Lead generation, especially online lead generation, is the bane of many businesses out there. The lion’s share of business income is the result of an established client base, but how does a business get those new clients? Fortunately, with a WSI franchise, half of the problem is on its way to being solved.

From all over the world, there are clients who have already experienced the benefits of WSI’s online solutions; so the foundation for word-of-mouth promotion is out there. By opening a WSI franchise, we can provide you with our resources for generating client leads. There will, of course, still be some additional networking efforts for attracting new local clients. At the same time, however, the very nature of a franchise means you’re taking advantage of a great deal of ground work that’s already been laid out for you in advance.

Going into business for yourself offers a particular challenge: How do you convince customers that your stuff is the stuff they want?

With a WSI franchise, you don’t have to do so, because we have done that part for you.

Now, we’re not claiming you’ll never have to find a new client of your own on the strength of your own work. Lead generation is a tricky thing, and sometimes it will require a fresh approach all your own to get those new clients or re-tap those older ones with new incentives. However, brand recognition and trust is a strong factor in bringing in new clients, and a WSI franchise offers you the brand recognition combined with the independence to do things your own way.

WSI has taken a great many steps to build up a strong customer satisfaction base, and these are people who are familiar with our brand. This creates an inherent market for each of our franchises, a group of people who already know the online solutions that WSI delivers. So a big part of your lead generation is already done — you simply have to make your franchise and its services available to the clients. This familiarity with our service means they know exactly what they’ll be getting, and it allows them to put their trust in your operations.

Every job offer out there, whether it’s a traditional employment situation or a self-start business, has its criteria for what makes a good worker. A WSI franchise is no exception — there are people who are particularly suited to the kind of work a franchisee will be doing.

So to see if the WSI Internet Franchise opportunity will fit you, consider these qualities:

• Are you the kind of person who looks for more work, and tries to get ahead of large projects instead of waiting on them?
• Do you volunteer to take on extra duties even if they aren’t strictly in your job description?
• Do you excel at working independently?
• Do you do well operating to specific standards and within a set method?
• Are you able to handle a very diverse set of tasks such as customer service, looking for leads, completing a project and balancing financial concerns?

If so, then a WSI franchise might indeed be right for you. A WSI Internet franchise requires all of these attributes in order to be successful. You have to manage your own budget, because you work for yourself. You have to handle customer service, because you’ll be working directly with your clients. You need the initiative to take care of things, because you are the boss — you don’t have the luxury of waiting for someone to hand you an assignment.

With a WSI Franchise, one of the most important things to consider is your ability to generate leads and network effectively.

This is the process of drumming up business for yourself by investigating leads, or sources for clients. The importance of this technique cannot be overstated to a successful Internet Marketing Consultant; after all, why just wait for business to come to you when you can get the ball rolling yourself?

Now, it has been discussed and remains true that after a business has gotten its feet under it, the most consistent source of revenue is repeat business from satisfied clients. However, a business just starting out obviously can’t rely on this, and even businesses with loyal customers go through slow periods. Both of these times are excellent opportunities to look for new leads.

One opportunity that some marketers might overlook are local trade shows. Whether focused on video games, local businesses, the arts or high-end professions like medicine or science, these places are abundant sources of lead generation activity.

Previously, I blogged about the importance of face-to-face contact in generating leads for your WSI franchise. This is a good, long-term tactic to adopt because once you get used to it; the process is very easy to maintain as a habit, and really lets your clientele get to know you in a sense. However, it isn’t the only way to develop such “face time” when promoting your business.

One tactic that can really work out for you is to host small, informal seminars which review what you offer to local businesses who might be interested in your services.

There are really two ways to go about the seminar process today — on-location and online.

An on-location seminar is fairly straightforward: Invite local business owners to an area you have designated for your presentation, be it your office, your town’s conference center or your own home if you have sufficient viewing space. Do make sure you can afford to provide refreshments (even a cup of tea or coffee goes a long way in keeping people content while they hear you out). The advantage of this is it really allows the natural flow of the Q&A that comes at the end of a seminar.

With a WSI franchise, money isn’t the only resource that gets invested. You also invest time and energy into each of your clients, generally in exchange for the payment you’re intending to receive. Again though, money isn’t the only thing returned from each of your clients. Every arrangement made with a client can return a host of other benefits in exchange for a solid investment!

With any client, you will invariably invest:

• Time
• Energy
• Creativity

Some client needs will take longer to address than others. A particular project will inevitably be exhausting to tackle. A particular problem might require every clever idea you’ve ever had about digital marketing. Each of these categories requires an investment of yourself that could have been put to some other task, and it’s natural to want a return on these.

When maintaining a WSI franchise, lead generation is an important part of the process. You have to drum up business in order to survive, after all, and getting people interested is part and parcel of your success.

That said, it isn’t necessarily new contacts that provide the most resources. Oftentimes it is the existing clients you’ve worked with before that provide the best business overall. Study after study shows that repeat customers are the ones that tend to supply businesses with their best revenue, so it’s important to understand ways to take advantage of this fact.

One thing to consider is how to bring back existing customers with whom you might not have had contact for a while.

Perhaps they were happy with their site and didn’t see a need to get more information from you just yet, or maybe they didn’t quite realize you offer more services than the initial campaign you provide. Whatever the reason, it is quite likely you still have many of your older clients’ contact details if you’ve been building a proper email database.

Owning a WSI franchise is about more than just doing business — it’s about lead generation, knowing how to increase revenues and organizing your life so that you can handle the very real task of doing everything for yourself.

One of the advantages of traditional employment that self-employment tends to lack is division of labor. In a traditional setup, you have marketers, developers, analysts, investors, financing and other departments that break up the task and allow people to get more done overall. If you’re considering going into business for yourself, it’s important that you understand this option is not necessarily going to be available to you. Sometimes several people buy into a franchise together, but by and large the individual operator is the unit of ownership.

As we’ve discussed before, lead generation is an important element of operating a WSI franchise.

You need to keep people interested, and while most business for franchisees comes from repeat customers, you’re always going to need to bring new and interested parties into your sphere of expertise.

Owning your own business – rather than working for someone else – means you can perform lead-generating efforts based on realistic information you have, rather than some abstract numbers that corporate insists you meet.

Lead generation and WSI franchises go together perfectly.

You need new clients to keep getting work, and they need your services to maintain their own advantage in their personal businesses.

One option you can use for lead generation is social networking. Today, there is no excuse whatsoever for any business not to take advantage of the power that social media offers anyone ready to invest a bit of time.

Many WSI franchise owners focus on how to increase revenue.

That most certainly is an important aspect of any business — the more money coming in, the better. However, there is also value to learning how to make the most of the revenue you already have, so that every dollar coming in is being used to its best effect.

An effective way to do this is to do an analysis of the time you spend on certain projects, and what those projects bring in compared to what expenses you have to lay out for them.

Going from a traditional job to owning a WSI franchise needn’t be an overnight jump. Many people choose to make a transition from employment to self-employment.

One of the best ways to prepare for the transition is to do a lot of research. There is a lot of material out there, both WSI-specific and about franchises in general, that can really give you a good sense of what to expect.

For example, one could research the rate of return on investment of most franchises. It’s one thing to understand that a franchise is typically profitable within the first one to three years. However, knowing the typical curve from month-to-month can help you paint a more specific picture of what sort of money you can expect to have and when.