“Great marketing is a reflection of your attitude toward success in business. If your attitude stinks your marketing probably stinks too. Entrepreneurs with winning attitudes are always enhancing their marketing and striving for better results. So it’s not about what you invest in marketing and sales. It’s about what you get back. Never forget that success in business begins with a positive attitude and that positive attitude and marketing must be constants. So check your attitude every day when you come to work. We are the few blessed enough to have a vision and to create our own destiny through entrepreneurship. For this we should be extremely grateful.” – Clifford Jones
Last week in our six part series I addressed the three primary sources of traffic and gave you some insight as to how to measure traffic using Google Analytics. (If you aren’t measuring traffic and conversions you should reconsider the real purpose of your website. See what I have to say about this later.) I also shared the three primary strategies we use to help ourselves and clients build traffic to professionally designed and optimized sites.
I must share with you that business owners and professionals tell me all the time that they think their website is “pretty” or “well designed” or “good enough as is.” But when I ask how their site is performing in terms of lead generation and conversions the response is always, “What lead generation and what do you mean by conversions?”
At WealthNet a huge part of our business development work is helping clients leverage the internet by designing, redesigning, and optimizing professional websites that generate leads. As our talented design team addresses design, we begin to craft and implement strategies that drive traffic. And with a properly designed site, traffic becomes leads. Leads then become customers, sales, cash flow and revenue. This is achieved by implementing proven design disciplines and executing proper follow up through email marketing and other strategies that I will address later in this series.
So how do we impact conversions as we drive new traffic to your site?
Here are several key points that impact traffic to your site and conversions to build your list and market with permission.
1. When we conduct a website analysis for clients one of the first things we assess is the number of inbound links to their site. Most highly ranking sites have hundreds if not thousands. Inbound links perform two crucial roles. First, people who see the link will click on it and get to your site if the information around the link is compelling enough. Second, search engines count the number of inbound links to determine how much “clout†you have on the web, and will rank your site higher if you have more.
2. Your site content matters and impacts the traffic you attract to the site, short of buying traffic via a Pay Per Click marketing strategy. The more content written with the right keyword phrases for your target market the better. Search engines love content. And search engines must be able to recognize your content. We recently reviewed a site that was virtually invisible to search engines because it’s design was too graphical and not enough text-based. But it lacked content that mattered most. The client thought it was a great site. But if it’s invisible to search engines how good can it be?
Your prospective customers are looking for current, relevant information about your expertise and offerings. (Static sites that pose as online brochures make me gag. They are pretty much useless, yet people keep paying designers to build them. Yuck.) Search engines know this and like to see content added regularly, as it provides an indication that your website is a reliable source for such information. This is why it’s almost essential to have an active blog integrated into your site. (Blogs built on WordPress and other blog platforms are essentially websites unto themselves.) Adding regular and highly relevant content also gives your site more keywords that a search engine can use to figure out what your site is about and rank you for those terms. In the end, more pages is better when it comes to the search engines. Your site will attract more visitors who will trust you once they arrive. But the content must be relevant to your target market.
3. Once again, driving new visitor traffic and conversions for list building is the point of your site and it’s content. Given that, how does your current site enable you to collect contact information from interested prospects that visit your site? People visiting your site want choices. And they wan them now! Offering highly valuable information that your visitors want entices them to give you their contact information upon which you can then follow up. If you visit our site we give visitors three offerings in exchange for which we earn permission to market and follow up. We see sites that have nothing in this regard. Bad. Very bad. It’s also important to make your phone number prominent enough that those who prefer to call you can do so. And in other cases offering a simple form for them to complete with a request for more information is essential to have on most pages.
As professional marketers we know that it frequently takes prospective clients several small interactions, called clicks, drips and touches, before a client will have the confidence and information they need to buy or do business with you. Clicks are one thing because they happen in real time when someone is on your site. But having permission to follow up with those who don’t buy now is essential. You have permission to educate them again and again so they can make an informed buying decision when the time is right.
Following up without permission is annoying to most people. Consider how you feel about spam and unwanted follow up that often creates hostility or ill will. Trading your knowledge for your prospective customers’ contact information is an effective way to build goodwill and ensure that they will be reminded of your company and offerings regularly.
If your site integrates custom ecommerce so people can buy your product or service then it’s important to make navigation and shopping simple and easy. Through testing and assessing an existing site we can tell our clients at what point or page they are losing business or converting the most. Then we can enhance the site to impact higher conversions. If you don’t sell a product or service on your site, the next best thing is earning permission to market and follow up via email, phone, and fax. This is known as permission-based marketing and millions of marketers and business owners still don’t get it. We believe permission-based marketing is more effective. And it’s earned over time through timely, professional and relevant follow up.
While degrees of customization and other factors vary widely, we have found that nearly all businesses can make some of their offerings available online, if not all of them. Beyond this, it is important to let your prospective customers decide how they want you to interact with them in the future. Forms are certainly useful and important, but many people still don’t like or trust them. The most effective practice is to provide options for customers to call you, email you, or fill out forms with varying degrees of information. For example, garnering just a name and callback number would be a start. Having a detailed form gathering the information you would need to provide them a quote would be another consideration that we could easily integrate into your site.
In closing, driving traffic to your site and enhancing conversion rates is part art and part science. Millions of your customers search online for products and services that you sell. If you want to earn your share of this market and grow your business it’s essential to master the disciplines of generating traffic and converting visitors to leads and paying customers. And whether they can buy your product or service at your site once they get there, it’s equally important to have a system to up sell or to follow up so they can do business with you in the future when they are ready.
Next week in part four of this series I will share with you some fundamentals of permission-based email marketing and how to leverage powerful and affordable Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software to make your life easier.
Clifford Jones, Founder
WealthNet Partners, LLC
“Discover The Art of Business Development”
Scottsdale, Arizona
Follow up on twitter http://twitter.com/WealthNetTeam
Get LinkedIn with us at http://linkedin.com/wealthnetpartners
Related posts:
- How to Grow Your Cash Flow Leveraging The Internet-Part Two. Driving Traffic To Your Site. Last week I wrote about the importance of creating a website that will help you generate leads. This includes having...
- How to Grow Your Cash Flow Leveraging The Internet-Part Four. Building and Managing Your List of Leads, Prospects, and Customers/Clients. Would you like to know how you can literally market while you sleep? No matter what we are doing day...
- How To Grow Your Cash Flow Leveraging the Internet: Part One Not every business needs to leverage the internet to be successful. But with millions of potential customers using search engines,...
Tags: Blogs, Ecommerce, Internet Marketing Strategy, Web 2.0 Design
WealthNet's team is composed of visionaries and workhorses. Give them a project and get out of the way! Their written and presentation skills are head and shoulders above the rest. If you ever have the opportunity to work with them take it!