The Do’s and Don’ts of Website Lead-Gen Work

Today I’m talking about the do’s and the don’ts for turning your website into a lead generation machine.

Do you want to turn your website into the salesperson that never sleeps?

Here’s some good news – there are multiple paths to get you there. There’s never just one path to progress.

But there is a lot of noise that can distract you from your effort to make progress.

It doesn’t matter

• what content management system you use,
• what colors you pick,
• how perfect (or not) your site speed is,
• whether or not you have a good Yoast score, or
• if you forget to add alt tags.

It’s all about process management and making progress:

What are you going to do, and how are you going to measure progress?

I’ve compiled a list of do’s and do not’s for turning your website into a lead-gen machine that we’ve learned along the way. It’s not completely exhaustive. Use these to determine whether or not you are making progress and operating from a process:

Do

• Measure the ultimate outcome you’re looking for (lead, sale, email subscriber, etc.).
• Regularly review whether or not goals are being completed and work backward to refine every detail.
• Regularly compare your site content to what else is available online.
• Get an outside opinion on your website and content.
• Invest more than you think it should cost on good content and copy (content is fact-based and educational, copy is used for persuasion and action)
• Be educational. Never assume it’s known by your target audience. We have a natural bias to information when we already understand something.
• Wait for perfect to publish (perfect doesn’t exist; only progress does).
• Communicate with key stakeholders about what work is going to be done and how it contributes to the goals.

Don’t

• Ever stop working on your website.
• Get hung up on issues (like site speed) unless they undoubtedly are preventing any goal completions.
• Blindly go about making changes/adjustments without supporting evidence.
• Publish individual pieces of content and never come back to them.
• Create content for the sake of it. Create based on evidence of need and prepare long in advance with a schedule.
• Make unilateral website decisions – those that only satisfy design, copy, SEO, etc.
• Let metrics be isolated. Website traffic alone is rarely a metric that matters by itself. It must be correlated to another valuable outcome.
• Expect anything to happen overnight. Take the long view of a year or two or 10.