Instantly engage your visitor's attention

The first and most important step in online lead generation, is to engage the attention of visitors to your site. How you go about this depends on how the visitor arrived at your site in the first place.

Visitors responding to an ad, ought to arrive at a dedicated landing page that picks up where the ad left off. Do this right, and your visitor is automatically engaged.

Visitors arriving at your homepage from an unknown source are more of a challenge. How do you engage the interest of a person when you have no idea why they're at your site? Here are 2 suggestions...

Ask the visitor what s/he is looking for
Assume a specific interest and write directly to it

Ask him/her what they're looking for

It's so simple, isn't it? Why not ask the visitor what s/he is looking for? Simply provide a list of items, and a 'Show me' button. The visitor clicks on the item that interests him/her, clicks the button, and you take them directly to the content s/he is looking for.

You could do this via the site's navigation, but that introduces extra hurdles for the visitor. I tend to think of each additional step as a road block in the way of generating a lead.

Write to a specific interest

This approach works when a business has several highly focussed sites, or is prepared to devote their only site to a particular target market.

Writing copy that tries to speak to everyone results in weak copy that lacks power. Most business owners find this concept counter-intuitive, which is why most business copy (on and offline) lacks lead generating power.

Dedicating a site to a specific target market makes it possible to talk directly to that market. You can describe specific problems you know your chosen audience has, and explain how your business solves them.

Even an inexperienced copy writer will create powerful copy (in the minds of the target audience) when it's sufficiently focussed on one or more specific problems, and its/their solution.