If you are a small business and have a website, you should really have 1 of 2 goals for your website:

1. Generate Leads
2. Sell Your Product

If your website isn’t doing one of those 2 things, it’s not an effective web site.  I’m not saying that you should get rid of the website because then you would be taking one more step back, but you need to make some changes and reexamine what you’re trying to do with the site.

If you Generate Leads on Your Web Site

This is focused on those web sites that are used to generate new prospects.  Businesses make a lot of mistakes that cost them new prospects, and potentially new business.  Here are some of the features that you want if you want to generate more new leads:

1. Make the Form readily available.  Too often, people have to hunt through the website for a form that they can fill out to reach you.  It’s very rare that a home page shouldn’t have some sort of contact form.  Most people leave once they get to the home page so you want to try to get their information instead of forcing them to look through the web site.
2. Don’t ask for too much information.  Too often, businesses are trying to qualify out prospects based on the web form.  While you will be able to do that, often you will filter out potential clients as well.  No one wants to fill out a huge form.  They just want to put in their name and a brief description so that you can e-mail or call them, and then you can get the info that you need.
3. Offer incentives to contact you.  This is a little bit like bribing but you want to pique their interest.  If you offer some sort of special that is only valid if they contact you before the end of the week, they will be more likely to contact you.  As long as you have their contact information, you have a chance to sell them.

Every industry and every web site is different.  Just make sure you are testing out different variations to increase the effectiveness of your web site.  Remember - the goal of the web site is to generate new leads and you should be making changes to your online forms to constantly increase the percentage of visitors that convert into new leads.

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