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Wouldn’t it be great if people just came to your website and bought from you just like that. Unfortunately this is a general assumption most small business owners make when they put up their site. “If you build it they will come – and buy..”

In reality it’s more like “If you build it – then drive traffic to it they might come and look around for a few seconds, maybe decide to stay around or go back to the search engine results and go somewhere else”

It’s tough out there folks and it ain’t getting any easier as more businesses become savvy on how to market effectively on the web.

The Key Concept to turning Visitors into Customers

The key concept that needs to be grasped here is the difference between the online prospect and the offline prospect. To illustrate this let’s make a quick comparison between an online surfer and someone who has just walked into your shop or place of business:

Online Prospect	Offline Prospect
varying levels of commitment to even buy your product/service at all Is surfing around with an almost infinite amount of choice just a click away You have no chance to inetract with them and educate them on making the best choice for their needs.	Has committed to leave the house to go out  to buy your product (from somewhere) Has entered your premises which could be one of many but nothing compared to the choice online You can open a dialogue with them, find out their needs/goals/desires, educate them on your products/services and hopefully make a sale

Now when you think how hard it can be to make the sale in person to someone who has committed the time and effort to seek you out offline – imagine what you need to do to get the first time website visitor on board.

The End-to-End process

Looking at our first time website visitor who has just clicked through to your website – put yourself in their shoes (or slippers) for a moment and ask yourself the following questions:

• What is the ultimate goal they are trying to achieve which has brought them to your site?
• Why should they keep reading and looking around when they arrive?
• What can you do for them right now (preferably for no cost or obligation) that can help them a step further in achieveing their goal or solving their problem?
• Why should they take up your fabulous offer?

Online it’s all about relationship building and providing value up front. You do this in the form of high quality content followed by lead generation. The idea is to get them to the stage they would be at if they had just physically walked into your business premises. Call it going from wearing slippers to wearing shoes.

The steps to doing this are:

1. You research the end result your target customers are trying to achieve. You need to think in terms of benefits and not features
2. You create something of value be it a download/ebook/piece of software/telephone consultation that helps them toward achieving their goal/solving their problem.
3. This high value freebie also educates them on how your products and services can help them toward that goal.
4. You make sure that the pages they arrive at educate them on how your freebie can help them achieve their goal
5. Your site ‘sells’ the freebie which only costs them their contact details and permission for you to follow up with them.
6. You focus all your online efforts on ths one goal of lead generation, all your site content, all your off site promotions are geared to funneling people to this fabulous offer

When they have converted you now have them at the stage they’d be at as though they’d walked into your business premises.

Now you can start selling to them

To find out more about using this technique to convert cold prospect website visitors into warm leads I’ve condensed it as much as I could into a short complimentary ebook which you can find out more about here.