5 Awesome Ways To Convert Website Traffic Into Leads

Last updated on July 16th, 2024 at 12:31 am

You have a website.

You are getting traffic.

But how can you convert that traffic into leads?

Today we are going to discuss five ways to do that.

Set Up a Value Ladder Sales Funnel First!

The purpose of lead generation isn’t collecting random email addresses for its own sake.

It’s getting the email addresses of your dream customers so that you could then convert them into paying customers and then into repeat customers. 

So, ultimately, lead generation is about making sales.

That’s why it’s so important to always view lead generation in the context of your entire sales funnel. 

You need to put a system in place for converting website traffic into leads, leads into paying customers, and customers into repeat customers. 

Our co-founder, Russell Brunson, has developed such a system – it’s called the Value Ladder sales funnel. That’s what he used to grow ClickFunnels to $100M+ in annual revenue!

This sales funnel has four stages:

• Bait – You offer the potential customer your lead magnet in exchange for their email address. 
• Frontend – You offer the potential customer your least expensive and least valuable product or service. 
• Middle – You offer the customer a more expensive and valuable product or service. 
• Backend – You offer the customer your most expensive and most valuable product or service. 

Ideally, you also offer a continuity program of some sort, meaning, a subscription product that generates recurring revenue. 

We also recommend adding downsells, upsells, and cross sells to these core offers in order to maximize your revenue. 

The reason why this sales funnel works so well is that it allows you to:

1. Start the relationship with that person by offering free value
2. Nurture that relationship by continuing to provide free value via email
3. Build trust by providing progressively more paid value at each stage

Here’s how Russell explains it:

We recommend building a Value Ladder sales funnel first so that you could then put lead generation into its proper context. 

Keep in mind that all you need to start with is a lead magnet + a frontend offer. You can always build out the rest of the funnel later!

Okay, now that we got all that out of the way, let’s talk about how you can convert website traffic into leads:

#1: Create a Super Valuable Lead Magnet

One of the most common lead generation mistakes that we see is blah lead magnets.

These might have worked back in the 2000s, but they don’t work anymore. The novelty of getting something for free in exchange for your email address has worn off. Everyone is used to free offers now. 

Moreover, people are also overwhelmed by the number of emails that they get, so not only they are not interested in yet another junk eBook, but they are also concerned about getting spammed with endless sales pitches should they download it.

Finally, people are getting bombarded with free offers all the time, so “lead magnet blindness” is becoming increasingly prevalent. 

Here’s what all that means for you:

Your dream customers are not going to give you their email addresses unless you offer them something SUPER VALUABLE in exchange.

That’s why the secret to designing an effective lead magnet is creating something that they desperately want and then giving it to them for free. 

What’s important is that:

1. Your lead magnet offers an effective solution to a problem that your dream customers are struggling with.
2. That problem is the same one or related to the one that your frontend product addresses.

Ideally, you want your lead magnet to be so good that people would happily pay money for it should you ever choose to charge. 

This might seem like a lot of work for a free offer, but you need to remember that your lead magnet is the foundation of your entire Value Ladder – you must get it right if you want your sales funnel to work. 

Keep in mind that your dream customers are going to use your free offer to evaluate the quality of your paid offers:

• Impress them with your lead magnet and they will be open to checking out your paid offers. 
• Disappoint them and you won’t get a second chance. Why would they give you their hard-earned money when your free offer is low-quality?

So don’t cut corners when it comes to your lead magnet because a bad lead magnet can cripple your online business!

Also, while everyone starts out with just one lead magnet, we advise creating more of them over time. 

That’s because different lead magnets appeal to different people, so having a whole bunch of them can help you convert more potential customers into leads. 

Say, here are some of our lead magnets:

• “DotCom Secrets” (book)
• “Traffic Secrets” (book)
• “Expert Secrets” (book)
• “Copywriting Secrets” (book)
• “The Funnel Hacker’s Cookbook” (book)
• “Death of a Website” (web class)
• “Funnel Scripts” (web class)
• “Secret Funnel Strategy” (web class)
• “Funnel Builder Secrets” (web class)
• “5 Day Lead Challenge” (online course)

As you can see, they all fall within the “make money online” umbrella, but vary in terms of both topics and formats.

This means that we have something for everyone who is interested in building an online business!

#2: Promote Your Lead Magnet on Your Homepage

Okay, so now you have a super valuable lead magnet, but how can you use it to convert website traffic into leads?

One of the most straightforward ways to do that is to promote it on your homepage so that it would be impossible to miss.

You can combine elements of a traditional landing page and a traditional homepage by displaying both an opt-in form with a call to action and a navigation bar on your homepage. 

Say, popular personal development blogger Scott H. Young offers a free eBook called “7 Must Know Strategies to Learn Anything Faster” on his homepage.

This works well in the context of his sales funnel because his paid products include his best-selling book “Ultralearning” and a 6-week program “Rapid Learner”.

So this free eBook allows Scott’s dream customers to sample his approach to accelerated learning and then if they get value from it they can check out related paid products.

#3: Promote Your Newsletter at the Bottom of Each Article

We recommend starting a regular newsletter where you send the latest blog articles to your email subscribers.

The newsletter schedule will depend on your publishing frequency – if you publish more often, then a weekly newsletter might work well, meanwhile, if you publish less often, then a monthly newsletter might make more sense. 

Once you set up the newsletter, you should promote it at the bottom of each blog article with an opt-in form.

After all, if someone has made it all the way to the end of an article, then it’s reasonable to assume that they have enjoyed reading it and might be interested in more similar content. It’s a perfect opportunity to pitch your newsletter!

For example, Chris Guillebeau features this opt-in form at the bottom of The Art of Non-Conformity blog articles:

By the way, if you publish new articles sporadically, you can still use this approach, but in that case, you might want to send your subscribers the blog posts themselves as opposed to a newsletter with links to them.

#4: Create Content Upgrades for Your Most Popular Articles

A content upgrade is a lead magnet that is designed to serve as an upgrade on a specific piece of content. 

Content upgrades convert much better than generic lead magnets because they are more relevant to the readers. 

However, producing them requires a significant investment of resources, so it may be impractical to make one for every article. 

What we suggest is identifying your most popular articles and then creating super valuable content upgrades for them.

That should help you convert more traffic into leads. 

For example, when the Sumo team noticed that their “7 Must-Have Instagram Marketing Tools For Rapid Growth” blog post started gaining traction, they created a content upgrade for it – an Instagram marketing swipe file.

You can learn more about Sumo’s approach to content upgrades by watching their video “#1 Way To Build An Email List FAST (Free Step-By-Step Method)” in which Chris von Wilpert explains it:

#5: Promote Your Lead Magnet With an Exit-intent Popup

Everyone hates pop-ups but there’s no denying that they work.

That being said, welcome pop-ups can be risky, as you may alienate your dream customers that way. 

The same can be said about timed pop-ups that appear after the visitor has spent a set amount of time on your website and event-triggered pop-ups that appear after the visitor has done something to trigger them (e.g. scrolled past 50% of a blog article).

However, exit-intent pop-ups are more or less a safe bet because they are shown to the visitor as they are about to leave your website. 

At that point, you have nothing to lose, so why not make one last attempt at converting that visitor into a lead?

For example, entrepreneur, podcast host, and best-selling author Tim Ferriss uses this exit-intent pop-up on his website:

Bonus: Ditch Your Website Altogether! 🔥🔥🔥

Okay, so now that we have discussed the five main ways to convert your website traffic into leads, it’s time for our most controversial hot take:

Websites are dead. Sales funnels are the future. 

Think about what happens when a potential customer lands on your homepage. 

They see a navigation bar with a bunch of links and start clicking around. They check out this page. They check out that page. Maybe they read a few blog articles.

And then they leave. Possibly to never come back again.

How does any of this help you grow your business?

It doesn’t!

Meanwhile, by definition, a sales funnel is designed to guide the potential customer toward the sale, one step at a time.

You present them with your lead magnet, then with your frontend offer, then with your middle offer, and finally with your backend offer.

There’s no confusion because at any given moment they are presented with a single “Yes or No” decision. 

So it shouldn’t be surprising that sales funnels tend to perform much better than websites in terms of generating sales.

In fact, according to our data, on average, sales funnels generate 6x more sales than websites.

So in all likelihood, not only is having a website not ideal, but it’s probably actually costing you a lot of money in terms of lost potential revenue.

Of course, we know that ditching your website just like that might seem a bit drastic, which is why we suggest conducting an experiment:

1. Split your traffic in half. Send 50% of it to your website and 50% of it to your lead magnet landing page
2. See which one generates more sales
3. Keep the winner

We already know what the results are going to be!😉

Want Russell to Show You How to Build Your First Sales Funnel?

Let’s keep it real:

Building a sales funnel from scratch can seem like a daunting task.

That’s why we created our 5 Day Challenge where Russell walks you through it step-by-step.

You will learn how to:

• Generate unlimited leads
• Create your first lead magnet
• Build your first sales funnel
• Create a simple 6-email follow-up sequence
• And launch your funnel

…in just five days!

So don’t hesitate.

Join our 5 Day Challenge today. It’s completely free!