10 Ways to Generate Leads, Inquiries, and Sales From Your Site

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You’ve launched a website for your brand or business. Now what? Setting it up isn’t enough — you need to actively find new clients and customers. Here are 10 ways to help you generate inquiries, leads, and requests for service on your site.

1. Make it easy for potential customers to contact you

To add a contact form, click on + Add in your page editor, then select Contact Form in the dropdown menu. Once the page is created, don’t forgot to make it visible in your main menu.

Create a Contact page on your site titled Contact Us, Work with Me, Order Now, Inquire, Sign Up, or something similar. Add a contact form on the page, which is one way for people to get in touch without you having to display your email address. The contact form has four default fields (Name, Email, Website, and Comment), but you can customize them depending on what information you need from a prospective customer.

The Contact page for Hawk Hill Micro Bakery, a small bakery for breads and cakes.

2. Promote your physical storefront with offline contact information

In addition to or instead of a contact form, display business details like your phone number, physical address, and directions to your brick and mortar storefront, if you have one. This contact information demonstrates your business is legitimate and provides alternate methods to get in touch.

Add the Contact Info and Map Widget by going to My Site(s) → Customize → Widgets, then select the area where you want the widget to appear. Click Add a Widget, then search for Contact Info & Map.

Add the Contact Info and Map Widget in your sidebar to display your location, hours, contact information, and a map. Alternatively, you can embed a Google Map alongside basic contact information on your Contact page.

The Contact Us page of EkoBuilt, an eco-conscious construction company.

3. Optimize your site for search engines and social media with SEO tools

WordPress.com Business plan subscribers: explore SEO tools in My Site(s) → Settings → Traffic.

WordPress.com sites have great SEO out of the box. Of course, there’s always more to learn. If you’re a WordPress.com Business plan subscriber, you can optimize your site for search engines and social media with SEO tools. Additionally, the WordPress.com SEO guide for Business plan subscribers can help set your site up for SEO success, Google Analytics tracking, and more.

4. Connect your site to your Facebook page to continue conversations

You may have readers who are interested in what you sell or offer but won’t contact you via your site — they might be more comfortable interacting on Facebook, where they already spend much of their time online.

You can activate the Social Icons Widget and Facebook Page Plugin at My Site(s) → Customize → Widgets.

Give these people the option to engage with you. Add the Social Icons Widget or the Facebook Page Plugin to your sidebar (or the footer, as seen on Ashley’s site, Wanderlust in the City) so potential customers can visit your Facebook page.

Ashley gets social in the footer of her blog, Wanderlust in the City.

5. Visually promote your products and services on Instagram

Instagram is an ideal place to visually promote what you’re selling and offering — your new book, an upcoming workshop, or your consulting service. Share a new product on Instagram with a custom image, and then link to the Shop page on your website in your Instagram bio. Not a graphic designer? Use free design tools like Canva or Pablo to create images with text overlays.

Hanny Kusumawati, the writer at Beradadisini, shares a pre-order teaser image about her new book Break, Hearts, which has its own page on her website so readers can learn more.

6. Direct your readers with a call-to-action button

Need inspiration? These six sites using the Radcliffe 2 theme use a CTA button in different ways.

With a call-to-action (CTA) button, you can nudge potential clients to a certain page on your site: your merchandise, your list of massage services, or details about your organization’s levels of membership. Some themes have a customizable CTA button built into their designs, like Goran, Edin, Gateway, Pique, Karuna, and Radcliffe 2.

Author and homeschooling mom Denise Gaskins uses a CTA button on the Edin theme to direct visitors to her books page.

To add custom CSS, go to My Site(s) → Customize → CSS.

Don’t have a theme with a call-to-action option? If you have a WordPress.com Premium or Business plan, consider using custom CSS to add button styles.

Use Image or Text Widgets to create clickable book images or a badge to a shop of your artwork.

One free alternative is creating your own clickable button using an Image Widget and placing it prominently in your sidebar.

7. Build trust and credibility with testimonials

Showing compliments from clients and customers is a great way to establish credibility, build a reputation, and snag more gigs. Some themes have a built-in testimonial feature, so you can display reviews and recommendations as seen on these portfolio, small business, and consulting sites.

A testimonial from Dwell on The Frost House, the site of a mid-century modern prefabricated house. It uses the premium Venture theme, which has a built-in testimonial feature.

Editor’s tip: one of my favorite themes, Zuki, has a special Quote Widget that displays beautifully — see it in action.

If you’re not using a theme with built-in testimonials, turn on the testimonial feature in My Site(s) → Settings → Writing → Content Types so you can add testimonials on a separate archive page. Another alternative is using multiple Text Widgets to display quote-style testimonials in your sidebar or footer.

8. Make selling and buying seamless with a payment button

WordPress.com Premium and Business plan subscribers can add payment buttons on their site to sell their books, merchandise, classes and workshops, conference and festival tickets, memberships, and more. Explore how individuals and organizations use the payment button and learn techniques that top sellers use to get the most out of the feature.

To create a new button in a post or page, click on + Add in your post or page editor, select Payment Button, and follow these steps. For each button, you’ll add a product name, description, price, and image, which will look something like this listing, seen on writer Alexis Kanda-Olmstead’s Webinar Series page:

9. Grow your email list with a Mailchimp popup form

Are you a WordPress.com Business plan subscriber? The MailChimp for WordPress plugin provides a range of features beyond a signup form.

Do you need to build an email list? Email lists are often composed of more engaged readers and dedicated followers: people who are willing to receive updates in their inbox and are more likely to buy products or services marketed to them in this way.

Some of you may already use MailChimp for your email list. To grow your list, add a MailChimp Subscriber Popup Form — like the one below from Lauren Webster, a photographer in West Virginia — so visitors can subscribe right from your site.

 

10. Share your expertise in a guest post

Collaborate with a site you respect and contribute a guest post. Ideally, the site is managed by an individual or group that you have previously interacted with and has a similar or complementary readership. Perhaps you’re an author with a new cookbook and write a post on a fellow food writer’s blog. Or you’re a travel photographer, back from an adventure in the desert, and publish a photo essay of selects from your trip on a camera and gear review site.

Offer value to the site and its audience by sharing your expertise, philosophy, and perspective on a specific topic, as guest blogger Kelsie Marchand demonstrates at photography site tea&bannock. Kelsie’s approach is subtle — there’s no direct selling involved, yet she promotes her work to an appropriate readership.

Depending on the host site and its audience, you can try more direct promotion, as shown in this guest post by author Kathleen Gage on the blog of Lucinda E. Clarke. You may want to offer a discount or a special perk to these readers, too.

Ready to do more on WordPress.com? Upgrade to WordPress.com Premium or Business and enjoy more advanced features.

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