Where will you find your next key account? Like miners looking for gold, sales people need to be constantly prospecting. Good news: There are many proven lead generation prospecting tools to mine for those new veins of business growth.

The first step is to find the names, emails and phone numbers of people who you suspect might become a golden client. This database will become the cornerstone of your marketing outreach efforts. Here are ten ways to build it:

1. On your home page, make visitors an offer for your electronic newsletter or e-zine. Offer a bonus gift for signing up for the e-zine, such as an eBook, special report, mini-course, or sample book chapter. The trick is to know your audience and create something they want.

2. In addition to your regular website, create a direct response one page mini-site. This should offer a different bonus gift to get people to join your e-mail list. Make a promise you will never rent or sell the list to anyone and they can opt out of the list any time they like. Typically mini-sites sell items such as information products (books, CDs, DVDs) or seminars and workshops.

3. Send targeted traffic to your mini-site through pay-per-click search engines. Pay-per-click search engines, like Google Ad Words, are where you bid on the keyword terms related to your target market.

4. When you give a speech, host a drawing. Ask everyone in attendance for a business card for the drawing and instruct them to cross their e-mail address out if they don't want to be on your e-mail list.

5. Find an affiliate to host and market a teleseminar with you. Offer to split the money you make from the teleseminar for access to their people. As part of the promotion, invite the list to visit your website for the free bonus item.

6. Reach out to your target market by writing articles. By writing articles you show your target market that you know how to help solve their problems and may have a possible solution for them. This is the quickest way to build instant credibility in your niche. Post the articles on your website so the search engines can find them and use free article submission services to place them on other websites and blogs.

7. Negotiate a sponsorship ad swap with an e-zine publishing peer. Contact other newsletter publishers. Let them know that you'd be interested to announce their newsletter if they're up to do the same for you. This way, both of you can build your lists faster.

8. Request that your subscribers pass it on. Word of mouth is a powerful viral technique that works great with e-mail marketing. If your subscribers find the content you share with them to be useful and informative, they will pass your newsletter on to their friends. This can be a good source of new subscribers.

9. Invite others to reprint your newsletter, as long as its content is unmodified. Many webmasters and newsletter publishers are actively looking for high quality content. If they reprint your newsletter, you will get new subscribers, traffic and links pointing to your site.

10. Include a "Sign Up" button in the newsletter. If you are using plain text instead of HTML, provide a text link to your subscription page. You may feel that this is not required, because the subscriber is already on your list, but remember that your readers will forward your newsletters to others, or reprint it online.

Before they can be leads, they've got to be suspects. The world of potential buyers is like a miner's sieve; you're panning for the gold nuggets. And to find them, you've got to pound through a whole lot of sand.