Build it and they will come – Your website can’t do it all on its own

Table of Contents

Do you remember the Kevin Costner film from the late 80’s called Field of Dreams?

After being told by ghosts in a corn field  “Build it and they will come” he

spends hundreds of hours and thousands on building a baseball field in his back garden.

Does this story sound familiar?… I’m not talking voices in a cornfield.

You’ve spent thousands of pounds on your new shiny website, hours and hours typing new content and testing to get it live.

You’re super proud of your new website. You tell all your friends and family. You blast it out to your Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook followers. You get a few positive notes of feedback and happily smugly sit back and feel your work is done.

After the first week or so you don’t really notice an increase in sales or people contacting you. But after a month, you do!

So why is your awesome new website not the lead generator of hundreds of new leads and sales?

Sadly, with websites – Your work has only just begun; the build it and they will come the way of thinking has never applied better when it comes to websites.

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You see, a good website is never really finished.

To be effective in building your marketing lists, generating leads and making sales you need to be constantly adding and sharing new content, new marketing pages and guides that your audience will engage with or that will attract new subscribers.

And then when you add this new content you need to be promoting this content with emails, SEO updates, Paid traffic, social sharing and even direct mail.

Sounds like a lot of work, doesn’t it… Sadly it is!

We spend at least 7 hours a week creating new content and supporting promotional materials to get this content out there. I’d love to spend triple that time but we just don’t have the spare time or resources.

So, what types of content should you be constantly creating?

Blog Content

We try and publish a new post at least once a week.

This serves a number of purposes:

  • Improves your visibility in search engines for our relevant keywords
  • Helps to build as an authority in your field
  • Gives you shareable content you can email to lists or share with your social profiles
  • Builds evergreen content that will continue to be found and shared – Bringing in more leads and more subscribers.
  • Helps build marketing lists – You need to make sure that you include something that people can download or subscribe to when they hit your blog.
  • Gives you a great platform to build an affiliate revenue stream.

As you can see in the screenshot above we – have a download on the side of each blog post that  we publish – This helps us to organically build our marketing lists.

Make sure all your blogs have something the user can subscribe to and we invest a small amount in sharing the post over Facebook and other content discovery platforms.

Don’t fancy writing a blog every week – You can hire great writers that will write the content for you, these can cost from £50 – £150 dependant on length and expertise.

We share our post over different social channels

You can also create Vlogs (Video blogs ) or your could create a podcast. I regularly listen to Chris Ducker and Patt Flynn. I’ve learnt so much from them and I am very much engaged with and have paid for their products because of the value I get from them.

Common thing you will see with company blogs – They are very proactive with adding content for the first month or two and then all of a sudden the content dries up –  This is because they’re not seeing the results and think what’s the point –  but they don’t use the blog as a tool to build an audience and they don’t invest the time and money to successfully share their content.

Getting it out there…

Email your marketing list to tell them about your new post linking back to your blog.

Using an automated social media tool like http://meetedgar.com/ you can schedule your post to go out on a regualr basis using a number of different headlines

Facebook ads – spend £25 – £50 to share your new post to a potential new audience – The main goal here is to build new email subscribers!

Publish your post on Linkedin.

If you’d like to know more about building an effective blog – check out our post on the 5 Steps to creating a blog that converts

Landing Pages To Build Your Marketing lists.

Are you offering up any free guides, checklists, free training courses through your website?

If not then you should be…  As I write this we have 4 separate free guides and I plan to continue to add and promote more.

This serves a number of purposes:

  • Helps build email your marketing lists

  • Gives your new subscriber great value and build you as the authority on that subject

  • A reason to email and promote your services

  • Gives you a marketing asset you can use to help set you apart when making sales.

Example of our free website download landing page…

Building your marketing list is one of the most important things you should do in your business. It gives you traffic you control.

I would always recommend having one main key download per service you offer.

This gives you multiple pages you can promote but also gives you more targeted leads.

For example if someone downloads a guide to Branding – They are interested in branding so we’ll share with them content on Branding and design – Not some generic email campaign that tries to cover everything you do.

Whats required…

If you’re using a CMS like WordPress or Concrete5 then you should be able to create a landing page. Or you can use a page building tool like Clickfunnels or Leadpages  – I prefer to keep all my landing pages inside my website for SEO and adwords quality score reasons

The ability to create new free guides… Any half decent publishing tool will do, We use Indesign to make em pretty but if you’re not a designer – Word will do the job. Add your logo and a call to action and hit save as PDF and your half way there.

Getting it online

A CRM for your email subscribers to go into.

Write what people are searching for not what you think they want

Paid Advertising – Use Google Adwords or Facebook ads to drive traffic to your new landing pages to sell

Common mistakes…

Most companies that do this – Write the guide

All the successful businesses do this, they

To attract traffic to your site you need to be driving traffic.

Sales Pages

Same principle as landing pages but the whole purpose of a sales page is to make sales (pretty obvious)

The main difference is that this page will be a lot longer to help inform the visitor what they will be buying  and will include links to a CRM tool that can process online payments.

Getting it out there

You also don’t drive blind traffic to these pages. You will only push people on your lists to these pages as they have a relationship and should be pretty engaged with you.

SEO updates

Just adding new relevant content to your site will help you to build your positioning in search engines.

Then make sure that any new content you put out is well optimised for our keywords as they can be. Meta tags, image tags,no follow on your links to. Most CMS systems now come with SEO tools that will help you to optimise your site better.

For more information on SEO – Check out our post on 9 Mistakes To Avoid with your onsite SEO

Getting it out there

You should also re-submit the site to Google Webmasters, so Google knows we have new content to index.

You should also share this new content on your social profiles to encourage shares and build organic backlinks to your new content.

Conclusion

Updating and adding to your website isn’t a nice thing to do – It’s a must.

Blogging has had one of the best impacts on our business from a marketing point of view. If you’re serious about building your marketing lists, you need to generate content that people want and will trade their details for.

If you’re not able to create these new landing pages or blog posts or run SEO updates yourself, then find someone who can help you do this. We do offer a web and Marketing support package to help time-strapped business owners out, and we’d be more than happy to help.

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