WordPress Icontact

Saturday, April 5th, 2008 at 6:54 am

How to build a website for lead-generation

Web design has come a long way since the early stages. It has never been cheaper or more simple for anyone to launch an attractive website within days, sometimes even hours.

The challenge is that it takes a little more experience to build a website that really persuades visitors to take significant steps to your business.

From custom CMS

In the early days of web design, determine your needs then have someone custom design the entire site from scratch. The proliferation of content management systems (CMS), including WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal to name a few, has radically changed this model.

I'ma fan of WordPress delusional. With a little research and a lot of persistence, anyone can find a way to establish and operate a CMS.

Thousands of items and designs are available through the web. This means that all you have to do is choose the design then customize the color scheme to match the brand of your company.

For example, you can get premium themes StudioPress, or WooThemes iThemes, among hundreds of other sources. To find specific items of content management systems, simply do a search on Google (ie, "wordpress" + "themes" "Joomla" + "templates").

If you find a theme that suits your needs as it is, then all you have to pay for accommodation is (assuming you build the site yourself). If you want a custom design, but not experts in technology, you can hire a graphic designer.

Architecture

Once you have chosen and set up the CMS and the theme, the next step is the architect of your site.

There four components of a website: 1) the technical program, 2) graphic design, 3) copywriting, and 4) architecture.

The programming technique is careful with the CMS, and you can find designers who work specifically with the CMS of choice.

This leaves text and architecture. This is where the knowledge of the characters plays a role.

You need pages and text to answer questions from each. Specifically, you must have at least the following:

"About Us" that describe the credentials and competitive advantages to competitive.
A "Get Started" page or something similar to spontaneous rates. Downloads Free also calls this character.
Pages that details of their products, services, processes, methodologies and research applicable to Methodicals.
A "testimony" or "Case Studies" page of the humanists. It also includes bios of their respective owners, managers and employees of this character.

Enter the text to answer questions from the characters. Using hyperlinks in the words and phrases to direct people to your pages. Make navigation simple and intuitive.

Evidence in a number of his friends to find where experience difficulty or unanswered questions.

Build your database

The capture data from visitors to your site Web is one of its top priorities and one of the primary keys of online marketing for small businesses .

People You can not buy on a first visit, but if you can gain their trust enough to at least your name and email address, you can continue to serve them and make your case over time.

The trick here is to have a free download as an eBook, audio file or a free trial of something. The discharge should be of interest for visitors and valuable enough to attract attention.

You need database software for management, as AWeber, iContact, or Infusionsoft to create web forms and create and manage your database.

Driving Traffic

With your website built, the next step is to direct traffic. Web site traffic comes primarily from organic search, direct references, links and social networks and bookmarks.

To optimize your search engine rankings, a number of items to take care of technical programming.

This is one reason why I like WordPress so much - it will automatically handle all the details for you.

It is also imperative that you have a blog frequently publish articles. The more after the search engine is most relevant content. In addition, it increases the likelihood of people through linking to their web site, search engines love.

Read my free e-book, The Blogger Principle Bible to learn more about the benefits of blogging.

Currently, the three social networking sites popular are Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Configure the profiles of each, make friends, then wisely refer people to your website. Social bookmarking sites are Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, among others. These allow people to share content.

The best content of your blog, the better your chances that links to you of these sites.

Optimizing over time

Your website will never be finished. Embrace this fact. The key is to always test to optimize your site over time.

To test you need to set up Google Analytics. Google offers a free version that works well for most websites. Set up an account, then enter your website address. Then, you will code to insert into the back of your website, either in the footer or header. This will track everything from visits to your site time and hundreds of other variables.

Adjust your site and see what happens to your stats, then further adjustments.

About the Author

Stephen Palmer is a persuasive copywriter and website architect with The Website Architects, a small business website design firm with an audacious, money-back guarantee. He and his team "architect" small business websites for optimal lead generation. Download his e-book, "The 12 Essential Elements of a Lead-Generating Website."

How to setup iContact on your WordPress Blog - Video