Having a website was a good first step (in 1997).  By the mid 2000’s your web site actually had to have interesting information on it and look more attractive than your competitors’.  You may even rank well in the search engines for keywords you have chosen as important ones for your business.  If you’re at that point, congratulations!  But wouldn’t it be nice if your website was actually generating business for your company on a regular basis?  Well it can.  You just need to call it to action!

This is not as difficult as it sounds, but it will take some effort and regular attention to what is happening with your web site, your clients and in the world of social media. At ForeSite we have been following the methods below for our own business and saw a 10x increase in lead generation in the first month.

To begin you need to create some compelling offers for your site visitors.  Unfortunately an information request form is NOT a compelling offer.  There must be a reason for the visitor to take their time to fill out a simple form to get what is behind it so you have their information.  We have found that numbered lists work very well such as “10 Tips for Developing an Effective Website“.  For more tips on compelling calls to action, download 6 Best Practices for an Effective Call to Action.

Once you have a call to action for people to download, you need to create a landing page for them to download it from.  This page should have some information about what they are getting for their time as well as a SIMPLE form for them to fill out.  Collect only the information you need to get in touch with them.  Long forms are far more often abandoned than simple ones.

Now that you have a place to send people, you need to send them there.  You must PROMOTE your new content to get people to download it.  This is best done using the powers of social media and taking advantage of the connections you have and the connections those people have.

Lastly, get ready to collect your leads and work your sales magic to convert them into new business.  We’d love to hear how this works for other people using these methods as they have been working very well for ForeSite.  Ready, Set, Sell!

I was opening my email one morning and noticed that the “out of office” message from an IT Manager of a local small business that said he was out of the office for the next two months. This was a company I had called on 8 months earlier and the company’s president had referred me to the IT Manager as their technology resource, so I looked up the company president’s name and gave him a call.

The President took my call. He explained that the IT Manager had been in an auto accident, and would be out for at least two months, and maybe longer. They didn’t have anyone else internally that knew the network, and he was concerned, but wasn’t sure what to do. He couldn’t replace an employee who would be coming back at some point, but what would he do if an issue came up in the meantime?

I suggested a Network Health Review to allow us to get an overview of his setup and any initial concerns without any cost or obligation. We both agreed that this would be a good starting point. I set up a review for the following day, and two days later, sat down with the management team to go over the findings. Overall, things were in decent shape. We identified some potential issues that we could easily fix, including:

• Incomplete backups which included data, but not the system state (registry and other system information that needs to be restored in the event of a hardware loss)
• Battery backup software was not configured to shut down the server gracefully in the event of a prolonged power outage.
• Lack of system documentation – No network diagram, no inventory of hardware/software, no master password list, etc.

We also came up with some other questions that no one in the room knew the answer to. This discussion led to us assigning a systems engineer to the company on a weekly basis for the duration of the IT Manager’s sick leave. We addressed the issues we had uncovered in the review, we found the answers to the questions about how the network was configured, and what the contact and account number information was for their key vendors. We set up Help Desk coverage for his staff so they had a resource to resolve issues on the days when we were not on site. This was critical to maintaining their productivity since they were accustomed to having someone else to ask for help and were not IT savvy.

About 3 months later, the IT Manager was ready to come back part time. He was able to quickly come up-to-speed on the changes we had made from our documentation. The management team was so pleased with the information that we provided to them, the level of support, and our ability to work well with their IT Manager that they decided to keep us on board with a scaled back schedule. Now they know that they have a backup resource when needed who is familiar with them and their setup.

8 months earlier when I contacted the President of the company, he was all set, he had someone handling his network. You never know when things could change, but you can be prepared by knowing where you stand BEFORE it happens.