3: How to Turn Your Website Into a Lead-Generating Machine

You have 8 seconds to capture the attention of visitors when they land on your website. And in those 8 precious seconds, there are (3) questions your visitor wants to be answered.

Wanna know what they are?

Tune into this episode of Shop Talk, where I am going to share the secrets to turning your website into a lead-generating machine.

These strategies will help you:

Bring more visitors to your website
Immediately build trust and authority
And convert more visitors into subscribers so that you can grow your email marketing list

I’ve got a lot to share, so let’s dive in!

Here’s a snapshot of this episode:

[3:25] – 3 Questions your visitors want answered
[6:11] – What to do if a visitor tries to leave your site
[8:50] – Engaging visitors in real-time
[11:11] – How SEO works
[15:57] – Optimizing your blog to capture leads
[21:19] – Boosting your website visitors

Links mentioned in this episode:

READ THE FULL ARTICLE

I’ve got a lot to share, so let’s dive in!

Hey there! I have so much to share with you today. But, before I dive in, I wanted to let you know if you:

Currently, have a website that you are embarrassed to share because you haven’t touched it in years.
Or maybe you have a website that’s “pretty” but doesn’t work (meaning it doesn’t capture leads or convert prospects into buyers).
Or, you don’t have a website at all!

You are in luck, my friend!

My team and I at Your Marketing Coach have a unique service (and program) that is NOTHING like you’ve ever experienced before.

It was created to help coaches, consultants, and professional service-based businesses get a beautifully designed, professional website that they are proud to share.

I won’t go into all the details here, but trust me – our approach to building websites is nothing like you’ve seen from most web developers. That’s because we don’t consider ourselves web developers – we are marketing professionals who design websites that work.

Go to www.yourmarketingcoachonline.com/websitesthatwork (all one word) to see for yourself.

Are you ready for allllll your new email subscribers? I hope so!

One thing I know is that I am excited to share the exact strategies that have helped me and my clients build a profitable business of raving fans that not only want to hear from you – but, also want to buy from you.

Right now, as I speak these words, there are people who are visiting your website that need your help. If your website isn’t set up correctly, they will (probably) read a few things, click a few links, and then leave your site to check out your competition.

UGH, it stinks to think about that, doesn’t it? But it’s true.

Imagine having your website so optimized to capture leads that no matter what page your visitor lands on you have a way that you can capture their information.

And even more importantly, imagine having an asset in your business that could generate revenue for you – at any time!

When you have an engaged email marketing list, it means that you no longer have to struggle to grow. You have a community of people who love what you do, trust and believe in you, and are ready to invest in the products and services you offer.

Sounds pretty amazing – right!?!

Well, it’s high time that you turn your website into a lead-generating machine!

(3) Questions Your Visitor Wants Answered

Let’s start with the home page of your website. When a visitor lands on your site, there are (3) questions they want answered:

What do you do/offer?
How will it make my life (or business) better?
And how do I get started?

If you were to head over to the home page of your website right now, would you see those (3) questions answered?

If not, that needs to be fixed.

“Well, wait, Misty, what does this have to do with capturing leads?”.

As I said, you have 8 seconds to grab the attention of your visitor.

If you don’t answer those (3) fundamental questions in those first 8 seconds, they will assume that you can’t help them and they will leave to find someone who can.

We can’t capture their contact information if we can’t get them to stay on your website. So, that’s objective #1 – get them to want to know more, so they continue to explore your site.

So, how do you do that? I’m glad you asked!

There are (3) components that need to be on the home page (above the fold). You need:

An Impact Statement
Statement of Benefit
And a Call-to-Action Button

An Impact Statement is (1) crystal clear message that explains exactly what you do or offer. Many people refer to the Impact Statement as the headline of your page. I prefer to call it an Impact Statement because the focus of that message is to show your visitor how you impact their business (or life) – depending on what you do.

A Statement of Benefit is a short paragraph that’s listed immediately under the Impact Statement. This paragraph should be 1 – 3 sentences long and point out the top (3) ways that your customers benefit from working with you.

And then, you should have a Call-to-Action Button. This button should guide your visitor on what they should do next. That could be:

That you guide them over to your product or services page.
Maybe you want them to take a survey.
You can have them schedule a discovery call.
Or simply, “buy now”.

Where you guide your visitor is up to you. Just be sure that you make it clear as to what their next step should be in case they are ready to take action right away.

If Your Visitor Tries to Leave Your Site

The next objective is to have a way to capture your visitor’s contact information if they try to leave your site.

One of the best ways to grab their attention one last time before they leave is to have an exit-intent popup that comes up when they try to leave.

I know that a lot of entrepreneurs share with me that they don’t like popups. But the reality is – they work.

On your exit-intent popup, you could have a message that says something like, “WAIT! Before you go, take [THIS FREE RESOURCE] with you (whatever that is).

The Information To Include On Your Popup

When designing your popup, you only have limited space, so these key elements are important:

Include an image of the free resource that you are offering them.
An Impact Statement.
A Statement of Benefit.
And a Call-to-Action Button

Just so you know, an exit-intent popup can be added to any of the main pages on your site. What I mean by main pages is your home page, about page, services page, and even individual sales pages.

You can (and should) customize your free resource to align with the page they are visiting.

As an example, you could offer them:

An eBook
A Guide
A Training that you recorded
Invite them to sign up for a free trial

On our website, we have found that asking our visitors to do an online marketing audit on their business has worked really well.

Now, the theme we use for our website (and our clients), allows us to create popups natively within the builder. This basically means it’s a feature that’s included with the theme.

But, before we had that option, we used ConvertFlow to create popups on our website.

ConvertFlow has a really cool feature where you can show hyper-targeted, personalized website popups to every visitor on your site.

I’ll go ahead and make sure I link to them in the show notes. You can grab them at www.yourmarketingcoachonline.com/3

Engaging Visitors In Real-Time

Another strategy that we have found to be really successful is to set up a Chatbot or Live Chat that engages your visitors and offers them a chance to get their questions answered.

A Chatbot is a computer program designed to simulate conversation with your visitors.

Whereas Live Chat allows your visitors to initiate a real-time conversation with you (or someone on your team).

As always, there are a ton of tools that you can use. Here are a few that we really like:

ManyChat Facebook Messenger Chatbot Builder

ManyChat is a Facebook messenger Chatbot builder. With more than 1.3 Billion people using Facebook Messenger, it allows you to have a wider reach and more powerful retargeting options on the Facebook platform.

Best of all, ManyChat has a free plan that you can use to get started.

Crisp Live Chat

Crisp is a Live Chat tool that can be used to engage website visitors, answer questions, have sales conversations, or provide customer support.

I want to point out that this isn’t a Chatbot tool like ManyChat. It’s a Live Chat tool that allows you (or your team) to chat with prospects and customers live in real-time on your website.

Intercom

And the last tool that I have to share is Intercom. Intercom is a flexible tool that can be used as a chatbot or for live chat with you or someone on your team.

Intercom’s whole approach is designed to be conversational and to help you build relationships. With Intercom, you can personalize your chatbot’s interactions based on the relationship you have with the visitor or customer.

I’ll be sure to link to each of these in the show notes so you can check them out. To access the show notes, go to www.yourmarketingcoachonline.com/3

How SEO (Search Engine Optimization) Works

Now, I am going to switch gears a bit and take a few minutes to talk about how SEO works and why this is important to the success of your business and helping you capture leads.

SEO is an acronym for Search Engine Optimization.

Let’s go ahead and break this down a bit…

Right now, your perfect ideal customer is looking for you.

They are opening up Google, Bing, or their Yahoo browser, searching for answers to questions they have about challenges they are struggling with and looking for answers or solutions.

When they conduct their search, they get a page of results. That page is called a SERP (or Search Engine Results Page).

You’ve seen them before, so I am sure you know what I’m talking about.

The information that is displayed on that page depends on what was searched.

EXAMPLE…

If someone searches “auto stores near me,” they will get a list of:

Stores that are near them
They will see some business reviews
Maybe some product reviews
A map of their location
And links to the businesses website

But, if they search “how to change my brake pads,” they will likely get:

Videos on youtube
Links to articles
And a section titled “people also ask” with a list of other questions and links to more articles

If you really look at the articles that are listed in a search result, you’ll notice that they are mostly blogs.

A blog can be a dedicated website or a page that you add to your site that is regularly updated to provide information that can be viewed on the web.

Google won’t (typically) send people to the home page of websites on a search like this. They will send them to an article that was written and posted on a blog that can answer the question that was asked (in this example “how to change my brake pads”).

BTW, the results that show up here don’t cost that business anything. Search engines want to rank sites that produce content because they want to give their users answers. Search engines don’t create content. So, if businesses didn’t write these articles, they would have nothing to serve up to their users in their search result pages.

So, I have a couple of questions I’d like you to think about:

What questions is your perfect ideal customer asking?
And have you published content that search engines could offer to their users?

I find that many businesses don’t have or regularly utilize this tool. They have no idea how valuable it is to have a blog on their website or what they are missing out on.

A blog is one of the most valuable tools you can leverage to:

Bring visitors to your website
Build instant trust and authority
Capture leads
And convert prospects into customers

Think about it. Every time you write a blog, you are giving search engines one more piece of content that they can share with their users. The more content you have, the more likely you are to show up in search results.

It makes sense – right!?!

Now, this episode isn’t about writing blogs or SEO. It’s about Turning Your Website Into a Lead Generating Machine. Well, to generate leads, you have to get people to your website. Your blog is an amazing way to do that.

But, it’s not enough to get visitors to your website. You have to make sure that once they get there, it’s optimized to capture their contact information.

And that’s what we are going to talk about next.

I have (4) strategies that you can leverage to capture your visitor’s contact information once they land on one of your blogs.

If you understand the value of having a blog, but you don’t have one currently – I’d like to invite you to check out our Websites That Work program.

Not only can we help you set up a beautiful website and blog – we provide you with training on how to write a blog, how to post a blog, and how to optimize a blog. We provide you with everything you need so that you can take advantage of the free exposure that search engines are giving businesses that produce helpful content.

Go to www.yourmarketingcoachonline.com/websitesthatwork (all one word) to check it out.

Optimizing Your Blog to Capture Leads

Ok, let’s mentally get into the heads space that you have a blog article that you’ve written and posted on your website.

Someone did a query, and the search engines served your blog to them on the search results page – they clicked on the link, and they are now on your website.

On the page, they will see the article that you wrote (of course). But, in the right-hand column, they see an image offering them a free resource that they can request that’s in alignment with the article they are reading.

But they aren’t ready to do that yet because they don’t know who you are and if they can trust you (and that’s understandable). After all, they haven’t even had a chance to read your article yet. So, they continue to read. They like what they are reading. They think, “the person who wrote this really seems to know what they are talking about.”

And then they see some text that appears to be linked (because it’s a different color than the rest of the text on the page). They click it, and a smaller window opens up, offering them that same free resource or maybe even a different resource like a case study of a client you helped). They are tempted to sign up for it, but they really enjoy the article, so they keep reading.

They realize the article is quite long, and they are only halfway through the text, and they see another image that’s embedded right in the article, and it says, “Want to take a copy of this article with you? Click here to download it now and read it later”. They click the link, provide their contact information, and get sent an email from you delivering the article in a PDF that they can read later.

Or, maybe they will continue reading the article. They love it! In the footer of the article, they see another offer. This one, though, is offering a free discovery call. They think, wow, I thought I’d tackle this problem I have on my own, but this person definitely knows more than me. I’d like to talk to someone to see if they can help me. So, they click the button and schedule a discovery call for the next day.

Wouldn’t that be freakin’ awesome!

Guess what? That exact scenario is happening on millions of websites every single day.

You see, there are (3) kinds of people who land on your website lookers, shoppers, buyers.

Lookers are just browsing for information.

Shoppers know they need help and are exploring and comparing their options. They are likely to check out a few different sites to see if anything catches their eye.

And buyers have done their research, or their problem is painful enough that they are ready to implement a solution.

Most businesses build their site for buyers. I mean, why not, right!?!

Well, according to a study done by Episerver Insight (I’ll be sure to link to this source in the show notes), 92% of consumers visiting a website won’t buy on the first visit.

Let me put that into perspective for a second.

That means that 92 people out of 100 are not going to buy the first time they visit your site.

If you don’t have a way to capture their information, you may have lost them forever.

Now, I say (may) have lost them forever because you can set up retargeting ads to try to get them back. But that’s a topic for another day.

Our goal in this episode is to capture their information so that we can follow up with them in the future.

I just shared with you (4) different ways that you could have captured their information:

Through the right side-margin of your blog
In a text link pop-up
Through a content upgrade (where they can request a full copy of the article in a PDF)
And in a footer call-to-action

And I have (1) more for you.

Let’s say that person tries to leave your article. You could also add an exit-intent pop-up (like we talked about earlier).

That’s (5) ways to capture leads – in one article!

Chances are, if they like what they see, they may even browse some of the main pages on your website as well. And that’s ok because if you’ve turned your website into a lead-generating machine with the strategies I’ve shared with you today. You could also capture their contact information on another page.

I know you might be listening to this, thinking, “Yikes! That’s a lot of work, Misty!”

And it is.

But you don’t have to do them all. Even if you added (1) call-to-action to your blog, you increase your chances of capturing your visitor’s information substantially.

What I would do, though is periodically look at the analytics on your site to see what blogs are bringing in the most traffic and spend some more time on really optimizing those blogs.

Boosting Your Website Visitors

Ok, I have (3) last pro tips to share with you before we wrap up.

Writing blogs for the purposes of search engine optimization is what I call “the long game” in helping you increase your traffic and ultimately grow your list.

It takes some time and dedication to produce content consistently to start seeing the fruit of your labor.

But, there are (3) things you can do to get an immediate boost in visitors to your site:

#1 – You can drop a post on your social media profiles and share your articles. You never know who might see it and head over to your site.

#2 – If you want to supercharge your social post, you can boost it and spend a little money to target who you want to see your post.

I recommend spending just $10 to boost your post, see what results you get – then decide if it’s worth putting more money behind it.

And the last strategy I’ll leave you with is #3 – share your new articles with your existing email marketing list.

Why do that if they are already on your list? There are a few reasons…

Some businesses get so caught up in capturing new leads that they forget to nurture the ones that are on their existing list!

Sharing new blog articles with your existing list is a great way to continue nurturing your relationship with them.

It also helps you keep your business top of mind.

I mean if Coke and Pepsi are still running ads to stay top of mind with their consumers (even though you can’t walk 10 minutes in any city in the United States without seeing their product) – we (as entrepreneurs) should probably do the work to stay in front of our prospects and customers too!

Also, when you invite your existing list to your website, they may decide that the time is right and they are ready to invest in your products or services.

There are more benefits, of course, but I think you get the point!