5 Ways to Generate Leads with Your Web Site

If selling services, certainly one of the biggest challenges has to be tracking down qualified prospects that want what you have and are ready to buy. You can easily be fooled into wasting your time making cold calls and engaging in other marketing activities that turn up little in the way of sales. Wouldn’t it be better to get a steady stream of hot leads, where the lead is not just an address and phone number, but gives you some idea of what the prospect needs or what problem they are trying to solve?

You have a website, hundreds—maybe thousands of people visit your site every week. If your site is working properly, it should be producing a list for you of hundreds of people who want to be on your marketing list each week, and dozens of qualified leads: people who want you to call them right away about your services.

Ways To Generate Leads

Here are the five strategies to develop a list of people who are qualified prospects.

1. Collect Contact Info

Try to get the email address of every person who comes to your website and is interested in the problems you solve. Offer bait in the form of an article, tutorial, or guide that people are highly motivated to get their email address so you can sell to them again and again.

Offer prospects something they want, and place your sign-up form prominently at the top of your home page and in a side navigation bar on the other pages of your site. This should help you capture the email addresses of 10-20% of the people who visit your site each week.

2. Use Auto Responders to Collect Detailed Information

Clearly, if you’re using a free giveaway to get people to give you their email information with the briefest of sign-up forms, then you can market to prospects. But wouldn’t it be helpful to have more information?

Set up an autoresponder when people ask for your free article or opt-in for your newsletter. In the email, ask them for some detailed contact information by asking a couple of questions about why they wanted this information. One is one of the best method to generate leads from your website.

3. Get People to Tell You How You Can Help Them

It’s also a tool in finding solutions and the capability of hiring people who can help solve problems. If you’re a financial advisor, giving away an article about financial tips can get you contact information, but really what you want to do is to find immediately those people interested in your services.

Make it easy for visitors to contact you by including an inquiry form on your Web site, but avoid the mistakes most sites make. Too often, inquiry forms are either unseen or buried on the site, multiple clicks away from what your visitors are most likely to view. Include your form on high-visibility pages, at the bottom of your home page and other key pages that discuss your services and products.

Use your question form to collect contact information and identify what services your prospects may be looking for, and how you can help them. This way, when you make your follow-up calls, you will know where to pick up the conversation.
When you receive inquiry forms, you can screen them to determine which ones are worth pursuing based on the responses. Then get on the phone and make those qualified leads an offer to bring in new clients and grow your business.

4. Get Feedback and More Info on What Your Prospect Needs

When people visit your sell pages, the web pages describing your products and services, they’ve shown interest. Some will move directly to purchase, others will discover they don’t have any further interest, and a large number will fall into the middle. These are people who are interested but not ready to commit.

You can use exit pop-up windows before visitors leave your website selling pages to collect feedback and find out what they are looking for.

Offer them some sort of free article or something like that to lure them into filling out the form. Once you receive these created feedback forms, make a call to them. Provide this call with a purpose of understanding the reason for not buying the service or product, or even more information about the problems they need solving. Once you get these prospects on the phone, often you’ll be surprised at how many you can actually turn into clients.

5. Attend Surveys to Identify What Sells

Unless you have a newsletter, you can further leverage its trust to help you collect ideas of what people want to buy. If you have been sending out ideas and information to your target market periodically, they will be more likely to respond when you ask for their input.

Send your subscriber base an informal survey two to four times per year to ask for their ideas. Ask them which of your product or service ideas they like best, and what they need or want. Then tabulate their responses and develop the products and services they asked for.

These five lead-collecting strategies will help you work out who has a problem—one you can solve. From there, it’s not such a big stretch to follow up, close, and continue to grow a respectable business.