I spend a lot of time in google analytics and am talking to new business owners daily. And a lot of them have a similar problem – a heap of traffic, but low (or no) ability to generate leads from website.

There are thousands of articles on solving the Traffic Problem.
There are also thousands of articles working on the Conversion Problem.

But I think this is the only article I know of that generate leads from website and outlines some additional tactics for a high converting landing page including 3rd party tools, automations and some cool extras to solve the conversion problem once and for all.

This stack of conversion ideas is not ideal for all industries. I think you will get great success however if you apply these ideas to any of the following industries.

• Marketers
• Lawyers
• Advertising Professionals
• Architects
• Accountants
• Advisers
• Consultants
• Coaches
  …Basically, any organisation or profession that offers customised, knowledge-based services to clients.

The Traffic Problem

The traffic problem focuses on the start of the customer journey. If you have low visitor numbers you have a traffic problem.

But don’t worry… it is easy to solve the traffic problem…

It’s no secret that we live in an age when you can buy traffic to your site. As of 2020, the internet was considered the most important medium for advertisers, accounting for 51 percent of total media ad spend in 2020.

Sure… SEO is important and you can do things to generate leads from website organically… but what most professional service business owners are looking for is a ‘tap’ they can turn on to get new clients. I recommend putting a strategy into place that can drive organic traffic over time, but if you can buy traffic and then easily convert them – then you have the rare and coveted client tap to generate leads from website

The Conversion Problem

Now, if you’ve got traffic hitting your site… congratulations! Now we just need to convert them. I’m assuming you are sending them to a landing page where hopefully they are seeing an enticing offer, heaps of social proof and an obvious next step to generate leads from website.

If so, are you getting conversions? Is your lead funnel filling up?

If not, and you have a low number of visitors going into your sales funnel, then you have a conversion problem.

Fixing the Traffic and Conversion Problems

Both problems can be tricky:

I regularly talk to business owners who say they have tried buying traffic and generate leads from website and they’ve found it a waste of time. As of 2021, 62% of small businesses feel like their paid Ads are not working.

There’s quite a few reasons you might feel your paid ads were a waste of time.. but most often it’s one of these reasons:

• Your ads are not targeted properly and are not getting in front of the right people
• Your messaging or offer is not attractive enough to the right people.
• Your landing page is not converting into a visitor into a lead.

If you are getting the right people to a landing page and you need help with boosting your conversion rate… then this article is for you!

Don’t be ashamed if your landing page isn’t working… you might be surprised to learn across industries the averagelanding page conversion rateis only 2.35%. That’s the average!! If you are lucky enough to be average you’ll need to send 50 leads over to your page to get a bite. Depending on the cost per click you might already have blown your margins.

The top 10% of landing pages are converting at 11.45% or higher! Which is where you want to get to. (…even higher in my opinion)

So I would like to share with you 10 remarkable ideas to generate leads from website that are outside of the box! These are things we tweak for each of our professional builds we do and how we successfully build a lead ‘tap’ for our clients.

If you have questions about any of these feel free to leave a comment below!

1. Niched Landing Pages

Focusing on a small part of a broader market has it’s benefits. It increases conversions, generate leads from website, and opens the door to affiliate marketing programs, sponsored posts, etc.

However, most professional service business I know are not keen to go down this road and are scared of choosing an unprofitable niche.

There is nothing stopping you from creating Niched Landing pages though!!

This means you can target a niche with your ads and send them to a landing page that is speaking their language, using relatable imagery and solving their problems directly!

With websites we build we often set these up as a template so the clients can quickly create a new landing page without breaking the design.

Here’s an example of two niched landing pages.

You can view the landing pages here:

• This landing page targeted at Yoga Studios
• This landing page targeted at Performers

Notice that the language, imagery and problems they solve are different – but the layout is the same. Setting it up this way means you can easily create as many niched landing pages as you need to.

There’s lots of websites implementing this strategy. One company that is doing this really well is a scheduling software called Setmore. They have chosen to create niched pages for different Industries just like us, but more often I see niched pages towards locations.

If you do nothing else, do this! Ensure the landing page that your potential clients are going to are talking directly to them and solving their problems.

2. ‘Smart’ Lead Magnets

Forget what you think you know about lead magnets. Because here’s where I think most business websites miss the point.

They assume if they put a subscribe to our mailing list they’ll get a flood of new leads… which is rarely the case. Mind you, products, influencers or performers with a following and regular exposure are an exception to this rule… but if you’re an accountant… forget it.

I urge you to think bigger than a 3 page ebook giveaway. It needs to offer huge value and wow your landing page visitors.

You need to do something to get your visitors email, or phone, generate leads from website or better yet get them to book in a meeting! It needs to be clever. It needs to give your visitors something they want. It often gives them more information to help build trust that your business is able to help them.

Our lead magnet is a form that calculates the price of a website built by us. You can see our lead magnet here. This works for us because almost all businesses who need a website are asking the question – how much?

If you are brainstorming ideas for a successful lead magnet for your business, here’s a few ideas.

• Free Trials
• Free Consultations
• Checklists
• Resource Lists
• Calculators (like ours)
• Videos
• eBooks (or real book for that matter!)
• Case Studies
• Tickets to an Event
• Online Course or part thereof
• Access to ‘member online’ resources

The success of any of the other really depends on how much your visitors want it so make sure you tick the following boxes!

• It’s usually better if the customer can get it right away
• It should solve a problem or answer a burning question
• It should validate your authority in an area or speak to your USP
• It should have a high value or perceived high value

3. A clever followup that gets noticed!

It’s important you stand out from the crowd.

I recently gave away my email address to a website in return to see their pricing. What I received back was a beautifully designed Pricing PDF from the company – but here’s what caught my attention. The PDF had a cover page with my Name on it! It said “Dave, Here’s a little about us…”

Here’s how they generate leads from website. (I know because I do it for clients all the time)

1. The form captures my name and email address.
2. An image is created for the cover page using my Name from Step 1.
3. The PDF cover page is merged with their latest pricing document PDF.
4. The combined file was saved as ‘Pricing-Plans-for-Dave” and stored temporarily on a server.
5. The email was composed and sent to me with the attached file.

Clever right!! They certainly stood out.

I was also very impressed when the founder of a huge Australian Marketing Firm I followed sent me a photo of himself holding a piece of paper which read ‘Hi Dave’. You can bet your bottom dollar I read every word in that email!

I have since taken his idea and built further upon it also with more automations. Here’s the image I send:

Today, it is easier than ever to allow 3rd party tools to talk to each other and automate things to really make an impression on your target audience. The goal is to get noticed and encourage a next interaction with you.

It is possible to automate the generation of documents, PDFs, Audio and Video files, Web pages, poems, and more. Just set and forget!

…you just need to think outside the box.

4. Integrations with the tools you use most.

Following on from point 3, the information from your new lead should be captured in the tools you use most. After all your hard work getting the leads, you need to ensure you don’t lost your generate leads from website.

In the old days it was costly and time consuming to get your systems talking to each other.

Now however, there are services you can subscribe to which can integrate the web applications you use. Such services include Zapier, Zigiwave, LeadsBridge and Automate to name a few.

Here’s a few things you might want to automate when a lead comes in:

• Add the lead to your phone contacts. That way if they call their name shows up on your phone and you can greet them warmly.
• You can add them to a CRM and create a new lead on your sales board.
• You can add them to a mailing list.
• You can trigger a sequence of followup emails
• You can set a reminder in your calendar to follow up in x days time.
• Announce the lead on Slack or Messenger
• You can automatically add all the data collected into a spreadsheet so you can make data-driven tweaks later on

…and the list goes on.

If you are wondering ‘can my tool be integrated?’… perhaps you can look here. To date, Zapier alone allows for over 3,000 integrations!

5. Make it easy to book a meeting

As a general rule of thumb, on every webpage, of every website I build I have two Call to Actions.

The First CTA is for users who are still investigating your services, are not yet convinced and need more nurturing. These CTAs change on every page and generally send visitors all around your website so a lead can eventually get to the information they are looking for.

The Primary CTA is for those users ready to take action! This is the most important CTA and it needs to be super easy! For most professional services the ideal situation is a lead will just book time with them.

I love it when someone interested in building a killer website just books a time with me – and it goes straight into our calendars! It means I can spend less time getting distracted with spontaneous phone calls and instead plan my time effectively.

It should be said, that getting a lead to book time with you is one of the hardest things to get them to do! But, if you’re landing pages are clean, full of great content and your service is genuine then your calendar will fill up.

Pro Tip: If you are creating great content for your target market make sure you have an a ‘book a call’ button that is always visible!

(shameless plug)

Also, for those giving away free consultations, then be sure you give away heaps of value in the first meeting and then you’ll see their referrals booking meetings the same way.

If you want to generate leads from website meetings without the back and forward of trying to find a time on email, then here’s a few scheduling tools to look at:

• Calendly
• Acuity Scheduling
• 10to8

Different tools suit different businesses, but personally, I use Calendly and love it. (I’m not affiliated with them btw). With all my meetings I can set email and SMS reminders for me AND my meeting attendees which has saved a few meetings int he past when people forgot they booked a meeting.

Also, with these tools you can take payments for meetings if you wish and even have meetings rotate between different members of your staff. Perfect if you grow.

They are all easy to embed onto a website and make you look much more professional and of course approachable.

6. Artificially Intelligent ChatBot

We’ve all used chatbots, but now you can setup chatbots with huge libraries of pre-programmed language.

If done correctly, your chatbot could be one of your best selling tools.

Here’s a snippet of conversion to show you how smart they can now be and how they can help you generate leads from website.

The pre-programmed comment library is a beautiful touch to any chatbot and really adds another dimension to your brand.

If you want to have a simple chatbot without all the ‘chat’ there are some very simple solutions and ways to get this happening quickly.

There’s some really remarkable chatbots out there that have accompanying phone apps so you can receive chats wherever you are. They can scale for a team. You can set times when you want them to be inactive, and you can hide them on the site when you are not around.

Despite statistics proving that they generate leads from website and increase conversions, site owners are often wary to put them onto their sites.

The objection is normally due to them thinking they need to be sitting in front of the computer 24/7 waiting for the ‘chatbot to ring’ – but that is just not the case. iF done effectively they can reliable generate leads from website.

7. SMTP integration for email deliverability

If you get an email address from your lead magnet, then you better not waste it!

Email clients (particularly gmail) are very good and filtering incoming emails. This is why I don’t recommend you use an autoresponder or mailing list sequence on this first email.

Most people who set up an email to be triggered from mailchimp or other popular mail clients usually see their email get filtered off into the Updates, Social or Promotions folder. This means that most of the time the lead doesn’t get your first email! … doesn’t that suck!

However, for the deliverability of the coveted first email, did you know you can set up an SMTP integration with your email program? An SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) integration allows you to send emails through your email service.

So for example, if you use GMAIL, that first email will be sent by your gmail account and the lead will receive the email in their inbox – it’ll even have your signature on it. If the lead replies it’ll return straight back to you.

8. Consistency in Design and a clear UX

Good design in your website is an extremely important factor and you should not take it lightly.

Judgements on a company’s credibility are 75% based on the company’s website design.
/Source: Web Credibility Research from Stanford/

A study found that, first impressions are 94% design-related.
/Source: The Effect of Aesthetics on Web Credibility, Farah Alsudani & Matthew Casey/

38% of people will stop engaging with a website if the content or layout is unattractive
/Source: Adobe/

But let’s get clear about what ‘good’ design is… right? Because it is subjective after all…

There are lot’s of factors that go into good website design but from a purely measurably surface level, it is at least these things:

• Typography is limited to 2 fonts (max 3) and the headings, subheading and body font is always the same. That means, not just the type of font, but the size, the letter spacing, the line height and the weight.
• Your prominent colours are always exactly the same values.
• If you choose round edges in your design, ensure the border radius is always the same!
• If you use drop shadows, ensure they are always the same colour, distance, blur and spread.
• Be careful about mixing photos with illustrations, with videos… there’s a time and place.
• Ensure the padding and margins around elements is consistent and the design has room to breathe while guiding the eye towards key elements

..and the list goes on.

Get a clean professional design and you can expect to generate leads from website and increase your conversions with no increase in traffic.

9. Analytics and heat mapping

At a very minimum your website should be integrated with Google Analytics.

This is a free tool that allows you to measure a whole stack of website analytics. Here’s just 10 (out of hundreds of things) you can measure:

1. Audience Location
2. Audience Engagement
3. Mobile Traffic Behavior
4. Traffic Sources
5. Social Media Traffic
6. Site Content Trends
7. Page Bounce Rates
8. Site Search Behavior
9. Events
10. Funnel Visualisation

The trick is to sit back and not tweak your site for a period of time until you have enough data to make an informed decision. Used correctly (over years) you’ll be able to make some changes which will dramatically increase conversions.

With the recent release of GA5 (Google Analytics 5) it’s even easier to see the right data and be excited about tweaking your pages.

As your landing Pages are often longer form pages with a lot of information I also like to use a heat mapping tool. Heat maps show you where people clicked, moved or scrolled on your page. You can use Heat maps to figure out how to make the pages convert higher, or even compare different versions of pages. You can even record videos of visitor interactions!

If you want to generate leads from website then installing analytics and a heat mapping tool is free, fast and a total no-brainer.

In Conclusion…

I wrote this article for you because I felt everyone was talking about the standard stuff.. Speed, SEO, Have an enticing offer, etc. No one was giving outside of the box suggestions, which is SO required in 2021!

I hope this has given you some inspiration and if you have anything to add, I beg you comment below. I am a big believer in sharing information and collective knowledge. I’m excited to hear your thoughts and even more excited to hear about the results after implementing anything outlined here!

If you have a project you would like to discuss with me I am always keen to share my knowledge. Feel free to book a meeting.

Nowadays, a smart website design is almost a prerequisite if you want to build a lasting brand. It’s where your audience learns about your story and your offerings, and the goal is to keep them engaged for as long as possible.

That being said, the home to your brand should be more than an eye-candy. It has to be simple enough that they can explore without any hassle, and rich enough to ask for more. It’s a delicate balance. Anyone can create a website, but it takes careful planning come up with a good one.

Below are some of the key principles you should keep in mind when planning web design.

Purpose

Simplicity is about subtracting the obvious and adding the meaningful. – John Maeda

Why did you put up your website in the first place? What purpose does it fulfill for your target audience? How much do you know about them? Purpose comes down to individual pages, too: Each page should offer a certain type of information like entertainment, engagement, or transaction with your business. Creating a sales page? Keep the focus on your offering, and reinforce it as you go along. Creating an About page? Tell ’em about your company and the wonderful people behind it. You don’t need to put up a circus in a single page.

Navigation

People ignore designs that ignore people. – Frank Chimero

Dead ends are the end of engagement in your website. And as you already know, the goal is to keep them engaged until they’re ready to take the next step. Navigation is the framework containing all the touches happening within your website. It should feature a logical hierarchy; clear CTAs and clickable buttons; and the right information within 3 clicks. It’s a lot to keep track of, but creating a sitemap and constantly testing links and buttons will keep you on top of your game.

Mobile-friendly

The role of a designer is that of a good, thoughtful host anticipating the needs of his guests. – Charles Eames

As a consumer of information yourself, you know there are plenty of moments when you’d rather browse in your smartphone than get up and turn on your laptop to search something. Whether it be smartphone or tablet, people prefer the convenience of browsing on smaller screens now, especially when they’re on the go. In fact, there are varying stats everywhere but the most credible I can find is over 60% and climbing. So if your website is stuck on desktop view, you could be losing these viewers to your competition’s mobile-friendly layout. To fix this, you can either rebuild your site with multiple widths, or come up with a dedicated mobile site they can easily navigate on.

Communication

Get rid of anything that is not essential to making a point. – Christoph Niemann

Clear, well-organised information make a reader and SEO-friendly website. With tons of distractions on the internet, your viewers tend to want information quickly. They (We!) skim a lot, so placing meaningful headings, subheadings, and bullet points are more preferable than long, windy sentences.