Telemarketing Software Featured Article

Just about any 21st century business needs a website, even if it does not sell anything directly online like Amazon, or relies heavily on walk-in business like an appliance repair shop. Customers are more likely to research products and services on the Internet than they were before.

It’s not enough to attract lots of traffic to a website, however. All the traffic in the world won’t matter if your bounce rate is close to 100 percent. Just as television networks want channel surfers to stop and watch their shows, business owners need Web surfers to spend time on their sites. This means making websites that generate leads instead of bounces.

Many sources on the Web discuss the issue of websites as lead generators and if there is one point they all agree on it’s this: websites must have good content or prospects won’t stay. According to Business 2 Community contributor Monique Torres, content that answers prospects’ questions greatly increases the chances of converting some of these prospects into customers. This can be in the form of case studies, blogs or white papers as long as it’s what people are looking for.

Another common tip is to make the website easier to find. Content may be king, but it won’t have much of a kingdom if no one knows about it. Sites should be SEO friendly to improve their positioning within search engine results. Leveraging the many webmaster tools Google (News - Alert) offers and determining what visitors search for while on your site will help improve SEO performance.

Assuming that a website has content that interests visitors and is easy for them to find, the next step is to include one or more calls to action. Without this step, you have visitors who like your site, but have not made a connection with them.

A call to action could be something as simple as a contact page or a freebie like a downloadable report or white paper. As long as it captures the visitor’s contact information so that future follow-up is possible, the call to action is effective and the site has succeeded in generating a lead.

When the Internet became popular in the mid-1990s, many company websites were little more than static Web pages. Everyone was excited about having a website, but few of them influenced the bottom line.

That’s a luxury that most businesses can no longer afford, but fortunately it’s easily corrected. By making a website with compelling content that is easy to find and captures visitor information, business websites can go from something that takes up space to a lead generating asset.