...ast. This includes email marketing, telemarketing, and faxbroadcasts. The ultimate sales lead has the following characteristics: * The prospect is ready to buy right now * The prospects IS thedecision maker * The prospect has the money to buy now * Theprospect has already seen your offer and has made the decisionto buy from you * The prospect is not being talked to by a largenumber of your competitorsDoes this sound like the perfect lead? Of course it does. Isthere some magic...

...al potion to produce such a lead? Moreimportantly, is that potion available to me? Actually there is amagic potion, but it only works if you have the rightingredients. What is this magic potion? Search engine marketing,otherwise known as paid search advertising coupled with acarefully designed lead generation site.Consider some facts, Google is considered by many to be themajor player involved in the search engine field. GoogleAdwords™ is very effective if the ad campaign is set upcorrectly. That is a big if though. It has been found that over50% of all companies that attempt to use Google fail in theirefforts. So the question is how can a company find success when so manyfail? The answer is actually quite simple. Hire a search enginemarketing firm. Beware though, not all search engine marketingfirms are equal. One can use a firm like In Touch Media Group(www.intouchmediagroup.com), who have gained certificationdirectly from Google (no easy feat), to correctly set up one'scampaign or one can hire other independent consultants whopromote a certain level of expertise, but whose qualificationsare unverifiable. Watch out if someone claims that they can setup a campaign overnight. It is simply not possible to establisha proper and successful search engine campaign without severalweeks' worth of detailed research and testing. Companies like InTouch Media Group get results the others only dream of.The other key to lead generation is the use of a proper webpresence that is designed to create leads. Many web sites aresimply designed to graphically impress a visitor, yet producesnothing in terms of leads. A good lead generation site or pageeducates the prospect and then gives them specific action to do.You have to ask yourself as a website owner, how many of myvisitors are converting to leads or sales and how many areleaving to go shopping elsewhere? A web site must elicit aresponse from the consumer. An excellent web site firm is DRCMarketing (www.drcmarketing.net). This company has a long trackrecord of success in terms of producing effective leadgeneration sites.In short, the magic potion consists of having the right web sitepresence, driving traffic to it through paid search adsresulting in the ultimate leads. Don't forget that people whoare searching for something on the internet have already made abuying decision. The key is how economically one can pushprospects to a web site and then whether the site is effectiveor not. There is no shortage of prospects on the internetlooking.On a typical day at the end of 2004, some 70 million Americanadults logged onto the Internet to use email, get news, accessgovernment information, check out health and medicalinformation, participate in auctions, book travel reservations,research their genealogy, gamble, seek out romantic partners,and engage in countless other activities. That represents a 37percent increase from the 51 million Americans who were onlineon an average day in 2000 when the Pew Internet & American LifeProject began its study of online life. This trend is ONLY goingup.Another Pew study identified that fact that over 50% of allonline purchases are now PRECEDED by an internet search. 36% ofall internet users under the age of 30 say that they could notlive without internet search engines. This illustrates what manyin ad agency executives now take for granted--that people, inhigher and higher numbers, are using internet information, notmainstream media related advertising, to make buying decisions.Every day, more and more people are turning on computers versusthe TV set for information and entertainment.The lesson to be learned here is that one has to control one'sown lead generation. Companies can no longer depend on thirdparty lead providers as a sole source for their new prospects.The ultimate lead can be found. They are all over the internetsearching right now.Bruce Prokopets Executive Editor Press Direct International