However, completing some of tasks that are required for Competition Analysis can be overwhelming and expensive. This is a disadvantage for e-commerce startups with limited budgets.

The following is a suggestion that has worked for us at Rothline Entertainment, an e-commerce site located at http://www.rothline.com. After reviewing information on completing Competition Analysis, we immediately knew we could not afford to have an outside source complete these tasks. We were also overwhelmed with idea of attempting to complete tasks ourselves.

For this article we will focus on leads. Leads are people that are interested in making money from home. How do we know this?

For starters, they have either put an ad on internet stating they want a home based business, or they have filled out a form with one of lead generation companies.

Now how do we go about getting these so called leads? Some businesses put a simple questioner out over internet that people can access to answer some simple questions.

These questions are usually, how much time a week you can put towards your business, how much money can you invest in your business, why do you want to work from home, etc.

These questioners are usually short and to point. Once all this information is gathered business then contacts that individual to sell them on his business opportunity.

Another way to find leads is through lead generation companies that are on internet. There business is to compile all information and then sell it to business owners to use.

This is where it gets touchy. Today there are so many of these “so called” email list, lead lists etc. How do you know who is legit and who isn’t?

My rule of thumb on this is, a company offering a large amount (over 5000) leads a month is probably not a very good source.

So what makes a good source to find leads? Well what you want to look at is companies that offer what we call “double opt-in” leads.