Collecting leads from a website is one of the best things you can do as an affiliate or small business owner. A lead, (or an email address), gives you access to your website visitors email inbox. That is hugely valuable because it gives you more opportunity to promote your business or product/s to that particular visitor once they give you their details.
On a website, most people only stick around for a few minutes. After that they are gone, probably forever! But once you collect their email address, you can keep in touch with them potentially forever! Once on your email list you can follow up with potential customers with automated email messages for months; even years and decades. This just isn’t possible from a website alone!
Collecting Leads From A Website – An Autoresponder
An autoresponder service lets you place some code on your website which creates a form. You can offer something on your website such as a free giveaway. I use a free video tutorial on this website as my giveaway but you can use ebooks, files or downloads. To access the giveaway the website visitor enters their details into the form. Their “freebie” is then delivered to their email inbox.
You will often see discount codes, ebooks, pdf files and free courses being offered on various websites online in order to collect subscriber information. Once you join someone’s email list, you will start receiving automated marketing messages promoting their products/service.
Collecting Leads From A Website – Building Trust
Many of these companies will follow up with aggressive marketing campaigns designed to sell you their wares! This can often push the potential customer away, knowing that if they open an email message from a certain company, they will be inundated with marketing messages! As a result, many subscribers stop opening messages.
To get your subscribers to open your messages more frequently, make a habit out of sending out helpful messages which genuinely help your subscribers with a problem they have. That way, they will be more inclined to open your messages when they arrive.
Build trust, rather than trying to sell from the get-go! Once you build trust with your email subscribers, you’re more likely to get subscribers to open your messages. When subscribers get to know, like and trust you, they are much more likely to buy from you.
A Valuable Giveaway
A valuable giveaway is something that your website visitors are going to want badly enough to hand over their details for! With so many websites and bloggers touting for your email address, consumers are becoming more discerning! They don’t want a million spammy emails in their inboxes! So they are getting more picky!
It’s not enough to have a valuable giveaway, you must also make sure your visitors know about it. Make your subscription option clearly visible on each page of your website and highlight the main benefit of signing up to your list.
“Join my newsletter” might not be enough of a benefit in the eyes of a website visitor. So make sure you’re offering something super valuable and that your visitors know it straight away!
Collecting Leads From A Website – Traffic
Once you have your lead generation tool set up on your website, you’re going to want to attract more targeted visitors who will want your giveaway. I do this through blogging and in particular by finding long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty.
By making a habit out of creating content aimed towards a specific type of person, you can bring more targeted visitors to your website. See also customer avatar worksheet pdf.
Generating organic traffic to a blog takes some time and commitment. But it’s worth doing because ultimately it can give you free traffic, leads and sales. Make sure you’re sharing and promoting your content and make a daily ritual out of it. There’s also a number of useful plugins you can use to automate the sharing of your posts and help you with your SEO. See also best free blog plugins for WordPress.
Putting You In Charge Of Traffic
Traffic is hard to obtain and you either need to create a lot of content for traffic or pay for it. So building an email list of subscribers is one of the best things you can do to put you back in charge of the traffic you’ve worked so hard for (or paid for).
Without an email list, you’re at the whim of Google or of paying constantly for traffic. But once you start building a list and building trust with your email list, your subscribers are much more likely to open and digest your email messages, putting you in a position of authority.
Build trust first, sell later! The consumer is much more in charge in the online world and can spend a lot of time collecting information with which to make a purchasing decision. The “pushy” sales tactic is therefore not a good one if you’re trying to build trust with customers. Instead, lead with value and position yourself as an authority in your particular field.