In the battle of internet marketing there are some things that everyone’s armed with, but very few know how to yield them.

Your website is one such gear that ought to keep you abreast of your enemies.

However, how a website is going to be useful to you depends on how you use it.

If your website isn’t generating leads, then there’s no point in having one, is there?

Well, that doesn’t mean that you discard your website, it simply means that you hang out with me for the rest of this blog and find out 3 useful lead generation strategies to get much deserved leads from your site.

Good enough?

Read on.

What is the Function of a Homepage?

In the arena of internet marketing the talk is mostly about how you can optimize your landing pages for higher conversion rates.

A website is not much different from a landing page in the sense that it’s a collection of landing pages.

So when I say that you’ve got to optimize your website, what I really mean is that you have to optimize specifically one of your landing pages: your homepage.

Your homepage is the first page of your website or simply the original URL.

What the function of your homepage is, is for you to decide.

For different types of business it serves different purposes.

For instance, some use their homepage as their ‘About Us’ page, while others use it to launch in to great details about their products and services.

However, since your objective is to generate leads and eventually convert them into prospective buyers, you have to create your homepage in a way that is bound to attract leads.

Optimizing your website is not only about bettering your homepage, rather it is also about linking the other pages of your site in such a way as to ensure that you’re guiding your visitors in a certain conversion path.

1. How to Optimize Your Homepage

When your homepage registers on the search engine results page, you’re going to have to be prepared to awe your visitors.

There are a few pointers that you’re going to have to ensure that you have on your homepage to make it click-worthy.

You have to remember that this is the first stop from a search engine result, a paid ad or any other source for your visitor and you’ve got to set bait real quick.

If you interested to know how to get more traffic on your website see what Brian Dean tells on his post.

A bait on your homepage is not going to be any one thing, but a composition of a few perfectly executed elements and they are as follows:

Heading

This is the element that’s going to be making the first impression because it practically tells the people what the page is all about.

The first most important thing about a heading is its visibility. Pick a legible font and size that’s h1 so that your heading stands out from the rest of the text.

The size normally used for headings is H1 which is preset on WordPress.

The next most important thing about a heading after its font and size is how attractive and at the same time, informative it is.

For some people, no matter how boring your headline is, they will go on to read it probably because it’s a part of a research or they came to learn something new.

For the sake of these people you will have to make sure that your heading has the bare minimum information that your entire content has.

Your heading must incite curiosity and the rest of the page must be in correlation to it in order to deliver whatever has been promised.

Here’s an example,

Although this is not the traditional heading but it does a great job in one, standing out and two, stating the purpose of the business clearly.

Kudos!

Here’s another one.

This is an example of a fabulous homepage. It’s neat and clean and very simple.

Even though the name of the company has been placed in the left hand corner, the center has been given to the most important piece of information: what the company has to offer its customers.

Subheading or a Brief Description

Since your homepage is not your blog page or any other content, your heading could be the name of your business or company.

This could be accompanied by a subheading or a brief description.

As you have seen in the screen shot above, just the word or heading isn’t enough and so they say where they’re specializing and what they’ve designed themselves to do.

Take a look at this page,

They makes the perfect use of subheading by concisely telling its visitors what services they can avail from this page.

Even the heading is informative!

Moving on, there’s something that all three of these pages have in common and that’s what I’m going to be looking at next.

CTA

While removing distractions is a great idea, you’re call-to-action or CTA has to be equally loud and clear.

Easy navigation is part and parcel of a page that generates large leads because a large part of your leads will come by making sure that you carefully guide them towards your preferred destination.

This is one page that’s gotten their navigation right.

If you’ll look at the two pictures you’ll see that they’ve both got ‘Shop Women’ and ‘Shop Men’ CTAs on them.

This is subtly guiding the visitors to the next stage which is purchasing.

Once, somebody clicks on either one of those buttons, they’ll be lead to a page where every picture is accompanied by a ‘Shop Now’ button.

Check out the picture below,

The whole point of your homepage is to trap leads, yet if you’ve not left any crumbs lying around what do you expect your visitors to do?

This brings us about to our next important part to generating leads.

2. How to Optimize Opt-in Form

You may have designed a great opt-in page that you’ve added on your homepage as a link.

Now, if you’re expecting your visitors to navigate through the correct link and signup then you’re doomed.

The best idea is to have your CTAs on the homepage itself.

Here’s an example,

Here we can see they have call-to-action that says ‘Get Free Card Reader’.

It has a simple opt-in form so people won’t be as reluctant as they are when faced with too many field to fill in.

If you think adding an opt-in form is going to spoil the anatomy then you could try doing what they’ve done here in the example below,

Send a pop-up opt-in form just so that your visitors know what needs to be done.

In this example instead of creating traditional opt-in pop he creatively said that he made 2 cookbooks with new recipes for his visitors and offer them for free.

What adds more value that he added 2 attractive images of his cookbooks and then added his call-to-action such this ‘yes, I’d like free cookbooks!’ This definitely attract the visitors to subscribe. You can make the best use of this idea!

If you’re not already acquainted with the finer details of how to optimize opt-in forms then you should probably go read up on it first.

This is the most crucial aspect of your homepage because generating leads depends solely on the action taken by your visitors.

Adding an email sign-up form right under your heading is one of the most high-converting places for your opt-in form.

That way there’s very little scope for distractions and the call is quite obvious.

At this point, if all has gone right for you, you’re all set to generate a healthy serving of leads.

3. Nurture your Leads

Although you truly may have generated a lot of leads you’re nowhere near success … yet.

The real deal starts after you’re visitors have signed up for something that you promised to offer them.

Here’s a few things that will help you to make sure that your visitors don’t slip away.

The first thing that you’ve got to do after visitors have signed up is send them a thank you note.

Often it’s just an encouraging mail that can warm your leads up to you.

And sometimes it requires a little more effort than that.

Often leads are not yet ready to move on to the next step of the conversion or sales funnel, that is begin the purchase process.

This is why you’ve got to spend a good amount of effort behind them.

Like most businesses, if you’ve got a blog that is updated on a regular basis then you could get that to work in your favor as well.

The inactivity on part of your visitors will help you comprehend where they stand.

In that case, instead of mailing them a whole course-like series you could send them links to your blog on a daily basis.

You Know what’s Another Great Idea?

That’s listening to your visitors once in a while.

I mean, as internet marketers we often get way too busy trying to tell people, trying really hard to sell our products.

We rant on about our services and all the flashy offers we have, but we rarely hear from those people without whom our business don’t run.

Since this is a rare thing, listening to your visitors will give you an edge over your competitors.

Ask your visitors to send in a mail, or you could arrange for a live chat session where you could address their problems on a one to one basis.

Just make it worth their time and effort.

In fact asking your visitors or engaging in a conversation with them is an ideal move because it allows you to monitor your leads.

By keeping a keen eye on them you can easily understand how much they are willing to partake in a monetary transaction and consequently what your next step towards them should be.

Instead of blinding sending out generalized emails, you can prepare content for each group of your visitors.

And believe me; it’ll be totally worth it.

So before I wrap up let’s do a review of the things that you’ve got to stick to.

1. Homepage: You’ve got to create an optimized homepage which you could also do with some help that you can find online.

2. Opt-in forms: These have got to be top-of-the-class stuff since this is what baits your visitors and finally,

3. Nurture your leads: because just getting them doesn’t spell success.

Conclusion

Well that’s pretty much the definitive guide to how you can capture and guide your leads towards a successful endeavor.

Capturing leads is a lot like catching fish with a rod.

You’ve got to be stealthy, smart and patient.

Anyway, enough with the dramatics; I’ll let you be on your way so that you can go and begin with the magic.

Let me know in the comments below how you’re faring with your leads.

Questions are also welcome.

Related articles: conversion optimization tips, lead generation strategies, improve your conversion rates, boost landing page conversion