Creating Valuable Leads from Online Visitors (Part 1)

Getting a ton of traffic to your website probably makes you feel awesome! But if you can’t convert your traffic into quality leads, you might not be so happy. First, let’s discuss traffic.

Online business owners must go above and beyond to educate and provide valuable content to the right audience. If you can’t first narrow down your target audience, you’re wasting valuable time and marketing dollars.

How A Website Redesign Can Increase Your Ecommerce Conversion Rate By 89%After you’ve locked down your target audience, you have to get them to your site, make them want to stay, and ultimately want to come back for more and tell their friends and family about you. The higher your Customer Lifetime Value – or the net profit you can generate from your entire future relationship with a customer, the more successful your online venture will be long-term.

Now let’s assume you have a respectable website up and running and are ready for some serious Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) – but don’t know where to start. Follow these 5 simple tips (three are found in Part 2 of this article) and you will be well on your way to successfully driving in, converting, and retaining leads.

Learn from the Best

See what your competition is doing well in the online marketplace, how they present themselves and what opportunities exist for you to make what they’re doing even better. You’re likely going to be sharing the market with your competition, so you may as well make the most of it. If you have stats that prove your product outperforms theirs, show it to your customers! Trust Guard, for example, ran a test proving that its Security Scanned trust seal performs better than McAfee Secure’s (You can learn about it here). So they made a full web page bragging about the fact that e-commerce owners can make more money with the Trust Guard seal than with McAfee’s seal. If you have the stats to back it up, you should brag too!

Perform a detailed audit of your competition’s website, conduct a usability test, and consider using your competitor’s sites as a benchmark for your own to make it as easy as possible for your target audience to find what they need. This is also a great opportunity to look at industry leaders’ sites and leverage key success points from the best in the business.

Constantly Create Exceptional, Relevant Content

You may have heard the old saying “content is king.” It’s entirely true. The key to building your reputation online lies in the quality of the content you produce. In order to present yourself as an expert in your industry, you must look and act the part.

The best content on the web normally shares three common traits. Nail all of these consistently and you can’t go wrong:

~ Great content has a positive outlook
~ Great content evokes high emotions
~ Great content is practical and useful

I am amazed at how many companies out there are producing mediocre or even poor content. If you have the money, it pays to hire a good content writer or technical writer. The more relevant content you have, the better online presence you can provide to people seeking to find products that you offer. There are plenty of sites where you can hire experienced freelance writers for your short-term projects if you don’t want to hire your own.

The only problem with that is that you want to be able to constantly verify that the content being created matches your mission, business plan and marketing tactics. A good first impression stems from quality content that is both unique and informative. Helpful content will not only drive more shares, likes, and quality backlinks, but it will also earn you valuable referral traffic. And the more consistently you post quality, relevant content, the better reputation you’ll have.

Make sure you read Part 2 of this article here. It includes three more tips for improving e-commerce conversions.

Special thanks to Sean Jimenez for his article on the subject.

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