How to Get More Qualified Leads Starting Today

Only a few people who visit your website are ready to buy. Sad, but all too true.

This means we must build a flow of information, where we first grab their attention, explain how we can help, and remove any barriers so that they feel confident to take action.

At the very least we should do our best to get them to opt-in before they leave and forget about you forever. This is called Lead Generation.

Is Your Problem Lack of Traffic or Too Few Leads?

One of the biggest issues facing the people I work with is that they are not getting enough leads.

When you have spent hours creating valuable content, PDF lead magnets, email follow-up sequences, and generating traffic, it’s frustrating when only a handful of people sign up.

The weird thing is, while I help people grow their traffic every day, and most people would love more visitors, often my clients do not have a traffic problem but a conversion problem.

If 200 people visit your site and only one signs up, rather than buying ads if instead, you can increase your opt-in rate will make your business much more successful without changing your traffic approach.

Increasing Opt-Ins

It is fair to say that if your lists are not growing, they are likely shrinking. Every list loses people, it is the nature of the beast.

When faced with a problem growing our email lists, there are a couple of ways people go.

Some people resort to aggressive tactics such as fake countdown timers and filling their websites with pop-ups. While it might slightly improve results in the short term, it can harm the experience and even your organic search performance in other ways.

Other people withdraw and get shy about their opt-in incentives and services, barely mentioning them so as to not lose even more subscribers.

In most cases, these solutions don’t work because they don’t address the root issues.

The only way you can really succeed is to give your audience the right message at the right time.

Done successfully, you increase your results without annoying your visitors. In fact, get it right and you delight them.

I’ve seen conversions double by just placing calls to action in the right spots and tweaking the follow-up sequences accordingly.

Here is the inline form I use on my retro programming site:

This approach more than doubled my opt-ins but also increased the amount of positive feedback I received from my tutorials.

Seems I have a lot to fix on that site since I changed a bunch of plugins before Christmas. I will report back with fresh numbers once I have it all working again!

What to Do to Now to Get More Qualified Leads

First, know your numbers. Look up your opt-in rates. An average opt-in rate is around 0.5%, but you should aim for 2% or higher.

Next, find your top pages. You need the ones that are most appealing to your most-wanted audience and that serve to introduce what you can most help people with.

When you have a good place to get motivated opt-ins, now you either need to present your existing lead magnet as a solution to what they are already thinking about, or you need a new incentive that speaks to that directly.

Finally, put your CTA where more people will see it. That could mean a popup, but do not cover the content entirely, make the close button easy to find and click, and give the reader a chance to read your content before making the popup appear. It is particularly frustrating when popups appear for people who already opted in also.

Your job is not over at this point. Over time focus on minimizing distractions, tracking results, and continuing to optimize.

For example, do your Adsense ads make you enough money to justify the space they take up? I find that I make more money NOT using ads than I have ever been able to make from ads, but again you need to know your numbers.

Connect Your Content and Your Solutions

One of the things I do a very bad job of around here is letting people know what I do for people.

My main source of WordPress clients is something like “Hey do you know someone who can …” and I reply “Me!”.

Don’t do what I do, let people know how you can help them!

This means in your opt-in incentive or lead magnet you need to tell people what you promised while reminding them they can get more help from you. Obviously also tell them how to do that.

For example, I should say “Here are the steps for how to set up your opt-in funnel yourself but if you have any difficulty or want me to do that for you, check out my services” etc.

Not Enough Leads? Look at Conversion Optimization

Get an independent view of your calls to action. We are almost always too close to things to be truly objective. I have this issue myself so much that I had a whole website of forms that were broken without me realizing it until a reader reached out asking how to get the downloads.

• Are your forms not just clear but compelling?
• Do people fully understand the benefits and what they will get out of them?

There are three main core elements of Conversion Rate Optimization:

1. Visibility – Does the conversion element stand out or does it need the visitor to hunt around?
2. Affordance – Can the visitor clearly tell what do do and how it works?
3. Feedback – Is the visitor reassured that they took the action, that they took the correct action, and that they were successful?

This is why buttons that look like buttons, graphics that show what they are going to get, and in-situ success/error messages work far better than expecting the reader to just know what to do.

Apply this logic not just to your design but also your copy. For example, rather than a headline like “Subscribe Now” try something more direct like “Download the ‘Fix Your WordPress Security Leaks’ Checklist Now“.

Clear value with good design and easy to follow calls to action will work a lot better than assuming your visitor is concentrating on every word on your page.

Small changes, like improving your headline, placing buttons above the fold, or removing unnecessary distractions, can have a huge cumulative impact on your conversions.

The key is to present your lead magnet in a way that makes it simple and safe for visitors to take the next step.

Ideas for Better Lead Magnets to Generate More Leads

You will notice here on chrisg.com that I switched from just one opt-in incentive to multiple incentives, eventually creating member download area.

While you do not need to go so far as to get people to log in, combining the attraction of multiple magnets can help build your perceived value to them over time.

What you do not want to do, however, is be seen as vague or overwhelming. You still need to be highly relevant to what your visitors need help with.

Ebooks and training videos are the obvious place to start but don’t associate bulk with value, focus on helping the reader or student get a result.

Checklists work especially well when they solve a key pain point, as people love clear, actionable steps.

Swipe files are attractive in the marketing and writing niches, but if you take my “opt in to get the code” example you could think of that as a kind of swipe file for programmers.

Personality or insight quizzes are a great option. Just be careful to ensure you get the opt-in before giving the full results, and connect the content to your services, otherwise you will put all that effort in and still not get as many leads out the backend.

Templates work great for stationary, journaling, graphic design, etc.

Calculators and tools can help generate inbound links and get people to return over and over. The most popular tool in my member area is the YouTube transcript getter, people come back day after day for that one.

How to Get Qualified Leads: Bottom Line

To generate more qualified leads, start with your numbers and your audience needs. Focus on your most relevant and attractive pages, and optimize them to remove distractions and to improve conversion.

Small, incremental improvements can make a significant difference in your results!