As a small business owner, running a business can at times seem like an overwhelming task, especially when it comes to developing an effective lead generation strategy. To complicate matters, consumers tend to have a negative outlook on direct mail, telemarketing and other types of invasive outbound marketing techniques, so your message is more than likely to go unnoticed. This is where inbound marketing enters the picture and serves as an efficient, low cost way to drive highly qualified leads to your doorstep.

Inbound Marketing is the practice of a attracting qualified leads into your sales funnel as opposed to reaching out to prospects.

The diagram above illustrates the four key components that all websites should contain. These components work together to turn your website into an effective inbound marketing tool. There is a key role that each of these components plays in generating leads for your business:

1. Search Engines – By properly optimizing your website, it gets found by your prospects before your competitors' sites when searching for related products or services that you provide.

2. Blog – Allows you to publish fresh content on a regular basis which serves to drive more traffic to your website.

3. Social Networking – As you post new information to your blog, this information can be distributed automatically into social networking sites such as Facebook, Linkedin and Twitter, thereby increasing your exposure.

4. Newsletter – As prospects visit your website, they are encouraged to give their contact information in order to receive your free offering. This contact information feeds into your auto-responder system so that you can maintain top of mind presence in a low cost, efficient way using email marketing. In essence, email marketing allows you to put your marketing on auto-pilot.

If your current website isn't generating the leads you want, it may be because you are not benefiting from any of the four key lead generation components listed above.