The core of any business is a fresh supply of leads. There are several ways to get those leads. The easiest way to find leads is to pay for them. This can get expensive and you don't always get people that are looking for your specific type of product, so here we will look at a couple of ways to get free leads for your business.

Opt-in lists
This is probably the most common way to get free leads. Basically, you offer your product or service and tell the visitor the benefits of it. In order for them to get the information, you ask for their contact information. In return for their information (usually a name, email address and maybe a phone number), they get the details of your product.

The information that they give you is managed by an auto responder. The auto responder keeps their information stored for you until they decide to stop receiving your emails. Thus you get a lead that is not only free, but also targeted to your product or service. In other words, they want what you are offering. This makes them a very desirable contact.

Gifting
This goes hand in hand with the opt-in list described above. Sometimes, a prospect will respond to a trigger word. In the world of sales, the most powerful trigger word is the word "free".
Offer a free report or EBook in return for their contact information. Most people will respond to a free offer of almost anything. Why? Because it is free and people like free things.

The Internet is ripe with free material of all kinds that can be used for this purpose. EBooks, reports and downloadable information on many different topics is very highly sought after and this makes gifting a very successful method.

Newsletters
Another successful, proven method is to offer ongoing information in a newsletter format. This method gets you a long term way of marketing other products to the customer. Send out the newsletter at a regular interval, preferably once a week and embed links to your products into the body. You can also place text links along the sides of the newsletter or at the top/bottom of the page.

Offering a newsletter carries another big benefit as well. You can sell advertising space to other business owners and make money from ad sales in addition to selling your products. You can also put your own affiliate links in the newsletter and the reader never needs to know that. It is not deceitful in the slightest, but smart product placement.

Referrals
Offer your newsletter subscribers a premium for getting others to subscribe to your newsletter; this could be a small discount on one of your higher end products or another free report/EBook. The idea here is a matter of simple mathematics. If each subscriber tells three people and they each tell three people and so on and so on, you will have an endless supply of free leads coming in all the time.

These are only some of the ways you can get free leads for your business and grow it as you do. The more leads you market to, the greater number of sales you will enjoy.