A lot of opportunity owners think that the best way to build their business is by finding business opportunity seekers and somehow letting them know about their opportunity. This usually means buying business opportunity or "biz opp" leads and directly soliciting those leads—most often through e-mail but sometimes through phone (or "cold calls") or even snail mail.

The problem with the e-mail approach is you run a very high risk of being accused of spamming. Even if you buy "double opt-in" leads and your lead seller assures you that these leads are safe to e-mail, unless these people directly requested e-mails from you, your best bet is not to contact them via e-mail.

The trick to generating business opportunity income with leads is to take a step back and think about how those business opportunity leads you were planning to buy got created in the first place. The lead sellers didn't do anything magical to get the leads they sell. They just happen to know what it takes to get people to provide their contact information. Once you know what they know then you'll never have to buy your leads from them again—you'll be able to generate your own leads on demand.

The process of creating your own business opportunity leads is simple. You just need four things: a compelling offer, a lead capture page, a follow-up system and traffic.

Your offer is the key to capturing leads. People know that once you have their contact information you intend to use it, so they're not going to give it away unless they have a very good reason to do so. Your offer needs to be that good reason for them to part with their real name, e-mail address and even their phone number.

To make your offer compelling, you have to be give something away. And no, "give me your e-mail for more information" does not count as giving something away. You need to give something away that has a high perceived value. That means exclusive informational reports, software, product samples, CDs or even DVDs. For instance, on my lead capture site I give away an informational DVD in exchange for someone's contact information.

Once you have your compelling offer, you need a lead capture page. This is normally one web page with a single purpose: to get the person viewing it to leave their contact information. This page should feature your compelling offer and lead them to the form they need to fill in with their contact information. Ideally, your page should not require a lot of scrolling before people get to the form. Don't be afraid to include several forms throughout your page if your page is really long.

Once you have your compelling offer up on your lead capture page you'll need to have your follow-up system in place. Lead capture follow-up systems normally include e-mail autoresponders or telephone follow-ups or both.

E-mail autoresponders are automatic e-mail messages that are sent to your leads once they give you their contact information. Your autoresponders allow you to stay in touch with your leads over long periods of time, building familiarity and trust with them. Make sure your autoresponder system allows you to fully configure all of your e-mail messages including the number of messages, their content and the timing of when they are sent.

I also encourage you to follow-up with all of your leads with a telephone call. This is a great way to let your leads know you're a real person and can quickly build familiarity and rapport with them.

Finally, now that your lead capture page is up and running, all you need now is traffic. There are all kinds of ways to get tons of traffic to your page—but when it comes to traffic you want quality more than quantity. That means you want people who might actually be interested in what you have to offer instead of throngs of random web surfers.

Some good ways to get qualified traffic to your lead capture page include buying Google Adwords and other text ads, sponsoring e-mail newsletters with solo ads, making your lead capture page search engine optimized and writing articles on the topic of your business opportunity. Using these marketing techniques will generate traffic to your lead capture page that is likely to be responsive to your compelling offer.

Now you know exactly how the lead sellers create their leads. Just follow the steps I described in this article and soon you'll have your own leads to contact and you'll never need to buy them from anyone else again.