Your website can be a powerful tool to generate leads. If so, How to Build a Lead Generation Website? Want to know How to Generate Leads from your Website?
Even before you start a business, people think about putting up a website nowadays. Putting things in perspective, a website is a combination of web pages that is hosted on a server space. You buy a domain name and then point the domain name to the server that is hosting your web-pages. Your entire website is then rendered from the server, where it is hosted. Your website is your prime digital presence that is visible to your target audience when they come and visit your web-pages.
Building a website does not ensure that you get traffic to the website. These are two totally different things. This is similar to saying that you open a store, but you do not get business by opening a store. You still need to do a variety of things to ensure footfall at your store so that you can generate business. Let us look at both these things through this post.
So, how do you build a lead generation website? What technology do you use to build your website?
Well, there are several technologies that you can use to develop your website. The popular ones are WordPress, ASP/.NET, PHP, pure HTML5 or even some of the other content management systems like Drupal or Joomla. A WordPress website allows you to manage your web-content far more easily, as if you are managing content on a word document. WordPress really started with blogs, but the ease it provides has made it popular as a website technology as well. People used to have blogs at wordpress.com (belongs to Microsoft) or at blogger.com (Google’s Blogging site), but that does not yield you any traffic really, as it is not linked to your domain. WordPress.org allows you to install WordPress at your site (at your domain),  so the entire WordPress site is then rendered from your domain.
To speed things up, Â there are several ready website templates that are available, either free or paid, that you can use to build your website. The template has several components ready and you can configure or customize them to meet your website requirements. That way, you do not have to develop things from scratch and the time required for your website to be ready reduces significantly. The templates also take care of a lot of things like rendering on mobile etc. , so it becomes a lot easier.
In terms of hosting, most customers initially go with a shared hosting plan with some space limitations. Depending on the transactions and traffic at the website, you may need to invest in dedicated hosting at a later point in time. Â Your hosting servers can be anywhere, but it is a good practice to rent hosting servers, where you have your maximum potential customers. That way the speed and availability is better.
There are some things that you should consider while making a website and these include
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Make it easy to navigate from a user perspective
If the user, a potential customer comes to the site, how easy is it for him to find what he is looking for. Does the website have a simple navigation, menus, breadcrumbs, sitemap, which will make it easy for users to find the content that they are looking for. It is good to create a simple menu structure and not clutter it to stuff additional content.
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Ensure that page load speed is good
There is no such thing as a wonderful website, if it takes too long to load. Generally, if you are very image heavy or have too many java scripts or apps running in the background, it will affect your page load speed. If your page load speed is too high, Â then users will move away from the site. They do not have so much patience anyway. You will lose a potential customer in the bargain.
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Usability is key, Technology is secondary
Developers will tell you what is easy to be done, but you need to focus on usability. You want to engage your potential visitors by a variety of means. Technology cannot be the limiting factor. Agreed, you may not be able to put all the necessary paid plug-ins, but most of the plug-ins, especially on WordPress are free, so make use of them and focus on delivering wonderful usability.
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Ensure your on-page SEO is done well
SEO is a technique, where you can feature in search results on Google. This is pure organic search and does not cost you money. To feature on the top page of google for selected keywords though, you have to spend efforts in doing proper SEO. Having the on-page SEO done well is the first thing that you need to fix before doing any further activities on SEO. Remember your website is your storefront. You have to get footfalls at the website in order to convert some of them to leads. There are several others things you can do to increase footfalls and we can talk about that in a subsequent post. Every page on your website offers you an opportunity to rank for specific keywords. Use the opportunity and manage the on-page for every page that you post on the website.
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Integrate your social channels
Website is one of your digital properties. Depending on the nature of your business, you might maintain presence on multiple other digital properties like LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, Google+ etc. Make sure that these properties are linked to your website.
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Invest in a blog
Having a blog at the website gives you some amazing results. Writing regular blogs gives you some awesome returns, when it comes to SEO. Blogging about your industry/expertise area also helps establish you as a thought leader in the space. Blog also helps drive additional traffic to the website.
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Use the website effectively as a lead magnet
Your special offers and promotions, powerful calls to action can be all managed from the website. With simple integrations, you can power leads for your business by managing Google AdWords promotions, Facebook Ads as well as a variety of email marketing campaigns. You can also host a variety of collateral like brochures, case studies, Ebooks, white papers etc. on the website and provide links directly for people to download or use some of the premier content as gated content and provide that to users on submission of some information like Name & Email Id.
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Ensure regular back-ups
There can be several reasons why a website may crash. Make sure you are invested in the right plug-ins to take regular back-ups. That way, in case of a crash, you can be up and running within no time. It is not nice to have the website down for extended periods.
Read more about 7 things to consider while building a lead generation-friendly website
These are good starting blocks. It is possible to have expensive automation elements, database integrations etc. done at the website through custom coding. However it is advisable to get this done through available 3rd party tools as they are the best in the business and are scalable to the changing marketplace.
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