Home Office Pro Blog

I recently had the benefit of listening to an excerpt from Jay Conrad Levinson’s Guerrilla Marketing(1) techniques. If you have never read or listened to his materials, you are missing out on some surprisingly simple buy extraordinarily powerful advice. One of the great “guerrilla marketing weapons” is mentioned was treating your website like your window display. This was a great concept, and so I decided to elaborate on it and share my own thoughts.

Your Website is Your Window Display

So, you need to make sure that you have a website that is easy to find by prospective customers (search engine optimization), gives them a reason to step inside (your website content and message) and fills them with the desire to close the deal (fill out your capture form). You also need to give them a reason to “come again!”, and that would be the all important follow up.

There are many great websites on the internet today that struggle to connect with prospects or end up lost and unvisited. If you look closely at these websites, they will be missing one or more of the important window display elements. Websites are not all that different from stores on the street that you walk by on a daily basis. They have the same needs and have to meet the same goals to remain competitive with all the other stores out their. You need to approach your website in the same way you would approach a brick and mortar business.

You need too…

Let people know you have a website and make it easy to find! Stores advertise and have maps. Websites can advertise and they can make sure that their website is Search Engine Optimized so people on the internet have an easier time finding it.

Make your website inviting, fresh and clear. Stores use window displays to capture the attention of passers-by. They highlight their most popular items, inform people of special limited time offers, and give a clear idea of the goods and services that store offers. The front page of your website should do the exact same things.

Stores offer incentives to close the deal, be it a special price on an item, a free gift with purchase or excellent customer service. As an online marketer, you need to give incentives for the prospect to fill out your capture form. The easiest way to do this is to offer a free gift, such as an e-book, or let them now it is a limited time offer. Another way is to have your website’s message connect with the prospect on a personal level to get them to fill out the form for their own benefit. The best websites are able to accomplish both.

Finally, you absolutely must follow up with a person after they fill out your form, and you should do so within 24 hours. Stores do this through curtousy calling, coupons attached to their store receipts and mailing flyers. You can do this easily through building a drip email list that starts by thanking the person for visiting your website and continues to give valuable information to the prospect over time.

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1. For more on Jay Conrad Levinson’s books and audios, please visit his website