Is your website working 24/7 to generate new leads for your business? Because it could be!
Your website should be supporting and adding value to your business. But many business owners see it as little more than an online presence to boost their credibility.
With a few tweaks and optimisations, your website could be your biggest marketing asset, as well as saving you time and helping you attract your ideal customers.
Here are some examples of what your website could be doing for you:
✅ Promoting your services
✅ Eliminating red flag clients
✅ Onboarding ideal clients
✅ Generating passive income
✅ Building your community
✅ Acting as customer support
Let’s break these down one by one.
Promoting your services.
Ok, you’re probably thinking this one is a no-brainer. Of course your website is already promoting your services, right?
Well, you may be wrong.
As a business owner, writing about your services isn’t as straightforward as it seems. You know how much value you provide, and the benefits your customers will get from working with you. But trying to convey that in concise, persuasive wording that really engages and attracts your ideal client is hard.
It’s amazing how many websites out there are writing all about the services the business provides, but this writing isn’t doing a great job at selling or promoting.
I’ve created some tips on how to write engaging website copy – you can read them here. But for the absolute best results, consider working with a website copywriter who specialises in high-converting website copy. It’ll be worth it!
Eliminating red flag clients
You’re a discerning business owner and you don’t just work with anyone. You definitely don’t have time to be starting conversations with potential clients who are clearly not a good fit for you from the start.
Here are a couple of ways you can use your website to filter out these red flag clients.
- Use your wording and messaging to make it very clear what you provide, and who will benefit from working with you.
Everything about your website, your tone of voice, visuals, and the ideas you choose to showcase, should give your website visitor a clear idea of whether they’re going to be a good fit for you.
- Ask qualifying questions in your contact form to give you a little more information of the stage your lead is at.
For example, maybe you’re a health coach who specialises in supporting women through the menopause. But you get a lot of enquiries from people who actually want meal plans for weight loss.
(In this case I would say that your wording and messaging needs tweaking, but that’s beside the point.)
By asking a qualifying question in your contact form such as ‘What do you hope to achieve by working with a health coach?’, you get a better idea of whether you should follow up, inviting the potential client for a consultation call, or send a polite email pointing them in the direction of a free resource or some other relevant information.
Onboarding ideal clients
This follows naturally from the previous point. You’ve had an enquiry through your contact form, and through their answers to a couple of qualifying questions, you know they’d be an ideal client for you.
What do you do next?
One way to use your website to semi-automate the onboarding process is to create what I call a ‘next steps’ page.
This is a hidden page on your website, there’s no link to it from the main navigation, people can only reach it if you send them the URL directly. And this is where you can send the people you’d absolutely love to work with when they get in touch.
This page can contain everything you might have previously discussed back and forth in a few emails before the client signs up to work with you.
It could have:
- An in depth intake questionnaire
- More specific and thorough information about your process or pricing
- An area for the client to upload documents or images
- A link to book a (paid) consultation with you, at a time that suits you both (Calendly is amazing for this)
Sending potential clients to a ‘next steps’ page means that you can be efficient in gathering all the information you both need to get started.
It’s low commitment on the client’s side as well – they can still look at everything on this page and decide they don’t want to work with you after all. But at least if this happens, you haven’t spent valuable time having conversations that ultimately weren’t going to lead anywhere.
Generating passive income
If you’ve got genuinely valuable knowledge you want to share, you could create an e-book or other digital product and sell it as a downloadable resource through your website.
The beauty of this is that once it’s created and set up, it could generate passive income for months or years to come. This is especially useful if you’re getting a lot of website traffic, but not all of it would be suitable for your main service or offer.
Create a page on your website where visitors can download your digital product, and add links to it throughout your website. Adding a section at the end of your blog posts could be a nice way to draw attention to your product. (If possible, include this section in a blog post template, so that you don’t have to add it to each post individually.)
Selling a downloadable resource, instead of a physical product, means that you can almost ‘set it and forget it’. Website visitors automatically get access to the download as soon as they’ve paid, meaning you don’t have to do anything on your end.
Building your community
Building an engaged, active following doesn’t always have to mean using social media. In fact, building a community through your website is much more stable and sustainable than relying on the whims of social media algorithms and trends.
If done well, blogging can be an amazing way to cultivate an audience, especially if you encourage commenting and interaction on each blog post.
More advanced options could be setting up events and allowing people to buy tickets or sign up through your website, or including a forum to encourage conversations and engagement.
If you’re into email marketing and you want to build your mailing list, there’s a huge opportunity to use your website to gather subscribers. One thing I see a lot is a tiny section at the bottom of a website saying ‘Sign up to our mailing list’ next to a couple of ‘Name’ and ‘Email Address’ input fields.
Well I hate to break it to you, but this isn’t going to get anyone signing up to your mailing list in hurry.
If you’re serious about growing your list, why not create a full blown landing page on your website? Give your newsletter a catchy name and explain the benefits and perks of signing up. You could maybe even offer a freebie in return.
Add a link to this landing page to strategic places across the website as a ‘call to action’, and watch your community grow.
Acting as customer support (plus a surprising bonus!)
How many times do you end up answering the same questions about your products or services? Sometimes your answers need to be quite in depth, especially if you’re explaining a complex topic.
This is the perfect time to write a blog article, breaking down your explanation into easily digestible chunks, or a step-by-step process.
Next time someone asks you a question, you can send them a link to this article. You’re still explaining it in your own words, you just don’t have to keep repeating yourself. There are also so many other benefits of blog posts like this – covered in this article here!
FAQ sections are also an underrated resource.
Here you can answer all the short, nitty gritty questions that customers might have about working with you, or about the products or services you provide.
A surprising benefit of an FAQ section like this is it could also give you an SEO boost. Here’s how it works:
You run a land surveying business (for example). In your FAQ section, you include a few questions you get asked a lot, and then write the answers after each question:
“How do I know if I need a land survey?”
“What time of year is best for a land survey?”
“What’s the difference between a land survey and a boundary survey?”
You now have a chance of showing up in search engine results pages when somebody types in that query, potentially increasing your website traffic and your overall SEO rankings.
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This is only 6 of the ways you can make your website work smarter for you, to support and add value to your business. There are so many more, but this article was getting very long so I’ll leave it here for now!
I hope you’re feeling excited and inspired to change up your website and start generating those leads for your business.
