Is your website the proverbial "one-night stand" where your visitors stop by once and never come again? Create a lead generation website to develop a connection to your visitors for long term marketing and sales opportunities.
What's a lead generation website?
If you're a business or service professional, quality leads that bring you sales in the future are important to you. A lead generation website simply means it has some means of capturing your viewer's name and email address so you can continue to market to them over a longer period of time.
Who needs a lead generation website?
Anyone in business should take advantage of this powerful yet fairly simple strategy to build a list of prospect names.
Why do you need one?
Think about how you browse the web. How often do you return to a site you've visited? Five times? Ten times? Or just once? For the most part, your visitor goes there one time, reads a few pages and never comes back.
Setting up a lead generation system lets your prospect get to know you, begin to trust that you offer valuable advice or solutions to their problems and keeps your name in their mind for when they are ready to buy.
How do you create a compelling lead generation system for people to give you their contact information?
Give away something for free. That's right. Everyone likes to get something for free. So use that to your advantage. Think about what your particular prospects want to know and offer it to them.
What are some lead generation ideas for free things to give away?
Typically a special report or white paper on a topic that highlights your capabilities and helps the prospect at the same time is offered in a pdf file. If you only send a special report, it's not as effective though.
An ezine is a great way to create value over time. Even if people are a bit inundated with them these days, they're still a powerful way to build a list of interested people who hear from you on a regular basis. When they sign up for your free report, they also get your ezine.
Another way to handle this is through a blog. Sometimes people write their ezine with short clips from their blog and a link to the full posting. This means you can use your article for more than one purpose.
You can also have people sign up for your blog with an email alert. Again, this shortened posting comes into their email inbox and they click through to read the whole article.
An email mini-series takes one topic and breaks it down into several short articles. So your prospect hears from you over five or six sessions. A PR firm might talk about Six Steps for An Effective PR Campaign with one step covered in each article.
You may also consider giving out an informative webinar or teleseminar as a free resource. Product demonstrations or audio mp3 recordings are other ideas.
Think about how you can fill your website with valuable, useful content so viewers do come back for more. For example, if you make fabric for the home furnishings industry, you wouldn't write about the fabric per se. You'd provide information on decorating, color selection, how sunlight affects the fabric, industry regulations and so on.
Posting these articles or archived issues of your newsletter on your website not only means you're helping your prospects. By adding fresh content often it also helps your website's search engine rankings.
Where do you put the sign-up on your website?
On every page of your site, plus a section with free resources. As much as we might not like to admit it, the word free does get attention. By calling that section Free Resources, people will nearly always click on that link to see what it's about. Under that section, you could have several sub-sections, newsletter archives, articles, or special reports. But on each page, you need to put that link to a sign-up for your free offer.
The Internet is a vast, powerful community of users from all over the world. Learning how to make it work to grow your business is crucial today. This simple tip to give your prospects something of value in exchange for their contact information lets you stay in touch with them for long term sales.
