Turn Your Website Into A Lead
Generation Machine

The purpose of a website is not what you may think. Most websites are useless because they do not fulfil the main purpose of having one. That purpose is Lead Generation.

What is the role of a website?

The purpose of your website is not branding. It's lead generation. A good website is not a website that 'looks' good. It's a website that generates leads and customers. I have noticed that founders care about their websites' appearance, which is fine. But your potential customers care about solving their problems.

A pretty website that does not offer solutions to problems will not generate leads.

Is branding important for local businesses?

Over the long term, your business branding matters. But people often confuse 'branding' with the 'look' of their website, business card or brochures.

A website is not a brand. It's only a small part of your brand.

Your real brand consists of the experience people have with your services, reviews on Google and Facebook, how they feel when they walk into your location. Branding is everything BUT your website. Your website is supposed to generate new customers. And your branding is what you do with those leads and customers afterwards.

Does advertising work for local businesses?

Yes, and no.

With the rising cost of advertising, you need to make all of your advertising spend count. Advertising for a website that is not built for lead generation is a waste of money.

For example, if you spend $10,000 on radio ads, or $3,000 on Facebook ads and 98% of people that click on them leave your site immediately, this is expensive marketing.

But if you can decrease the number of people that leave immediately from 98% to 80%, then advertising works.

Advertising is 50% traffic and 50% where the traffic goes. They both matter.

Is email marketing worth it?

Successful local businesses use email.

In our experience, email marketing has been the most profitable marketing channel we have seen. But it's also more complicated. Because it is more complicated, business owners leave it alone and leave money on the table as a result.

Why is it more complicated? Because you need to build an email list (through your website) before you can do email marketing.

If there is one thing you take from this page, it should be this: please start building an email list from people who walk in and your website today. Over time, you will create a free traffic source.

What is a 'free traffic source'?

It means that instead of paying $10,000 for radio ads or $3,000 for Facebook ads this month, you can spend $0 to generate new sales. Sending emails is free after you build the list. Building an email list from your website accomplishes this.

Should I use WordPress?

Ultimately the answer is it doesn't matter

Your customers do not care if you use WordPress. Your customers will never see behind the scenes.

But WordPress is a large (often slow) software written in PHP (the programming language). For that reason, we do not like it. You cannot generate many leads from slow, clunky websites.

At The Backend Engineer we also used PHP to create a lightning-fast marketing-website framework. But again, you shouldn't care about that either. You should care how we use that to generate new customers for you.