Leads are everywhere. No one should ever put off a cold calling campaign with the excuse of having no one to call.

There are many excellent sources to find lists of potential prospects for your market. Many of them are online, some well-known ones are: Hoovers.com, SalesGenie.com and GoLeads.com. These databases, while excellent, require a fee. The following are some more free resources to explore before you spend your hard-earned money. Read on:

**Companies that List Employees Online

Certain industries such as real estate (commercial and residential), insurance, financial and law firms list their employees online. Visit the company web site to access the leads you need.

**PRNewswire.com

Here's one that I really love: PRNewswire.com. This service provides electronic news distribution services on behalf of tens of thousands of corporate, government, association, labor, non-profit, and other customers worldwide. They have an advanced search function that lets you search news releases from the past 30 days. You can search by industry, company, and/or subject, for example, newly hired or newly promoted high-level executives.

**Social Networking

Here's something I'm still learning about - social networking I tend to be a techno-moron, but I do have profiles on SalesGravy, Linked In, and Facebook. www.SalesGravy.com, www.linkedin.com and www.Facebook.com. I'm told these are great resources to find leads. In the meantime, if you'd like to see my profiles here they are:

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/people/Wendy_Weiss/626375765 

LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/pub/0/a0/577

SalesGravy: http://www.salesgravy.com/Network/?L=users.profile&id=420

If you'd like to learn more about Social Networking you can access this program by Erin Blaskie. It's called "Social Networking - The What's, Who's and Why's" and it's free

too: http://bsetc.audioacrobat.com/download/vavs-socialnet.mp3.

**Various Other Directories

If your prospects are doctors or medical professionals, you can frequently find them on insurance company web sites, for example: Cigna http://cigna.benefitnation.net/cigna/%28zfn35455hndaobzumpecj345%29/docdir.aspx and Oxford:

https://www.oxhp.com/secure/providerSearch/content_doctor.html

Looking for attorneys? http://www.findlaw.com

If you're looking for business leads: http://amexb2b.us.disk11.com/open/us/en/Search.do

To find a particular person or business: www.411.com or www.superpages.com

How about radio stations? www.radio-locator.com

Leads for Healthcare IT? http://www.health-infosys-dir.com/yp_hc.asp

**The Public Library

Last, but absolutely not least, my all time favorite resource: The Library. Libraries have many resources available to the enterprising and the best part is that many of these are now available online. I checked out the New York Public Library, www.nypl.org, and this is a sampling of the databases I found that were available online:

- Advertising Red Books Online

- Bloomberg

- Business & Company Resource Center

- Business Dateline

- Business Source Premier EBSCO

- Butler Group CIO Knowledge Center

- Chicago Tribunte

- Communication & Mass Media Complete

- Compustat PC Plus

- Design and Applied Arts Index

- Directories in Print

- Dow Jones Interactive

- Dun & Bradstreet's International Million Dollar Database

- Dun & Bradstreet's Principal International Business CD-ROM

And remember, this is a sampling and I stopped at the D's. With these types of resources available, you don't even have to leave your home or office. You may have to join the public library for access, but that's free as well.

University and college libraries also have terrific resources available online and that is another avenue for you to explore.

So remember: Before you spend your hard earned cash, see what you can find for free, first.