Why Your Website Doesn't Get Leads
Welcome to the day's New Media Coaching session, if you want to be notified the next time we add one of our proven business building new media lessons sign up for email alerts or subscribe to our RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
So your website has all the bells and whistles but only a trickle of business seems to be coming from it. If this sounds familiar chances are during the development phase you made the all too common mistake of placing too much emphasis on the way your site looks, its design. 20% of your website’s success is a function of design. Building trust in the minds of your visitors makes up the other 80% of the success equation. Trust building is where you should be focusing the majority of your effort if you want your website to deliver a torrent of hot leads desperate to do business with you.
Ever heard the statement, “people do business with those they like and trust”? It just so happens to be the one firm truth in business and by adding a few trust-building assets, your website will be fulfilling your expectations in no time.
- Great Content: Teaching (not hard pitching) sells and adding useful, free information that helps your customers make better use of your products and services positions you as the market authority inspiring trust in the process. Interview your best clients at your blog, write an eBook detailing product use strategies or prepare a downloadable list of 10 great tips for using your services in PDF format.
- Newsletter
: Prospects must see your (trust-building) messages multiple times before they take action and sending a monthly newsletter filled with helpful, useful content (not sales pitches) simplifies this task. - Free Q/A Conference Calls
: Use virtual conference services like Free Conference Calls or DimDim to answer your prospects’ questions about creative ways to use the valuable services you offer. Use these service’s recording tools to create audio versions of your sessions and add the recordings to your site or blog to reach an even greater number of prospects.
- Social Proof: The principle of social proof teaches that humans are genetically wired to shortcut the decision making process, thus we naturally seek the opinions of others to help us choose the right product or provider. Proper use of testimonials on your site adds the social proof your prospects need to take the desired action, contacting you.
- Media hits: If you actively pitch story angles to the media about your company (if you don’t, start!) adding press mentions to your site provides a stamp of approval from an authoritative and “objective” source.
As long as your site’s design passes the professionalism smell test, every dollar you spend beyond this point is money wasted. Shifting your focus from flash and pop to trust building is the best way to turn your site into a customer generating machine.
Do You Still Think Looks Mean Everything?
April 6th, 2010 at 9:31 am
Great post, John! Love all of the tips. I have been publishing a weekly newsletter since 2000 and I think it is the most overlooked value-added tool of all. Once blogging became popular, rather than integrating their blog with their online newsletter, many people dropped the newsletter and went for just the blog. Then when Twitter and FaceBook stampeded onto the scene, they dropped the blog and started micro-blogging and relying on social media tools that they neither own nor control to promote their ideas.
I have found that the best outreach coordinates a website (or two or three) with social media tools and a newsletter, all working together in tandem. Not all customers and clients like to be engaged in the same way. We have to put a variety of options out there so we reach them where they are most comfortable. A newsletter helps you do that, especially when it’s connected to the other outreach methods.
Having all of them in place also makes for great multiple incoming links from every direction. Gotta love that!
I love my newsletter. When I stopped publishing it last year, not only did people email me asking if I had taken ill (or even died … seriously!), but conversations from my website plummeted. And fast. It’s not a scientific experiment, but it was enough for me to go back to regular publication. I have not regretted it in 10 years.
Thanks again for another great post!
April 7th, 2010 at 5:01 pm
Donna,
Once social media began to take hold, the Twitterati began sounding the death bell for email and other “old-school” marketing tactics but you are so right that email, offline advertising, referral marketing, direct mail and all other marketing forms are alive and well.
Can you quickly share with us, other than having multiple marketing tools, how you coordinate them as you mentioned? Okay, I am listening…
August 20th, 2011 at 1:39 pm
Very good post John, and thanks for the conference call link, will come in useful. I have to say i need to get back in focus and try harder to communicate with site visitors, part of the problem being that I have been trying to build things part time but mainly I just got distracted. Having read your excellent post I will try and use that as a springboard to building a better site, and particularly the newsletter as I agree a newsletter is a good tool. When I first started visiting sites many more sent newsletters and they were generally interesting but now its all ‘follow me on twitter’, fine if you use tools like that but many don’t including me apart from business purposes.
I’ll be reading more on your site as plenty to learn from it.
Thanks
Regards
Dave
August 20th, 2011 at 2:08 pm
Dave,
I am glad you found the post helpful. Distractions aside, it seems like your time is limited. If this is indeed the case there is one content publishing option that might work better for you.
At least ups front you might consider writing articles foe someone else’s newsletter or blog. By doing this you reduce the work on your end from managing the the complex demands of running an entire publication (writing, editing, finding an audience, etc).
Find someone whose topic focus compliments yours and who has built an audience and offer to write content for them. In each article include a byline with a link back to your site. This strategy enables you to position yourself as an expert to your target audience while reducing the amount of work you have to do.
John
August 20th, 2011 at 9:03 pm
Thanks John, that’s a good idea, will definitely look at that as an option.
Regards
Dave
September 16th, 2012 at 6:46 am
Thank you so much for sharing these valuable tips. I am actually looking for these since I have just started to put up my own site.
I really believe that you have what it takes to be a good online adviser. Keep up the good work.