Do you ever run into someone at a party who likes to ramble? Who starts telling a story and halfway through you’re wondering, “where are they going with this?”

Now think about what they make you want to do: find a quick exit or somehow finagle them onto another unsuspecting guest. It seems pretty obvious that rambling doesn’t draw people in, right? Well this is exactly what you are doing with your website if it’s not optimized to drive leads.

And every visitor that “bounces” becomes someone else’s customer!

Creating a good website actually becomes harder the more you know about your business.  Most owners fall victim to what Chip and Dan Heath, authors of the book Made to Stick, call “the curse of knowledge.” This is when you know so much about a subject that it’s difficult to say it simply. When your website is filled with too many things it becomes intimidating and suddenly you’ve become that rambling party guest.

What we need here is a reset on what really matters. Your website exists to drive more traffic to your business, so here are 4 tactics that can help you clear the way to do so:

#1 – Say things more simply.

Don’t think you can say things more simply than you already are? Think again. Even a giant company like ADP who has literally thousands of products manages to explain what they do in just seven words.

Pretty impressive, right? If they can do it, so can you.

A great exercise for this is to try to explain what your business does to a small child. The younger the better. Grab a niece or nephew and ask them to explain it back to you, and through several attempts you’ll start to realize that there are many unanswered, “why?” questions that you had assumed were obvious. To your customers however, they aren’t. This will help you transform, “Experienced industrial metalwork and fabrication contractors” into “Your local metalwork experts.” Simple can be beautiful, right?

How do I get more people to my now simpler website?

You’ve heard the term “SEO” bandied around, no doubt, maybe even as someone’s title followed by the word “expert.” At its simplest, Search Engine Optimization is how Google (and other search engines) gauge how valuable your site is. The more valuable, the higher it ranks on the list when people search for you.

Pro Tip: visit www.similarweb.com or hook up Google Analytics to see how many visitors your site is currently getting.

The key to having good SEO is to have a well-organized site full of keywords that your customers are searching for. While simplifying your messaging, you should also focus it so that the keywords are used consistently throughout. Don’t just write this one in! Spend some quality time on it (or hire a freelance writer), as Google’s algorithm can spot a fake and it will hurt your score.

Great work so far, but are you feeling impatient waiting for Google to discover how great your new site is? There’s always paid advertising where you can have ads for your site placed around the web. It costs money, but it’s a guaranteed way to get things rolling. Google’s Adwords service can come off as a little complex to the layperson so it never hurts to talk to an expert before getting started.

#2 – Getting them to take an action

Now that people are knocking down the proverbial doors to your website, waste no time in directing them to a “call to action” or CTA, like this:

The most effective lead-generation websites have a homepage with one large picture, a single sentence, and one or two buttons. Just take a look at Opportunity Knocks Marketing for a good example. Visitors have just two choices: get started or learn more. See what a vast departure this is from a website homepage full of hundreds of options? Here, your prospects clearly understand what you do, and can waste no time contacting you.

This sort of simplicity is possible because again, we’ve clearly defined our objectives: get people to fill out a form so that we can call them. Know your own objective, for example an eCommerce site would direct them to a store, but it always starts with a call to action.

#3 – Leveraging their contact info in other campaigns

Always use forms for collecting information. Too often I see good websites that direct people to a page that just lists an email or a phone number. Why leave it up to the customer to get in touch with you? If you instead use a form you not only take the initiative to reach out to them but you also capture their information for future use.

Several of our customers use their online forms to collect people’s addresses or zip codes which then allow them to send them postcard campaigns which see even higher engagement than typical email, meaning that they’re getting a higher ROI for the website that they already have. Pretty neat trick, huh?

#4 – Clear the runway for takeoff

You’ve come leaps and bounds from where we started. You now realize that by trying to say too many things on your website, you can end up saying virtually nothing. And now that we’ve been able to redefine your objective for the website around generating leads for your business, everything has gotten a lot simpler. Your messaging is clear enough that a five-year old can explain it to you, you’ve got traffic to your website, and you’re directing all of them straight to a form. Now we are in business!

There’s always more to learn, and if you’re finally ready to see some revenue from postcard marketing, call us today at 877-222-6010 and talk to an expert about how you can drive more leads!