change my number up, you know, on my phone or in my WhatsApp, this this phone number just still works. So definitely worth checking out. All right. So back to the seven tips I’ve got for you for getting more leads. And at 2024. Number four, be patient. Be patient. Stop chasing short term gain at the expense of long term success. Lead generation takes time to get honed in. And so you’ve got to take the time. You’ve got to do the work. It cost money to acquire new clients. It just is. There’s no way about it. You are not going to acquire new leads and convert them into customers for free. It doesn’t ever happen. Never. So you’ve got to be patient, do the work. That’s number four. Number five, understand the principle behind the practice before you change anything. Now, if you’ve been a listener to the show for a while, you know, I end every single episode with a leadership tip because leadership, your leadership capacity is the capacity of your business. And so I want to help you lead better, because the better you lead, the better your business will be better results. It’s quite it’s just that simple. Better leadership, better results. And one of the leadership axioms that I’ve shared with Bass, this is actually one of the core values of my my company for my team is the principle behind the practice. And we use this regularly. And what it means is when you sign up for of these programs, you decide to sign up for somebody’s program or learn from somebody, and they tell you to do something a certain way. Don’t change it. Just do it until you understand exactly why it’s working. What’s the principle behind the practice? Why are they doing it that way? What universal truth is at play that’s making that thing work? Once you understand the principle behind why it’s working, then you can contextualize it for you and not break it too many times And I’ve seen this even with stuff I have inside my inside the lead factory where it is a membership, specifically teaching lead generation. It’s the only thing inside the lead factory and that, you know, I only open enrollment for that a once a year. And so enrollment is most likely closed right now. The best way to find out when it gets open is go to finally leads dot com and download my the five strategies for 30 days five strategies for 30 leads in 30 days. Or you can download the Remote Success Bundle on E podcast dot com. It doesn’t matter in any of the lead magnets I have. If you download those, you’ll learn when the lead factory goes opens up. But inside the lead factory, I’ve had people come in and start working through it and you know, six, seven, eight weeks and they’re like, Eric, this didn’t work. This didn’t work. And you know, I’m like, Hey, well, let’s get on a phone call. Let’s get on zoom and find out. And and I’ll start and I’ll say, Show me what you did. And as I show me and I’ll send, I’ll say, wait a second, that that’s not what I said to do. I said to do it this way. Well, yeah, but I was just thinking, I don’t know. And I’m. Okay. Well, that’s why you didn’t get results. You broke the whole thing. And here’s why. And once I explained why it was, I said to do something, especially if away they go. Oh, okay. And every single time they change it. Bone result 100% of the time. So you have to understand the principle behind the practice before you change anything in any program that you sign up for mine or anybody else’s. I’m not even advocating for you to sign up for anybody you follow for their system, for lead gen. Don’t change it until you fully understand the principle behind the practice. Number six if you don’t want to do cold calling, don’t. If you don’t want to do Facebook ads. Don’t. It’s your business. Don’t let somebody out there tell you that this way or that way is going to get you more results. There’s no possible way one person or not just one person. But, you know, there’s a group of people out there that that teach cold calling and cold emailing, and they just swear one side and not, you know, up one side and down the other. And they have all this social proof that it gets amazing, amazing results. And then you have people who run social media ads and they get amazing, amazing results. The thing is, both are true. Both are true. All right. So just choose one of those or one of the other multitude of ways out there to bring in leads, you know, whatever that looks like for you, you just got to pick one and do it. Now, there are some foundations that are at play under all of those for sure, that you got to have in place. So you don’t miss opportunities and stuff like that. You wanna make sure you have your profit margins dialed in all of that. Because I’m telling you, if you don’t make your profit, if you’re if you’re selling watermelons and you’re losing $0.50 per watermelon, a bigger truck isn’t going to make you money. It’s just a bigger truck. It’s going to be a bigger truck that you drive to bankruptcy faster. So you have to have all five business systems in place. You’re collecting the managing money. The managing money is how you have budgeted and ensure that you’re you know, you’ve done Cal’s cost calculation. If you don’t how to do that. If you haven’t done it right, then doing lead generation is probably a really dumb idea, to be honest, because you don’t know if you’re going to make any actual money or not. So you got to have these systems in place. But here’s the thing. It’s your business. You choose the strategy you want. All right. I’ve had people I can’t, you know, that I’ve talked to in the like, you know, I don’t I don’t want to do cold calling. Well, then why are you doing it? Well, I heard somebody said I listened to one person. He said, make 100 calls a day. Make 100 calls a day. Okay. Is every business out there making 100 cold calls a day? Well, now, that’s obviously not the only way to make leads. Yeah. So, my, my, my. The best way to make leads is pick a way that you’re passionate about. Pick the system that you love. All right. Now, again, like I said earlier, you get that honed in, you get that firing on all cylinders. You get that set up in a way that it’s operating without you and it can go, you know, weeks without you touching it. Then by all means, you want to add another strategy on top of that, but you don’t add the other strategy and you get the first strategy honed in perfectly. It’s got to be dialed in. So that was number six. If you don’t want to do it, don’t just choose the one that you want. Number seven, if someone tries to sell you something using a method they didn’t use to reach you, don’t buy it. All right. I have seen this, but I’ll you know, there’s this YouTube commercial that every so often I see it and the guy starts out out of you’ve seen it and the guy starts out. Every business owner knows that explainer videos are the best way to make sales online. The guy’s not using an explainer video. Totally cracks me up. If the explainer video was the best way, then you would be using that. All right. You would be. You would be using that. You know, there’s a guy that, you know, make the bring in leads using this this video sales letter. And, you know, you never have to run ads. Well, you know how I just saw his thing by an ad that he just ran? Well, if it works so well and you don’t have to run the ads, why, you run in ads. Okay. Obviously, ads do work. Ads do ad to it. And I. Can’t trust you now because you’ve said such a stupid thing. If someone tries to tell you something using a method that they didn’t use to reach you, don’t buy it. The best person to buy Facebook ads from in retargeting ads is the person that captures you with the successful ad. The best person to follow that that uses cold emailing is the person that their email jumps out and captures you. All right. So you be the first guinea pig. If it worked on, you might be worth learning it. All right. Now, before I wrap up with this week’s leadership tip of the week. Do me a favor. Do all the nice things, leave a review, subscribe rating, and we would really appreciate it. I mean, the world to me. And now real quickly recapping, I know that you came here and you saw the title The Best Way to Get Leads in 2024. And you were like, Oh, he’s going to tell me which strategy to choose. I’m telling you right now, here’s the strategy to choose the one that you want, the one that you like, and the one that you’ll stick with. Choose it. Just choose that I don’t care what it is, it’s going to work. If you become an expert at it, if you focus at it, if you stop stink and changing your plans and jumping from one idea to the next in this thing, in this thing, lead yourself, be self-disciplined, have the self-control to say, I’m not going to do something else. This is my method and become an expert at it. By the way, once you’re done with that, you can then turn around and pay people to have you teach them how to do it. All right. Just a bonus little idea there, but you can’t teach somebody if you haven’t become an expert at it yourself, become an expert at one thing. So what’s this week’s leadership tip of the week? Management is not leadership. I’ll say it again. Management is not leadership. If you are trying to manage a team, you are not leading a team. There is a difference between leadership and management. If you find yourself being an accidental leader, you’re someone that you didn’t plan to have a team, but now you do, and you’re trying to manage them and you’re not happy with the results. And and you’re frustrated because maybe you keep trying to hire people and you don’t seem to hire the right people. And you’re, you know, are you are yet people on and they’re just not lasting and you’ve got all these things. I’m telling you again, it’s not a person issue and it’s not a human nature issue. It’s a systems issue. I have I just want to invite you if that is you if you’re struggling with that, a team leading a team figuring out how to hire a team. I want you to reach out to me. I’ve got a one time coaching roadmap where I can help you put together a staff recruitment, onboarding and leadership plan. A system that is going to work. I have literally hired and led hundreds of people all of my career. I used to be a camp director and every summer I would hire summer staff and I learned leadership in the trenches. I’ve been in all kinds of leadership positions. I have a team now that I lead. And, you know, we just we don’t have turnover in my team. You know, we don’t we don’t have, you know, flakes on my team there. These are hard workers. This didn’t happen by accident. This didn’t happen by accident. I have a system that works to bring in winners every single time and to develop them and grow them up and keep them and get amazing results out of them and enjoy working with each other. Management is not leadership. If you’re trying to manage people, not a great way to go. And what what’s the difference between management management and leadership management focuses on keeping things the same. You know, management wants the status quo. Management is about the the checklist, the standard operating procedures, getting this done and based on meeting deadlines, that’s management. Yet make who’s got this task? Who’s doing that task? Is this task getting done on time? That’s management. You are managing what’s happening. Leaders are different. Leaders are looking out and saying, where do we have a problem? Where do we have a bottleneck? How can we fix this? How can I help you work more efficiently? Where can we remove a barrier? What’s what’s a new skill that you can learn? You know, what’s what’s your key result area? What are we really measuring was results. Why a leader lets everyone on their team clearly know what winning looks like for them. It’s not the whole job description. It’s a one sentence. This is what winning looks like for you and leaders. Help them see that leaders point to a future and move their people to it. That is very different than what a manager does. If you’re trying to manage your team, you’re not going to grow your business. You’ve got to grow your leadership. So that’s this week’s leadership tip of the Week. Management is not leadership. Well, until next time. Chase the big dream lead with courage and safe travels.