When visitors land on your website, what do they see? 

Do you roll out the metaphorical red carpet for them with mouth-watering offers, clear calls to action, and irresistible copy… or do you confuse them with distractions, messy design, and poorly optimized landing pages? 

Even a stunning business website or blog hides tons of opportunities to increase conversions and deliver many more leads to your door — if you can identify and take advantage of them. 

So today, I’m going to take an X-Ray to your website or blog and drag all that low-hanging fruit into the light, so you can sink your teeth in it! 

…Wait, what?

Yes, I am mixing my metaphors — but only because I’m super excited to share today’s article with you!

Read on and you will learn:

  • The #1 website copywriting mistake that causes new visitors to run for the hills instead of signing up to your email list.
  • How business owners are cheating themselves out of high-quality leads (I see this one all the time, especially on local business websites).
  • The top 2 most-visited pages that you need to optimize for conversions — this alone can create massive growth in leads.
  • How to engineer an irresistible free offer for your website visitors in two simple steps, and watch those leads pour in.
  • The biggest missed opportunity that keeps your landing pages from converting (almost everyone makes this mistake).
  • A simple and devastatingly effective strategy you can use right after conversion to get more exposure for your brand, and even land some sales!

And more. Let’s start with the big one…

Pictured: a man rowing in a small boat on the open sea, trying to navigate hazards around him -- a shark prowling the waters, a whirlpool, and a jagged reef

Mistake #1. Too many distracting calls to action

A lot of business websites and blogs look like a marketer’s fever dream. There are lots of CTAs piling up on every page, each leading to a completely different offer — some free and some paid. It’s total chaos.

When you’re a website visitor just trying to find an answer to a problem, all this variety doesn’t excite or inspire… it confuses and repels.

By adding more calls to action to your site, you’re not making it more likely that someone will say yes and convert. You’re just stacking the odds that they’ll get overwhelmed and bounce!

The Solution: stick to one offer per page, with 3-5 CTAs total. E.g. if you have a blog post with a content upgrade, make sure that nothing distracts that visitor from said content upgrade.

The only exception is, pages specifically designed to showcase multiple things — like an ecommerce storefront or a “Work With Us” / “Services” page — can feature several offers. Just organize them clearly… and ditch any distractions that don’t belong.

Here’s a great example of a page with many calls to action done right. Unsurprisingly, it comes from our friends at HubSpot. And in a touch of genius, they even have a live chat script to address people who spend too long on the page, possibly overwhelmed by choices!

 

Mistake #2. NO clear and obvious call to action

Just as many websites and blogs suffer from the opposite problem: they don’t feature prominent, crystal-clear, impossible-to-miss CTAs anywhere.

(Local businesses in my beloved San Diego are especially guilty of this. E.g. check out this escape room website with gigantic banners on the homepage… none of which are clickable. Whaaa? Come on!)

As a result, 99% of visitors discovering them for the first time never convert into leads — and disappear faster than beer at a frat party, with no way of getting them back. (Unless you use remarketing, that is.)

The Solution: Each page on your website, or each post on your blog, has one job to do. It could be getting a lead’s email address, booking an appointment, selling a product, receiving a comment or a social share… you name it.

With this in mind, your goal is two-fold: 

  1. Define the #1 job for each web page or blog post you have — or at least the top 5 that are driving the most traffic.
  2. Inject those pages / articles with the CTA that best supports that strategic goal, a.k.a. “job.” And here’s a guide on how to make those CTAs pop!

 

Mistake #3. Wasting your most-visited pages

For most websites and blogs, their two highest-traffic pages are:

  1. The homepage, for obvious reasons — it’s the face of the brand! And…
  2. The About page, for visitors curious to know more about the business.

Sadly, the vast majority of businesses don’t optimize those pages for conversions, and therefore fail to take maximum advantage of all that traffic.

For example, an average company’s homepage doesn’t emphasize, or sometimes even include, the unique value proposition. That leaves any new visitors with zero clue about what makes that particular brand different and worth their attention.

And don’t even get me started on the typical About page! Those just drone on and on about the company: its founders, its history, its mission, the office pet’s favorite foods… 

…everything except how the business can solve the visitors’ problem.

(You know, the first and only thing they care about!)

The Solution: for your homepage, make it all about your USP, and the transformative value you can create for customers.

Keep it laser-focused on that, and guide visitors to either learn more by clicking through to somewhere else (e.g. to your blog) — or convert by subscribing to your email list / booking an appointment / signing up for a free trial / ordering a product etc.

And for your About page… do the same thing. That’s right, I pulled a switcheroo on ya! Seriously, though — make your About page as firmly customer-obsessed as your homepage, and emphasize conversions.

It’s counterintuitive, for sure — but it is effective.

 

Mistake #4. No mouth-watering lead magnet

It’s long overdue to admit: “Subscribe to our newsletter” just doesn’t work anymore as a lead-generating offer. Heck, has it ever worked? For any business?

Ditto for “Contact Us” or something equally generic. Contact you why, exactly? What’s in it for your audience?

Here’s where I’m going with this…

99% of your potential customers won’t give you their contact information without receiving something compelling in exchange. Think: an immediate solution to their burning pain point… in the form of a valuable, easy-to-implement, and free resource.

If you don’t have at least one to offer, let’s discuss how to create it…

The Solution: crafting an irresistible lead magnet is a simple two-step process.

Step One: obsessively research your customers’ hot, burning pain points. Scour your email inbox / support system for the most common challenges; study what your audience searches, consumes, and talks about online; do 3-5 customer development interviews.

Find the nastiest, gnarliest pain point you could solve… and then do Step Two:

Create the shortest, most practical resource you can to fix said pain point! Checklists and PDFs work great, email courses are excellent, and videos + worksheets are also fantastic. Use whichever format will be the easiest and fastest to implement — you can always upgrade to a fancier version later.

For now, just get it done and get it in front of your leads, pronto!

 

Mistake #5. Not using targeted landing pages

If you have a single catch-all landing page for all types of incoming visitors, you are missing out.

Don’t get me wrong — it’s light years better than having no landing page at all! But it still leaves a ton of potential conversions on the table. Here’s why…

Even if you sell to a fairly uniform, tightly defined group of customers, they are not all the same.

E.g., those customers could be:

  • At different stages of awareness (skeptical, unaware of you at all, eager to buy etc.)… and therefore resonating with different messaging.
  • Coming in from different sources: websites / social media / SERP / direct referrals etc. — all with their own contexts and expectations.
  • Struggling with unique, distinctive problems, and looking for different solutions.

For these reasons alone, a single all-purpose landing page just won’t convert optimally… so what should you do?

The Solution: beef up your landing page arsenal!

You want to create and deploy targeted LPs for different subsets of customers. That way, you can fine-tune the messaging and the offer being presented until they resonate perfectly with the right people.

For example, you could:

  1. Create source-specific landing pages that “call out” visitors coming in from a specific website, blog, social media etc. You could even create exclusive lead magnets for them!
  2. Direct referrals / red-hot leads to a more high-touch offer, like scheduling a call with your sales team — but drop cold leads into your email nurture sequence.

 

Mistake #6. Not maximizing post-conversion goodwill

The moment just after conversion is magical.

Your website visitors just took a leap of faith and converted into leads. They said “yes” to you, before they even got to know you. And after that initial yes, they are actually more likely to convert again if you were to ask them for something else.

But that’s not how most business owners choose to play it!

They rush right past that opportunity and into nurturing or priming their new leads for the inevitable sales pitch. You’re not going to make that mistake, though.

Here, let me show you how to build on post-conversion goodwill and inspire even more meaningful action from your new leads…

The Solution: according to psychology, when people say yes to something, they become more likely to say yes again to another, similar request. This is known as the “foot in the door” effect.

And it’s the same effect you’re going to leverage with your freshly converted leads! Here are just a few ideas for you:

  • Put social sharing buttons on your thank-you page and ask new leads to spread the word about your newsletter / lead magnet / email course etc.
  • In your welcome email, ask your new lead to forward it to one other person they know who might dig your content.
  • Instead of a conventional thank-you page, create a special landing page that will upsell your new leads on a low-ticket offer — say, $49 or under.

 

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And more. 

Interested? Then click here to get a risk-free quote and tell us about your dream explainer video — and one of our marketing experts will get back to you post-haste!

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