How To Generate Quality Leads For Your Business Using WordPress

There are only three ways to grow your business:

Whether you manage a brick and mortar store selling food, run your own veterinary practice, or run an e-commerce store, to generate more revenue you’ll need take action on any or all of the above.

Increasing your price is the low-hanging fruit as it takes no effort, but it comes with two problems:

So that leaves you with #1 and #2.

In the next six minutes, I am going to show you a step-by-step guide on how to generate leads through WordPress that any business owner or in-house marketer can follow.

At the end of the six minutes you will learn:

Tools you need to get started

You only need two tools to get started; they take only a few minutes to set up and I have explained the entire setup process in my blog, How to Set Up Constant Contact and OptinMonster for WordPress.

Tool 1 – OptinMonster

The first tool you need is some sort of form that allows website visitors to give you their details (email address).

A lead by definition is as follows:

“In marketing, lead generation is the initiation of consumer interest or enquiry into products or services of a business. Leads can be created for purposes such as list building, e-newsletter list acquisition or for sales leads.” – Wikipedia

You should only ever ask for a lead’s name and email address at the most. You might be thinking:

“Bleh, isn’t their telephone number better?”

Sure, it can be if you’re selling high-ticket items, but you can’t automate your lead generation process by getting mobile numbers. Also, you can ask for their telephone number later through email when you have warmed the lead up a little more.

As a business owner, I know you don’t want to spend hours each day working on generating leads, and it’s why email is the best option.

And that’s where OptinMonster comes in.

It works right out the box with WordPress, requires no coding experience, and has a very easy-to-use interface to set up your forms.

OptinMonster will show your website visitors a form that allows them to enter their details, and they are saved to your list. It also works with dozens of email services that can then send your leads automated emails without you having to do anything (explained further in this article).

OptinMonster does not send your leads emails – it’s merely a tool to collect leads.

Tool 2 – Constant Contact

OptinMonster is shown at the front of your WordPress website; everyone can see it and its primary objective is to collect emails.

It’s best suited for small businesses, and it’s incredibly easy to set up.

These are the only two tools you need to generate dozens of leads per day.

To learn how to set up OptinMonster and Constant Contact on your WordPress website click here.

How to create the right content to generate leads

So, once you’ve optimized your website to be able to take in leads, now you need to create (or outsource) content to drive people to your website to gather their emails.

Content is any text, visual, or aural elements on a page. For example, this blog post I’m writing now is content in the form of text and images.

To generate quality leads, you need to give them a reason to visit your website and hand over their details. Nobody is handing over their email address because they enjoy receiving promotional emails.

What type of content should you create?

If you’re a veterinarian, you may want to create content on ways pet owners can shower their dogs to reduce the chances of getting lice.

If you’re a realtor, you could create a short video or eBook letting first-time homebuyers know what they should think about when buying a property.

If you manage a bricks and mortar food store, you could create a visual blog post showing your best selling items or a short video showing various recipes.

The goal of your content is simple: to provide the reader with value and to imprint an impression of trust and credibility with your business in their mind.

Here’s an example of HubSpot creating a quality free blog post on 6 Steps to Transform Your Agency Leaders Into Consistent Content Creators, and at the bottom they have an opt-in form letting you receive more content as it comes.

You must do the exact same with your business.

You only need 2-4 pieces of quality content.

Don’t fall into the trap of writing dozens of blog posts per month; you really don’t need to do that until your website starts to bring thousands of new visitors per day, or you’re trying to improve your website’s SEO.

Creating a lead magnet for your content

Sometimes, using an OptinMonster form may not be enough to secure your lead.

Consumers know they will receive dozens of emails if they give their email address, and as a result don’t give it up lightly.

This is why you need downloadable content (called a lead magnet) that is connected to your content as a backup. For example, the HubSpot blog post I linked to earlier also offers their visitors a free Social Media Strategy Kit.

Once you click on the image, they ask for your email address to send you the free guide download.

Here’s another one of their blog posts titled How to Create Facebook Lead Ads: A Beginner’s Guide, but this time they used a different lead magnet:

Consider a lead magnet to be an extension of your content.

For example, if you’re providing first-time homebuyers ways to get the best mortgage, offer a free mortgage calculator or spreadsheet that can help them better understand the true cost of buying a home by being able to download it.

Showing them a report on the best places to buy a time-share or luxury villa would be irrelevant to their needs, and they would have no reason to download it.

Here’s a blog post from Elements Property showing realtors how to take better photos. At the bottom, they offer them a FREE photography eBook guide to download.

Their content and lead magnet play off each other and will have a high conversion rate for gathering leads.

How to drive leads to your website

If you’re reading this guide, then I’m going to guess that your WordPress website doesn’t receive too many unique views per day.

I’m not going to bore you with ways to generate free traffic, such as commenting on forums, organic social media posting, or SEO, because that will take months and a lot of your time – time you probably don’t have.

Instead, I’m going to tell you what you may already know but aren’t doing.

Go to any of the biggest online traffic shops and buy yourself super-targeted website traffic. I love using:

• Facebook
• Google

On Facebook, you can use their detailed targeting options to segment your leads by age, gender, location, state, city, Zip code, and interests.

Once you play with the settings and hone down on your target market, you can get yourself a constant flow of targeted traffic each day.

Facebook is awesome because it allows you to enter information about your ideal lead and it will only show your adverts to that group.

Google, on the other hand, allows you to target keywords and places your website on the first page of the search for related key terms.

Google and Facebook are going to be the quickest and most effective ways for you to drive traffic to your content.

You can start advertising on both platforms from as little as $5 per day.

How to put your entire lead generation process on auto pilot

By now, you should have done the following things:

• Set your website up to collect leads
• Created valuable content to show your website traffic
• Used Google or Facebook to drive traffic to your content

The final part of your lead generation funnel is to write (or outsource) a series of emails that are sent to your leads as soon as they opt in to your list automatically.

Using Constant Contact, you’ll only need to write these emails once and it will automatically send them to each new lead over a period of time, which you can set.

Your email series may look something like this:

Email 1 (sent as soon as they sign up) – This the welcome email. If you’re offering a lead magnet, this is the email where they should receive it.

Email 2 (24 hours later) – This could be a link to other blog posts, additional tips, or customer testimonials. The objective in Email 2 is to build trust and credibility.

Email 3 (48 hours later) – This is the sales pitch. You could send them a voucher to redeem at your store (vouchers also work as great lead magnets), a link to buy your core product, or ask them for a telephone number if you’re selling high-ticket items (property or expensive SaaS).

These emails only need to be written once, and through Constant Contact they can be 100% automated, which I’ve shown in my guide here.

Here’s a real life example of what I’ve just explained from Agora Pulse.

First they serve me an advert to a blog post, not one of their products.

Their advert is being shown to me because they are trying to reach people who have an interest in social media marketing.

As I am all about that social media marketing, I click on their advert and they lead me to a blog post.

Right away on the right-hand side, you can see their sign-up form. As I was writing this sentence, they went uber aggressive and then showed me a pop-up form too.

I went ahead and signed up to their email list and within seconds of signing up they sent me a welcome email.

A few days later, I was sent another email.

And there you have it. Using OptinMonster, Constant Contact, content, and either Facebook or Google, you can put your entire lead generation on auto pilot just like Agora Pulse.

How to get new customers to keep spending money with your business

This is the easiest part.

When you convert a lead to a customer, all you need to do to keep them spending money is to send more emails.

For every $1 spent on email marketing in 2016, businesses generated $38 in sales revenue, with email marketing being voted the #1 channel for ROI.

Using Constant Contact, you can set up further email series’ that are sent to your customers to ensure they keep on spending with your business, all of which is done on auto pilot.

Four mistakes small business owners make with lead generation

Before you start implementing this guide for your small business, please don’t make any of these mistakes as it will cost you too much time or money.
Testing too much – Don’t ask yourself questions like this until you’re driving hundreds of visitors to your website each day:

• Would a scroll bar work better than a pop-up?
• Should I change the color of my opt-in form?
• Would a different image on my eBook generate more leads?

Don’t waste time testing various elements to increase conversions until you have enough traffic and a profitable lead generation funnel. I’ve seen business owners spend hours each day testing micro elements that may increase lead generation by 1-2%.

Focus on getting the basics to work before you decide to optimize anything.

Writing your own content if you’re not a writer – If you aren’t great at content writing, creating lead magnets, or running Facebook ads, outsource it to someone who is. There are thousands of freelancers on sites like Upwork and Freelancer that you can hire as needed to help you with everything I’ve mentioned.

Don’t spend 10 hours writing an eBook when you can outsource the task for $80, as I’m sure 10 hours of your day is worth more than $80.

Using cheap tools – All good email service providers usually have a small monthly charge to use their services. I’ve used most of the free email services under the sun… and they all suck.

Most of the free services have poor email delivery, lack of automation, and many won’t work with WordPress plugins such as OptinMonster.

I suggest either Constant Contact (best for small businesses) or Get Response (for enterprise level businesses); both work with OptinMonster.

Giving up too soon – The first time you create a lead magnet funnel, there’s a good chance you will fail and make a mistake at every step.

And that’s okay, everyone does.

Generating leads and growing your business isn’t a linear process. While the fundamental steps for all businesses is the same, you’ll come across mini road blocks when setting up ads or finding the correct messaging in emails.

You might find you have to tighten up your targeting or add an extra email into the sequence to increase conversions. That is all part of the game.

Is your WordPress lead generation on auto pilot?

Lead generation is hard when you don’t know where to start or how to generate leads.

Lead generation is easy when you know the tools to use and how to set up your funnel.

In this guide, I’ve described a simple yet effective lead generation funnel that is used by businesses of all sizes in a number of niches that you can apply to your business today.

To grow your business and generate leads through WordPress, you just need to execute each step or outsource it to someone who can.

Are you ready to start step #1? Check out my step-by-step guide on how to set up OptinMonster and Constant Contact in five minutes.