If you sell services one of the biggest challenges is identifying qualified prospects who want what you have to offer and are ready to buy. It is possible to waste time on cold calls and other marketing activities that turn up little in the way of sales. Wouldn’t you rather have a steady stream of hot leads, leads that not only include contact information but give you an idea of what the prospect needs, the problem they want solved?

You have a web site, and hundreds if not thousands of people visit your site each week. If your site is working well it should be providing you with a list of hundreds of people who want to be on your marketing list each week and dozens of qualified leads, people who want you to call them right away about your services.

Use the following five tactics to generate a list of qualified prospects.

1. Collect Contact Information

Strive to collect the email address of every person who visits your web site and is interested in the problems you solve. Offer a free article, tutorial or guide as bait to motivate people to give you their email address so you can market to them again and again.

Offer prospects something they want, and place your sign-up form prominently at the top of your home page and in a side navigation bar on the other pages of your site. This should help you capture the email addresses of 10-20% of the people who visit your site each week.

2. Use Auto Responders to Collect Detailed Information

If you use a free giveaway and the briefest of sign up forms to get people to give you their email information you can market to prospects but wouldn’t it be helpful to have more information?

Use an autoresponder to send people a confirmation when they request your free article or sign up for your newsletter. In the email ask them for detailed contact information and ask them a couple of questions about what they’re interested in.

3. Get People to Tell You How You Can Help Them

Many people use the web as tool to find solutions and to hire people who can help them solve their problems. If you are a financial advisor, giving away an article on financial tips is a great way to get contact information but what you really want to do is to identify those people who have an immediate interest in your services.

Prompt people to contact you by including an inquiry form on your web site, but don’t make the mistakes made on most web sites. Too often inquiry forms are buried on the site, multiple clicks away from the pages most frequently viewed by your visitors. Include your form on high visibility pages, at the bottom of your homepage and other key pages about your services and products.

Use your inquiry form to both collect contact information and to identify the services your prospects are interested in and how you can help them. When you make your follow up calls you’ll know where to start the conversation.

When you receive completed inquiry forms you can sort through them to identify which ones are worth following up on based on the answers provided. Then pick up the phone and use these qualified leads to find new clients and grow your business.

4. Collect Feedback and Learn More About Your Prospect’s Needs

When people visit your sell pages, the web pages that describe your products and services, they’ve expressed an interest. Some will move directly to purchase, others will discover they don’t have any further interest and a large number will fall into the middle. These are people who are interested but not ready to commit.

Before visitors leave your web site sell pages, you can use exit pop up windows to collect feedback and to find out what they are looking for.

Offer a free article to motivate visitors to fill in the form. When you get these feedback forms, follow up with a call. Use this conversation to find out why they didn’t buy the service or product or to get further information about the problems they want solved. Once you have these prospects on the phone you’ll be surprised how many you can turn into clients.

5. Send out Surveys to Identify What Sells

If you have a newsletter you can leverage the trust of your readers to collect ideas of what they want to buy. If you’ve been sending out ideas and information to your target market periodically they will be more than likely to respond when you ask for their input.

Two to four times per year, send an informal survey to your subscriber base, asking for their ideas. Ask them which of your product or service ideas they like best and what they need and want. Tabulate their responses and develop the products and services they asked for.

Use these five lead collection strategies to identify prospects with a problem, one you can solve. Once you know who needs your help, its easy to follow up, close the sale and grow your business.

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2004 © In Mind Communications, LLC. All rights reserved.

About The Author

The author, Marketing Coach, Charlie Cook, helps independent professionals and small business owners attract more clients and be more successful. Sign up to receive the Free Marketing Guide and the ‘More Business’ newsletter, full of practical tips you can use at http://www.charliecook.net
ccook@charliecook.net

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So your traffic is going through the roof yeah? It’s all becoming a bit too much? You’re getting lots of sales enquiries through your website every day? You want to send visitors away from your site for good? Just follow these five Sure Fire Ways and your site will be a tumbleweed ghost town in no time.

Way No. 1 - Clog Up Their Internet Connection

Imagine it. They’re happily surfing around on Google looking for your ‘widget’ and everything’s going smoothly. Your website appears in the first page listings (congratulations you must have employed magnet4web or another highly-esteemed website marketing company!) and they click through to you. Then their internet connection starts to clog up. It is positively groaning and creaking under the strain of downloading your homepage which has so many images on it takes over 30 seconds to appear. They look at the progress bar at the bottom of their screen. It reads ‘20%’. They look at their watch and then click on the little ‘X’ at the top right of their screen. Well done - you’ve just sent away a visitor - for good.

Way No. 2 - ‘I am not a number - I am a free man’

Along come some more visitors. They lick their lips in anticipation of viewing your widgets which they are very interested in buying - they have their credit card handy.

They land on your homepage and all is well, at first. “The benefits of choosing Widgets Inc. are as follows…” Your homepage is laden with customer-focused benefits and selling points - excellent. But wait a minute. What’s that at the bottom of the page? It’s not what I think it is, is it? Oh dear, there in black and white is one of the fundamental no-nos in web design that is guaranteed to send the message “This website was built by my dog”:

“Welcome - you are visitor number 102″

Regardless of the number (and let’s face it 80% are either you or your family!) you will be sending away people in droves. Well done - your site is becoming less busy by the day. Let’s move on to way number three..

Way No. 3 - “Help me buy from you - please…”

They’re lost. You have built the site around what seems a logical approach but your visitors are lost. You’ve given most prominence to testimonials but they just want to send you an email. They click on three, four and sometimes five pages but can’t find your phone number or email address anywhere. But it’s okay - of course they have a spare quarter of an hour to hunt through your website (that doesn’t have a site map) to find your contact details when they already have another window open with your competitor’s website - complete with email address, phone number, fax number, street address, mobile number, map and GPS coordinates..

Yes - you’ve guessed it - you’re one step closer to that ghost-town..

Way No. 4 - ‘Please Let Me Watch Intro’

Yes, admit it - you once thought the best thing on the planet was a website that started up by having a revolving animation of the company logo that exploded, span round a bit to an 80s sounding techno tune and then re-constituted itself in the centre of the screen with the immortal words:

“Click here to enter site”

Strange that - “enter site”. That’s what all your visitors were trying to do when they typed in your web address or clicked on your link but instead they were faced with Jean Michelle Jarre and some possessed bit of code that replicated the effect of someone regurgitating your business’ corporate identity over the screen. Nice. Flash intro = trash intro. Use em (the intros) and lose em (the visitors).

Way No. 5 -”I am five years’ old - I like things that flash”

One day in the future a law will be passed that will make it illegal to use scrolling text, flashing images, rotating heads, animated animals and boucning cursors on a website. Your website is here to do business. It is supposed to be a serious tool in your marketing armoury. It should be used to convey useful information to your visitors and convince them that you are worth doing business with. Dress it up with flashing icons, swirling graphics, flashing logos and spinning pictures and the merry-go of visual delights will just make your visitors sick. They will leave your glitzy fairground never to return..

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It seems like everyone is talking about RSS Feeds. They’ve been around for years but the buzz is up about them as the technology continues to go mainstream. Some people are reportedly abandoning their browsers and viewing the web through their readers - but they hardly represent the general public yet.

So does your site need one?

This question is somewhat like asking if your site needs a newsletter. Sure, the sky won’t fall tomorrow if you don’t get one today, but once you realize the benefits of having a news feed for your site, and try it for yourself, you may become an addict like the rest of us.

Reason #1: More free traffic to your site

I’m not exaggerating when I say that a frequently updated feed can bring you massive amounts of traffic in a short time period. This won’t be true forever.

Here’s a snapshot in PDF format, of just the feed-originating traffic to a new page of my site for the first 24 hours it opened.

http://www.freetrafficdirectory.com/2-rss-marketing/screenshot.pdf

Not exactly a stampede, but here’s the good part.

On the fourth day, the feed traffic doubled, and all other traffic continued to rise at the same rate.

That’s my fifth active feed of the twenty I have spread out over four sites, and I get similar results each time. In thirty days, that would be at least 5,000 new targeted visitors - again, this is not counting my present traffic, or those who try my feed and stay subscribed, nor does it factor in what happens when the traffic doubles again..

I can’t promise you the exact same results, no one can. But you should know that my feed is targeted towards a crowed market - if you know how to set up your feed properly and correctly apply your keyword research, you could have better results..

Those visitors, from the first hour of traffic to today, resulted just from submitting my feed to the list of directories I compiled from many sources and studied. Some bring great free traffic to new feeds, some are better for once your feed has matured.

You can often get better placement in feed directories and in Yahoo’s RSS Directory than you could from your results in a regular search engine, and often, inclusion is instant.

Reason #2: It’s a hands-off way to update your audience

What if you could run your newsletter without the hassles of maintaining your list, removing bounced addresses, finding new subscribers, formatting the content you find, altering your content to keep from being blacklisted, and after all that, wondering if all the various blockers mistakenly kept your message from getting through?

If that sounds like heaven, you can be one of the angels as soon as an hour from now.

When you supplement your current newsletter with more frequent updates via feed, you will be able to push out updates to subscribers to your news channel or feed more frequently and more efficiently.

With all the new free tools available, even if you’re all thumbs when it comes to making a web page, if you can fill out a form, you can create a feed.

Reason #3: Get visitors to click through to your site whenever you update

If you haven’t used a feed reader before, you might be confused about the connection between the feed and your site and why it can result in an increase in traffic. I’ll attempt to explain this to you in words, but I suggest downloading a news aggregator (also known as a feed reader), and looking at the results of your favorite site’s feed through a reader after you read this for the full effect..

You can use my main feed here if you don’t have one to view:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/FreeTrafficTips

If you don’t want to have another application up while you’re surfing, you can try Pluck , a free application you can use for more than just feeds that integrates with Internet Explorer - get it at

http://freetrafficdirectory.com/pluck - it will take you right to the downloads page.

You can also do this from My Yahoo!, by changing your page to include their RSS Headlines console, still in Beta testing at http://my.yahoo.com.

To summarize, a visitor sees the headlines they want to read, view the summary, and click through to your site to read the rest of the news, either in a new window, or without having to leave the application they are in.

And when you update again, the reader will notify them that you have new headlines, and/or populate the list of items you have available. This can keep your audience coming back.

If you had trouble following that, come to this page for a one minute tutorial:

http://www.freetrafficdirectory.com/members/postt95.html

Reason #4: Recycle old content.

If you have a list of your older articles, some older product reviews, site suggestions, or archived newsletters, you can use those to build content to populate your feed with information. As long as this news is still relevant, you can recycle this content to attract new visitors

Reason #5: Its so easy it’s crazy not to do it.

Before the last few months, there weren’t as many free tools online that made the process of starting and publicizing a feed so effective and user-friendly.

The bottom line is, now that you can get all those benefits from filling out a form, saving the file, uploading to your server, promoting it once, and updating it from time to time, it’s insane not to do so.

You already have to update your site from time to time. You might as well get all the benefits of having a news feed too.

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I created my first website in 1995 - it was so long ago I built it out of rock and wood, not HTML.

Shortly after it went live I realised that nobody apart from me could see it and it started to dawn on me what this ‘Internet thing’ is all about. It is not about having a stand-alone website plonked somewhere that nobody will ever see - it is about being part of an INTERconnected NETwork of other websites. INTER-NET. The penny dropped - I needed to start getting connected to other websites.

Much has changed since then (my hair got longer, shorter and has since started to recede further up my head for one thing) but it seems the desire and pressure you face as a website owner to exchange links shows no signs of fading. But link swapping is killing your website! Here’s 5 Reasons why…

Reason No. 1 - It’s Addictive!

It’s true. You might not be that far down the link-swapping path yet but I promise you it will happen sooner or later. One day you’ll find yourself laughing like a maniac as you run a report to see how many in-bound links you have and start rubbing your hands gleefully as you reach that magic milestone you set yourself six months ago. You’ll start mainlining reciprocal links:

“Just one more link. Please - all I need is one more link!”

Take a deep breath, step back from the precipice and think for a moment. Why do you want all these links pointing to your website? No, honestly - why do you REALLY want all these links pointing to your website? To improve link popularity? You’re falling into the trap. Do you want it to boost that little green bar that Google assigns to your page? (see toolbar.google.com) Wise up!

Reason No. 2 - It Is Eating Away At Your Time Like A Hungry Hippo!

Just take a look at the last time you went out looking for a link and got it. How long did it take you? Not long? Well, let me put this another way - how long did it take you to find the right type of websites, look through those and find ones that even have a links page, find the contact information for the websites you wanted to contact, create the email, send the email, respond to the email, place their link on your website, check that they reciprocated with you, email back and forth a few times more and so on…?

If you add up all the minutes that each of these elements takes you could be looking at half an hour per reciprocal link established - maybe even longer!

And don’t think you’re cutting corners if you’re using software. It might be quicker to find possible linking partners using software but it’s a false economy as, to my knowledge, people are still cleverer than machines.

What I mean by this is I can tell if you email me using software rather than using your own fingers. If you go looking for reciprocal links using software you are FAR less likely to get a response so the whole process will probably take you as long in terms of time spent per link established.

Reason No. 3 - You Are Spending More Time On Other People’s Websites Than Your Own

If you spend a lot of your time researching and creating reciprocal links you’d better make sure that your website is perfect. Remember - all that time you’re spending developing reciprocal links could be spent adding new content to your website, sending out an up to date newsletter to your mailing list or even sitting down and writing out goals for your website.

If you spend all the time on improving your website, adding great content, providing excellent service, keeping it up to date, testing different headlines and homepage layouts INSTEAD of spending the time building links guess what? You will magically find that more people link to you anyway!

In fact - your website will become such a great resource because of all the time you’re dedicating to it that people will go OUT OF THEIR WAY to link to you! How ironic is that?!

You go hunting for links and your site suffers and therefore hardly anybody links to you. You spend time on making your website THE BEST IT CAN BE and everyone starts linking to you as, shock horror, you have a brilliant website that is worth referring to..

Reason No. 4 - You Don’t Have A Multi-Million Dollar Budget To Beat The Boffins

Those white-cloaked geeks over at Google towers and the like have millions of dollars at their disposal to create the latest technology that can sniff out the merest whiff of dodginess when it comes to link swapping.

If they think something is suspect you might get penalised. First you started to see sites that used the same phrase for their inbound links get penalised. Then it was sites that engaged with link farms. Who knows what’s next?

Ultimately you can bet your bottom dollar that the search engines will change their tack with reciprocal links and their importance - some of them are already starting to look at the words that appear before and after each link to make sure it is on a relevant page and not just created as part of a reciprocal linking deal.

It’s a risky game we’re all playing and my money’s on the guys with the white coats and millions of dollars..

Reason No. 5 - You Are The Weakest Link, Goodbye!

When push comes to shove this whole ‘game’ of website marketing is about balance.

Imagine you are a tightrope walker. Fifty metres beneath you is a huge vat of boiling hot lava. To help you across the rope from the podium of “website launch” to the podium of “website success” you get a balancing rod.

Spending too much time and effort on reciprocal link building is like having a large sack on one end of the rod. This sack has an elephant in it. The elephant is wearing boots. Made from concrete. Get the picture?

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