Biggest Website Development Mistake –> Don’t Make!

By Angela Wills

Saturday, September 10th, 2011

Your website is a marketing tool. You’re not building a website to win a writing or an art award (in most cases).

Your main goal with your website should always be to collect leads and make sales.

The biggest mistake people make is skip the ‘collect leads’ part. They think it’s enough to build a site that can accept sales or client inquires but they miss one of the most important parts of ANY sales funnel – lead collection.

Let’s back up and look at this in an example of how you might do business offline.

Imagine this…

You’re a website designer and you decide to go to a networking event for business owners.
You get chatting with some nice lady who runs her own beauty salon and says she needs a website.
You tell her you have a wonderful website design package that would be perfect.
She says she’s not ready yet.

Do YOU…

a) Say: “Awww, too bad” and walk away?
b) Ask her for her business card and tell her you’ll follow up with her in a few weeks?

Of course you’ll pick option a)! You’d be crazy not to follow up who is highly interested but just not ready yet.

See the correlation with how this works online?

You need to follow-up with those visitors who come to your site and say: “Not right now.” If you don’t then you will lose them forever, and that’s a crying shame.

To follow up you need to build an email list. This is a totally honest and ethical way to run a marketing campaign that can give you major returns on your investment.

Do you have an opt-in form on your website? If not, it’s high time you get it up there and start using it to build a large, responsive list.

I have a list. This email list a major part of my online business. If I had to estimate I would contribute about 50% of my income to my list, 10% to my website and 40% to my affiliates (some day I’ll actually do the calculation).

Point being, if you’re struggling, you need to seriously consider taking action right now and start collecting the leads that are slipping through your fingers right now.

Here are some resources for you: