The Online Sunshine Plan

Getting leads (also known as new customers, potential clients) is not all that hard when you know the rest of the Online Sunshine Plan.

I’m writing this to take care of an omission. It’s really not hard to take any small business online – even if you have a brick-and-mortar service company, like a general contractor or a plumbing shop. You aren’t interested  in fixing someone’s faucet in Anchorage, when you work in Southern California. So you use your site to generate local leads.

There are really just 7 steps to setting up a Lead Generation site:

1. Get real webhosting and a domain name – which is your company name, usually.
2. Set up a blog there. Pick a nice, professional template.
3. Do your keyword research so you know what keywords to use so people will find you.
4. Set out static pages for the key services you provide. Not posts, pages.
5. Make sure you put local names of towns and cities on your pages and posts – this helps the search engines help people find you by city that you’re in.
6. Put a contact link on each page and post as well as in your template sidebar – this is how you generate the leads
7. Now start blogging on a regular basis about your daily activities and how much you love helping people with their lives and giving tips others can use.

Now, in addition to this, promote your blog by posting great content to other social media sites – like podcasts, videos, ebooks, powerpoints, articles – all with your blog linked and using the keywords you’ve figured out above.

It’s not much different than building an affiliate site or a bookstore for digital downloads – you just are working to get the person to contact you for more information, a free estimate, or a no-charge consultation about whatever you provide the solution for.

The point on keywords and locations can’t be underestimated. You don’t have to come up #1 for “finish carpentry” or “interior contractor” as long as you come up tops for “finish carpentry Orange County” or “interior contractor Riverside”.  You see the the long tail search terms?

Posting all these other content pieces out there simply gives other people additional ways to find your site – some people look for videos on how to do finish carpentry, others look for articles. The point is to always give great data people can use – for free. And then they’ll trust you enough for you to talk with them about their own project.

That’s all there is to making a Lead Generation website.

- – - -

Now, let me give you a secret. Most of these guys don’t actually know how to blog or provide any content. This is how you can easily take over the rankings. Just keep your SEO in and routinely (once a week or so) post new content that is helpful.

The other point is to put your web site on your business cards, in your signature, and direct people to it for ideas on how they can best handle the problem they are talking to you about.

And you’ll get more leads than you could shake a stick at. Or something like that, anyway…

Cheers!

Thanks for visiting my blog and reading this entry.
If you’ve found it valuable, please consider donating via PayPal to enable my continuing research.

Or – buy a copy of “Online Sunshine Plan” from my bookstore.

Some additional posts of interest:

• What the Online Sunshine Plan consists of – and why you should care…
• There’s buyers, marketing, social media – and then there’s the real world…
• How to Roll Your Own Blog – Part 1
• How to Roll Your Own Blog – Part 2
• How to Roll Your Own Blog – Part 3
• How to Roll Your Own Blog – Part 4
• How to Roll Your Own Blog – Part 5