Your Guide to Lead Magnet Creation (53 Easy Ideas)

Take it from me: Acquiring qualified leads for your business is anything but easy. A common strategy for attracting new customers is to develop a strong content marketing strategy, but that is often not enough. Just because people enjoy reading your content doesn’t necessarily mean they’re ready to hand over their hard-earned cash.

(If it did, the content team at DreamHost would be cruising in Lamborghinis by now. Spoiler alert: We’re not.)

So, while creating great content is critical to the success of your website, you’ve got to take it a step further and make cultivating leads an ongoing process — one that continues even after a visitor has left your site.

By creating effective lead magnets, you can offer something valuable enough to your audience that they’ll be happy to give you their email address in exchange. Then using the best email marketing practices, you can nurture those leads until they turn into paying customers.

(Googles the price of a Lamborghini Aventador. Chokes.)

OK, ready to get started?

In this article, we’ll discuss what makes a good lead magnet, why your business should invest in developing a sales funnel, and how to create your very own irresistible lead magnet to power your marketing machine. Let’s go!

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Understanding Lead Magnets (And Why Your Business Needs Them)

“Lead magnets” are incentives offered by marketers. They’re provided in return for an email address (or other contact information) from a potential customer.

Email marketing has a return of $42 for every $1 spent. That’s a huge return on investment (ROI), and it makes a compelling case for including email marketing as a core part of your overall strategy. This is why lead magnets are so essential — they help you build up your email list more quickly.

Lead magnets also give you a way to sell to your site’s visitors over the long term. On average, a visitor will spend less than a minute on your website. This is rarely enough time to convince them of their need for your services, but lead magnets provide you with additional time.

The Qualities of an Effective Lead Magnet

Of course, it’s not enough to simply create a lead magnet. To get the best return, you’ll need to design one for maximum effectiveness. A great lead magnet is:

• Free. You have yet to convince your prospective customer of your value to them, so they’ll probably be unwilling to part with their money just yet.
• Solution-focused. You need to demonstrate how you can solve a very specific problem for your audience.
• High quality. You’re providing a free sample of what you have to offer, so it has to show your products or services off in the best possible light. Your value proposition needs to be clear.
• Easy to consume. An effective lead magnet is concise and provides value quickly (a PDF checklist is a popular example). Don’t make it too complicated.
• Instantly accessible. Your lead magnet should take no more than a click to download — you don’t want your audience to lose interest and move on.

The next step is to create a lead magnet that incorporates all of these criteria. Let’s take a quick look at what that involves.

How to Create a Lead Magnet

Creating a lead magnet can be an involved process. You’ll first need to understand what your audience is interested in. One way to do this is by reviewing your existing content to see what pieces have performed best or had the highest engagement rates.

You can do the same for your competitors’ content by using a tool such as BuzzSumo. All you need to do is enter a URL and sort the results by the total engagement metric. This will help you better understand what your target audience cares about.

Keep in mind that you’ll likely need to create separate lead magnets for each buyer persona or segment of your audience. Each one should be tailored to meet your audience’s specific interests and provide something they genuinely need. In other words, don’t forget to focus on quality.

Related: How to Create a Content Marketing Strategy

53 Awesome Lead Magnet Ideas

At this point, let’s take a look at some ideas for creating lead magnets. Almost any type of content can do the trick — here are 53 examples.

1. Checklists

Checklists are easily consumed and very actionable. They’re also easy to create. You can extract the main points from a few existing posts, and create a checklist from them. Then you can offer the result as a content upgrade.

Related: How to Choose a Web Hosting Provider: A 15-Point Checklist

2. Cheat Sheets

Cheat sheets typically condense important information into a few pages that can be referenced often. SmartBlogger’s “52 Headline Hacks” is a popular example of this technique in action.

3. Templates

Templates provide a starting point or outline with some base content for users to customize. A good example is Rosanna’s free marketing plan template for creative freelancers, which is gated behind a sign-up form.

4. Swipe Files

A swipe file is a collection of tried-and-tested ideas, as well as stellar examples of content that you can store for future reference.

Here’s a handy article on how to create swipe files using tools such as Pinterest and Pocket.

5. Examples

Examples are an effective type of lead magnets. Job seekers search for resume and cover letter templates, while business owners look for sample proposals. Examples can also be offered as content upgrades for relevant posts.

6. Scripts

Scripts are valuable if you have an audience that needs help creating speeches, podcasts, and even films. For example, if public speaking is a skill you excel at, you can create a business presentation and offer it as a lead magnet.

7. Toolkits

People generally want to know what tools experts and influencers use. Your toolkits can function as lead magnets and generate income through affiliate marketing if you’re recommending third parties.

8. Resource lists

Who doesn’t love resource lists? A digital marketer could create a list of books, tools, websites, and more that help them stay productive. These can be offered as content upgrades as well.

9. Calendars

When creating a calendar-based lead magnet, it needs to be relevant to your audience. For example, if you’re in the agricultural industry, you could offer calendars for rearing and planting seasons. If you’re in the fitness industry, you might design a workout calendar.

10. Plans/Planners

Planners are typically created for very specific use cases. That includes meal planners for diabetics or vegetarians, workout planners for pregnant women, and so on.

11. Worksheets/Workbooks

Workbooks are often effective for business planning or creating custom personas. They typically help your audience with something practical and specific.

12. Printables

A “printable” is a general term for any resource that can be printed. This might include checklists, cheat sheets, workbooks, and more.

13. Prompts and Inspiration Files

Prompts and inspiration files help users generate ideas. For example, if your ideal customer is a web designer, you can offer design inspiration visuals. If your ideal client is a writer, you can provide creative prompts.

14. Calculators

Calculators are also useful as lead magnets. For instance, WebStrategies has a Digital Marketing Budget Calculator, which can only be accessed through an opt-in form.

15. Generators

From “lorem ipsum” to topic idea generators, these tools are often essential for productivity. You can create a generator that’s relevant to your business and offer it as a lead magnet.

For example, Influencer MarketingHub has free generators for business names, Instagram hashtags, and more.

16. Web Apps

Web apps are useful if you have the technical chops required or can afford to hire a developer to build one. You could even offer your calculator or generator as a web app that users must log in to.

17. Spreadsheets

Even in this age of mobile apps, spreadsheets are still a killer lead magnet, useful for both personal and business use. If you’ve created a useful spreadsheet for yourself, such as a time or expenses tracker, you can offer it as a lead magnet.

18. Recipes

Although there are tons of free recipes online, this type of content can still work well as a lead magnet if you offer curated content from across the web. For instance, you could let your audience choose what types of recipes they’re interested in via checkboxes.

19. Gated Content

Publishing platforms, such as Medium, gate the majority of their content behind a monthly subscription. To adopt this strategy, you might ask for an email address in exchange for access to the latter half of a blog post.

20. Tutorials and Guides

Tutorials are useful for teaching specific tasks and tools. They can be in audio, text, or video series format. Similarly, you can offer definitive guides as educational lead magnets. They’re often used because they’re highly effective, especially for educating potential customers about a particular concept, product, or service.

21. E-books

E-books don’t fully satisfy our criteria for effective lead magnets. They are lengthier than a PDF checklist or an infographic. Regardless, audiences who prefer more detail than shorter lead magnets can provide will appreciate them.

22. Reports

Reports require you to do research and aggregate data. However, you can also create them from existing research. If you market primarily to B2B businesses in an industry heavily reliant on stats and data, this can be one of your best-converting lead magnets.

23. Infographics

Infographics can be used to present dense topics in a visually-appealing format. You’ll want to include facts and relevant statistics. To get started, you can condense some existing blog posts into infographics. These can also be shared on social media to promote the original articles.

24. Educational Videos

Videos are an effective marketing tool, as you can give your audience a close-up look at your products. They’re doubly effective if they can be made both informative and entertaining, and these days it’s not hard to quickly put together professional-looking videos.

Related: How to Start a YouTube Channel

25. Educational Audio

You can also offer educational audio content, for those who don’t have time to watch videos or read articles. You won’t necessarily need to create these from scratch since you can develop audio versions of existing videos or blog posts.

26. Webinars

Offers with time limits generally work well, as they play to your audience’s Fear of Missing Out (FOMO). Webinars are a great example of this in action, as they can only be watched live at a specific time.

27. Event Tickets

You can offer free tickets for live events in exchange for your potential lead’s email address. To promote your opt-in forms, you can even use social media and business ads.

Related: Lead Generation via Website Forms: Here’s How to Get Started

28. Email Courses

Email courses do not need to be downloaded and can be consumed instantly. Typically, you’ll send automated emails based around a specific topic. Teachable is just one of many tools that can help you create email courses.

29. Free Book + Shipping Offers

You can give out physical books as lead magnets and have your receivers cover the shipping costs, too. This is a good way to determine who your potential customers are, since anyone willing to pay to ship a product they consider valuable should be more willing to purchase your paid content.

30. Sample Chapters

You may not want to give out your ebooks entirely for free. In that case, you could simply offer sample chapters in exchange for email addresses and require payment for the rest.

31. Sample Audio/Video Clips

If you have high-quality videos, you can offer sample clips from them. Audio clips are also viable as lead magnets, even if your product is a video. All you need to do is convert your video into audio, using an online tool such as Zamzar.

32. Free Coaching Sessions

If it fits your business model, you can offer free coaching sessions to your audience in exchange for their information. This works out well since your audience will already be expecting a pitch at the end of the session.

33. PDF Versions

Another easy technique is to turn existing blog posts into PDFs and offer them as content upgrades. You can create the PDFs yourself using Microsoft Word, Google Docs, or a tool such as PrintFriendly or Beacon.

34. Transcripts

Video transcripts may be more accessible for non-visual learners. They’re also useful for those in your audience who have unstable internet connections or simply prefer to learn at their own pace.

35. Summaries/Cliff Notes Versions

If you have an ebook or another long piece of content, you can create a summary and offer it as a lead magnet. This isn’t restricted to just your own content. You can also create abridged versions of content written by experts and influencers in your field (just be careful not to plagiarize).

36. State of the Industry Addresses

For a unique twist, you can create reports and stats about current trends in your industry and then create a lead magnet out of them. This provides highly-valuable and up-to-date information. Keep in mind, however, that this content will need to be updated regularly to stay relevant.

Related: The State of Women in Tech

37. Predictions

If your goal is to become an industry leader, one option is to offer insightful predictions about your industry. You can collect these predictions, include associated advice, and bundle it all together into a lead magnet offer.

38. Mind Maps

Mind maps make complex concepts easier to digest. They look a lot like visual outlines. While MindMeister is a tool specifically for making mind maps, Canva can also be used for this purpose.

39. Audiobooks

Ebooks take a long time to consume and don’t always perform well as lead magnets. However, you can turn your ebook into a more easily-consumable audiobook and use it to drive traffic to your site.

40. Presentations

Slideshare offers a lead generation tool for converting audience members into subscribers.

This solution enables you to use custom presentations as lead magnets.

Related: How to Build a Lead-Generating Landing Page with WordPress

41. Roundups

A roundup is a list of tips, techniques, or recommended tools typically presented as an article or blog post. You can start by interviewing experts, asking for insights and advice. Then you can create a post by pulling quotes from the interviews and offer it as a content upgrade.

42. Newsletters

Sometimes, your email is the lead magnet. The Hustle is an example of a B2C company whose main service is sending relevant and entertaining emails daily with news from the tech and business industries.

43. Vaults/Libraries

If you’ve created a lot of educational content, you can compile it into a dedicated page or archive. Then you can ask for an email address in exchange for a handy all-in-one download.

44. Quizzes

A quiz is a series of questions for your website visitor to answer. To get a result, they’ll need to enter their email address. Quizzes are fun and convert well, plus tools such as Interact make them easy to create.

45. Surveys

Surveys can be used to solicit feedback from users who’ve been on your website a few times. Although they are more generally used for market research, they can also be implemented effectively as lead magnets, since many people will be happy to give feedback.

46. Giveaways

Giveaways help you get the attention of audiences who might have otherwise never looked your way. Using services like ViralSweep and Gleam, you can run giveaways easily. This generally involves offering some of your products for free in exchange for email addresses.

Related: How to Run an Online Giveaway on Your WordPress Website

47. Desktop Wallpapers

Wallpapers can be inspiring, fun, or soothing. If you’ve made something really unique, you can offer it as an attractive lead magnet.

48. Membership Sites

There’s a reason exclusive memberships are so popular. They let you offer your audience the opportunity to join a community where they can access opportunities not accessible elsewhere.

49. Facebook Groups

Facebook groups can be used as lead magnets, just like with membership sites. They give you a great platform for building a community around your business.

50. Slack Groups

Slack has become popular in the last few years as a way for teams to communicate more effectively. It can also be useful for building communities around your brand and might work better than Facebook for certain industries.

Related: The Beginner’s Guide to Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)

51. Free Trials

Generally, before you pay for a tool, you’ll want to test it out to verify whether the cost will be worthwhile. Software companies typically offer a demo or trial copy for this purpose.

52. Coupons

Limited-time deals can be very attractive since no one wants to spend more money than they have to.

If you’re offering a product, coupon deals will make it much easier to persuade consumers to buy from you.

53. Case Studies

Case studies are real-life examples of customer experiences with your products and services. They are especially useful when you’re targeting other businesses. You’ll need to ask your customers for testimonials first if you want to create case studies.

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The Perfect Lead Magnet

Although email marketing offers a high ROI, it’s impossible to use it effectively without a strong base of subscribers. Lead magnets offer proven ways to increase your email list, ultimately leading to higher sales and greater profitability.

As you’ve read in this article, there’s no end to the types of lead magnets you can create. There are checklists, cheat sheets, swipe files, calendars, reports, infographics, PDF versions, etc.

All you have to do is select the option that best fits your business and audience and get to work!

Ready to bring your lead magnet idea to life? Keep costs low with one of our shared hosting plans. With many robust features included — think free domain, SSL certificate, professional email address, and privacy protection — our shared hosting gives you everything you need to succeed online for as little as $2.59/mo.

The post Your Guide to Lead Magnet Creation (53 Easy Ideas) appeared first on Website Guides, Tips and Knowledge.

source https://www.dreamhost.com/blog/lead-magnet-creation-guide/

10 Ways to Make Your Website Accessible

Every website owner wants to attract as many visitors as possible. However, few take the steps necessary to ensure their site can be used by everyone. There are millions of users out there who rely on sites being accessible, and if you don’t take the time to understand their needs, everyone will be missing out.

Fortunately, accessibility isn’t difficult to implement. You just need to understand the underlying issues that can make a site hard or impossible to use by certain people. Once you do, you can take steps to avoid those mistakes and make your site welcoming to all visitors.

In this article, we’ll look at what website accessibility actually involves and why it’s so important. We’ll also outline the most important accessibility guidelines and show you how to implement them on your site. Let’s get going!

A Brief Introduction to Web Accessibility

Ideally, everyone should be able to use any website on the internet. It shouldn’t matter if they have a condition that affects their capabilities or what hardware and software they need to use. This is the main tenet behind the concept of web accessibility.

The fact is that millions of internet users have special needs, disabilities, and impairments that can make it difficult or even impossible for them to use certain types of websites. By designing your site with these challenges in mind, you can ensure that it’s welcoming to as many users as possible.

While there are a lot of disabilities and conditions that can affect the way people use websites, let’s take a look at some of the most common categories of impairments:

• Visual Impairment: This includes a partial or total inability to see or to perceive color contrasts.
• Hearing Impairment: Some users have a reduced ability to hear.
• Motor Skills/Physical Disabilities: Users may have difficulty moving parts of their bodies, including making precise movements (such as when using a mouse).
• Photosensitive Seizures: Conditions such as epilepsy can cause seizures that are often triggered by flashing lights.
• Cognitive Disabilities: There are also many conditions that affect cognitive ability, such as dementia and dyslexia.

To work around these issues, many people use assistive technologies to browse the internet. This includes screen readers that vocalize the text on each page, speech recognition software that converts speech into text, Braille terminals, and even alternative keyboards that accommodate special needs.

As such, it’s possible for almost anybody to browse the web. What’s more, you can make their experiences significantly better by designing your site with accessibility in mind.

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Why Making Your Website Accessible Should Be a Priority

As you can imagine, the benefits to the user of making your site accessible are huge. This is an important thing to do simply from a humanistic perspective, as it ensures that you don’t shut out people with disabilities.

Of course, improving accessibility on your site provides you with a lot of benefits as well. Crucially, it immediately expands your potential audience. The math should be evident here. If more users are able to use your site, you’ve just grown your potential user base exponentially. This could put you one step ahead of competitors who may not have taken the same steps towards accessibility.

By thinking in terms of accessibility, you can also benefit all your visitors, not just those who fit the categories we listed earlier. Many of the considerations involved in making your site more accessible will also improve its overall design and usability. Plus, you’ll be making your site more flexible and “future-proof” along the way.

Finally, it’s important to note that many countries have laws regarding web and software accessibility. As such, you may be legally required to match specific accessibility standards.

Thankfully, you’re not alone. The Web Accessibility Initiative project has been working since 1997 to help improve accessibility online. Be sure to check out the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, also known as WCAG, on their site. These guidelines specifically outline steps you can take to make your site more user-friendly.

Similarly, WordPress has its own Make WordPress Accessible team that focuses specifically on the platform. There are also countless other community-driven projects, such as A11Y, that provide guidance and resources to help you create highly accessible websites.

10 Ways to Make Your Website Accessible

Now we’re going to look at a few ways you can make your website more accessible right away.

First, we should mention that one of the most important things you need to do is choose the right Content Management System (CMS) to run your site on.

When it comes to accessibility, few CMSes can top WordPress. As such, we’ll be referencing a number of solutions specific to the WordPress platform throughout this guide (although you can find accessibility tools for nearly any CMS).

1. Make Sure Your Site Is Keyboard-Friendly

This step is also the most important. Put simply: for a website to be accessible, it must work without the use of a mouse. This is because many assistive technologies rely on keyboard-only navigation. As such, it must be possible to use all of your site’s major features via a keyboard and nothing else. This includes accessing all pages, links, content, and so on.

The most common way of navigating using a keyboard is with the Tab key. This will jump between areas on a page that can have “keyboard focus,” which includes links, buttons, and forms. Therefore, your goal should be to ensure that all web content and navigation can be accessed using Tab.

This is easy to test — simply use your own site without a mouse. If you find that you can’t access certain elements or that navigating is difficult, you can pinpoint those issues and address them. To help you out with this, WebAIM provides a handy guide for keyboard accessibility design.

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2. Make Sure All Content Is Easily Accessible

In addition to making your site keyboard-friendly, you also need to ensure that all content on the page is actually accessible. While this is usually not a problem, it can be an issue when a page contains dynamic content.

In short, content is dynamic if it can change without the page it’s on reloading. This can become a problem if the site doesn’t inform assistive tools of the change. For example, many screen readers will only “read” the site as it appears when it first loads. As such, you need to make it aware when something shifts, or the user will miss the new content.

One way you can do this is by using ARIA landmarks. These are tags you add to content in order to clearly define it on the page. You can tag dynamic content as a “live region,” which enables screen readers and similar devices to understand the content as it changes.

ARIA is also useful for making navigation more straightforward as it lets users skip directly to specific content. This way, they won’t have to tab through every menu item just to get to your main content and can easily pass over other link-heavy sections. The same effect can be achieved using skip-to-main links, which are invisible links that let users skip menus. However, ARIA tends to be more flexible and efficient.

The Make WordPress Accessible handbook contains a section on ARIA landmarks that you may want to check out. It’s also worth noting that all WordPress themes with the accessibility-ready tag will have ARIA landmarks added by default.

3. Add Alt Text to All Images

When adding images to WordPress, you’ve probably noticed this field.

Here, you can enter the alternative text for an image. This text acts as a replacement for the image if it fails to load.

However, alt text (sometimes called alt attributes, alt descriptions, or alt tags) is also accessed by screen readers to “read” the picture. You can, therefore, use this field to describe an image, giving context to users who would otherwise miss it.

As if that weren’t enough, alt text can also help you improve your site’s SEO, giving search engines more information to crawl. Just make sure to write descriptive summaries of each image, and try to include your keywords whenever it makes sense.

4. Choose Your Colors Carefully

We often talk about color blindness as if it’s a, no pun intended, black-and-white issue. However, it’s more of a spectrum since different people perceive colors in unique ways (remember The Dress)? As such, you need to make sure the colors you select on your site contrast well to ensure that everyone can distinguish between various elements on the page.

The most pressing issue is making sure text stands out against the background. Ideally, you should set a dark color against a light one, making sure that they don’t bleed into each other.

Let’s say you want to use a blue color scheme. You’d want to avoid creating a palette where the shades are too similar in hue and saturation, like this:

This is very difficult to read. Instead, a clearer color contrast works much better.

You’ll also want to avoid clashing colors that could cause eye strain. Check out this headache-inducing album cover if you don’t believe us.

There are plenty of online tools you can use to find and test color combinations. WebAIM has one, and we also like Contrast Checker because it gives you a score in real-time. The latter tool also enables you to switch to monochrome to get a rough idea of how effective any given combination is.

5. Use Headers to Structure Your Content Correctly

Another key task to make your site accessible is structuring your content by using headers carefully. Doing this will make your content much easier to understand and digest and improves flow.

Additionally, clear headers also help screen readers interpret your pages. This makes it much easier to provide in-page navigation. It’s also simple to do as you only need to ensure you use the correct heading levels in your content.

For instance, you should only use one H1 per page – usually as the page title. This can be followed by subheadings starting with H2, which can then be nested further with H3, followed by H4. These should always be used in order so you should avoid using an H4 directly after an H2 (and so on).

6. Design Your Forms for Accessibility

Forms are a useful addition to most sites but must be designed carefully. What’s most important is to ensure that each field is clearly labeled. You should also aim to place the labels adjacent to the respective fields. While a sighted user can easily match a label to the corresponding field or option, this may not be obvious for someone using a screen reader.

You should also aim to provide instructions and information in a clear way that the user can easily understand. To create accessible forms in WordPress, you can use a tool like the Caldera Forms builder. This is a plugin specifically focused on accessibility, which will make your job much easier.

7. Don’t Use Tables for Anything Except Tabular Data

When it comes to displaying data, tables are handy. They make it much easier for all users, including those using assistive technology, to parse a large amount of data. To get the maximum benefit, however, you’ll want to keep your tables as simple as you can.

In addition, it’s best to avoid using tables for anything but tabular data. For example, you should never use a table for layouts, lists, or anything else. This can be confusing to screen readers and similar devices.

If you do need to create more complex tables, you can follow this guide from W3. It shows you how to code a table while maintaining accessibility standards.

8. Enable Resizable Text That Doesn’t Break Your Site

Most devices and browsers will enable users to resize text, which can be helpful for those with visual impairments. However, if you don’t build your site to support this feature, resizing text could break your design or make it difficult to interact with your site.

A good practice is to avoid absolute units, such as specifying text size using pixels. Instead, use relative sizes, which enable the text to scale depending on other content and screen size.

You should also never turn off user scalability as this will make it difficult for users to resize the text at all.

To make sure your site meets these criteria, test your font sizes thoroughly by increasing the zoom level in your own browser. If you notice that content becomes difficult to read or navigate, you can check out this guide by WebAIM that discusses font size.

9. Avoid Automatic Media and Navigation

Automatically-playing media files have been a bane of internet users since the days of MySpace. As annoying as it can be to have music or videos start when a page loads, this is an even bigger issue in terms of accessibility.

For example, figuring out how to turn off the media can be difficult when using a screen reader, while other users could simply be confused or even frightened by the sudden noise. You should, therefore, avoid including elements that start without the user first prompting them.

It’s also best to avoid automatic navigation, such as carousels and sliders. This can be incredibly frustrating if the viewer needs more time to absorb all the information before moving on to the next slide or section.

Related: Leveling the Web: 12 Questions with Accessibility Expert Gian Wild

10. Create Content With Accessibility in Mind

Finally, we come to the core of your site: its content. While designing your site for accessibility is hugely important, you should bear the same considerations in mind when creating content.

This means paying attention to relatively minor things, such as always fully writing out acronyms, to more important points, like making sure you give all your links unique, descriptive names and anchor text.

If you’ve read through this entire tutorial, you’ll already have a clear idea of the potential issues that can cause certain users trouble. Keep in mind that — just as your site should usable by anybody — your content should be approachable and readable no matter who discovers it.

Web Content Accessibility Matters

Making sure your site is welcoming to as many people as possible should be a top priority. There’s no reason to exclude anybody, especially since it’s relatively easy to avoid doing so. Not only will your users thank you, but you’ll also likely see benefits in the form of increased traffic and conversions.

By taking the time to understand the possible flaws in your design and content, you can make sure your site is optimized for accessibility today.

At DreamHost, our mission is to empower people to get online. That means we take accessibility seriously. If you’re ready to set up a site, consider DreamPress, our managed WordPress hosting solution. With automatic updates and strong security defenses, DreamPress takes server management off your hands so you can focus on what really matters: creating a site that can be used (and enjoyed) by everyone. Learn more about plan options today.

The post 10 Ways to Make Your Website Accessible appeared first on Website Guides, Tips and Knowledge.

source https://www.dreamhost.com/blog/make-your-website-accessible/

12 Ways to Get the First Sale on Your New E-Commerce Site

You’ve just set up your e-commerce site. The design is trendy, the product descriptions are top-notch, and you’ve set up the perfect payment gateway. You’re officially open for business — boom, mic drop, collar pop!

Now you just sit back and wait for the orders to come in, right?

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Sorry, Charlie. Getting that first sale can be a challenge, even with a solid marketing strategy.

Ideally, you’ll want to begin to market your offerings even before your store is launched. However, you can take many of the same steps to promote your shop after it’s up and running. All you need is a little patience and an understanding of which techniques are most effective and affordable.

In this article, we’ll discuss 12 ways you can get that first sale on your e-commerce site. Let’s get started!

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12 Ways to Make Your First E-commerce Sale

1. Reach Out to Your Network

The first people to be aware of your business will likely be family and friends, and you can solicit their help in getting that first sale. If your product genuinely solves a pain point for anyone in your personal network, sell them on the benefits of buying from you.

This is not much different from promoting to strangers online. To get started, ask your immediate family and friends to try out your products. You could even provide free samples. You can also reach out to your personal network on social platforms like Facebook, where you’ll likely be connected to old classmates and colleagues.

The key here is to know your products inside and out, be aware of what problems they solve, and sell people on their benefits. Make sure to follow up with anyone interested and take the time to thoroughly answer their questions.

Related: 12 Marketing Strategies to Promote Your Local Business

2. Start a Blog

A blog offers a way to increase brand awareness and bring new traffic to your website. It’s also a platform where you can better expose your products to your audience. The more visitors you can bring to your site, the higher the probability you will make a sale.

Some examples of content you can create on your blog include:

• Articles that demonstrate how to achieve a goal using your products
• Roundup posts that showcase your best solutions for solving a specific problem
• FAQs that answer questions people who might be interested in your products will have

To improve your success rate, you’ll also want to do some keyword research. Organically working in some relevant keywords can help your posts rank higher in search engines.

Related: How to Create a Content Marketing Strategy

3. Build a List of Email Subscribers

Email marketing is a proven tactic for customer acquisition and retention. This means it can be a core part of your e-commerce marketing strategy.

Signups for newsletters generally indicate interest in your brand. Therefore, an email list can generate one-off sales and drive repeat purchases from customers whose interest you’ll keep active by sending them regular (and relevant) content.

Tools like Jackmail (which enables you to send automated emails) and Mailchimp (which provides email templates and tools for tracking metrics) can help you create and manage your own newsletters easily.

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4. Solicit Help From Social Influencers

As a new brand, it’s vital to keep costs low. One cost-effective strategy for getting your first sale is working with influencers – or to be more specific, micro-influencers.

Micro-influencers give you access to small, targeted audiences who already have a connection with the influencer and trust them. These influencers actively cultivate engaged and loyal followers and can get your product in front of that audience with their seal of approval.

This is a worthwhile investment because the costs involved are typically low. That also means you can work with multiple influencers to reach increasingly larger audiences as your budget increases.

The first step to getting started with this type of marketing is to search for influencers within your niche. You can explore relevant accounts on social media to locate candidates, or use a dedicated influencer database like Socialbakers.

Related: How to Build an Awesome Online Store with the OceanWP Theme

5. Host Giveaways

Everyone loves free things. When you’re just starting out, you can use this simple fact to your advantage to create awareness of your business and products.

Hosting contests and giveaways can bring much-needed attention and help you build trust with potential customers. You don’t have to start big, nor do you need to give out your most expensive products. However, you do need to be willing to offer a few starter products for free.

Giveaways can help you generate interest in your brand, as you’re drawing the attention of both participants and winners to your paid offerings. Participants may also share your products or information about the giveaway itself with their friends and networks.

Services like ViralSweep and Gleam help you run contests and giveaways online while keeping things simple and professional. There are also dedicated WordPress plugins you can try out, such as RafflePress.

6. Give Discounts

Unlike giveaways, discounts do not require you to give away your products entirely for free. Plus, discounts may make it easier to persuade a potential customer to buy from you.

It can be difficult for new buyers to justify purchasing from your store at full price, especially when you have no established reputation or past customer reviews. Offering some of your best or most affordable products at a reasonable discount can be a strong incentive, reducing the risks and enticing visitors to give you a chance.

Just remember that when setting up discounts, you’ll need to take production and shipping costs into account and make sure you don’t overextend your budget. It’s also a good idea to create sales with time limits, which play to visitors’ Fear Of Missing Out (FOMO).

Related: Word of Mouth: Why Customer Testimonials Work

7. Simplify Your Site’s Design

By simplifying your website’s design, you can make it easier for potential buyers to use your site without any hassle. This is key for turning interested visitors into e-commerce conversions (in other words, your first sales!).

One way to simplify your site’s design is by reducing the number of products displayed on its pages. You want to ensure that your site’s interface is not cluttered, and that a visitor doesn’t have to jump through many hoops to find what they want. This is one reason to have a prominent search bar and clear menu options for easy navigation.

You’ll also want to use a lot of blank space to help focus visitors’ attention on your Calls to Action (CTAs). That can mean removing distracting and unnecessary elements and avoiding the temptation to include too much information on each product page.

Finally, keep in mind that mobile phones far surpass desktops and laptops for making online purchases. Therefore, you’ll want to ensure that your store is fully responsive.

Related: WooCommerce Website vs. a Shopify Store: An In-Depth Guide

8. Build Your Brand on Social Media

Building a brand makes it easier for existing customers to stay connected. It also helps potential customers find and learn about your business and the people behind it. To this end, you’ll want to create accounts on major social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and even TikTok.

By using social media, you can tap into audiences that are already using those platforms. You can grab their attention and create positive feelings towards your brand while creating and sharing relevant (and engaging) content.

Attracting an audience through social media is a topic worth several posts of its own. In short, you’ll want to begin by doing some audience research, and deciding what platforms to focus on. Then you can start sharing content and promoting your products, linking followers back to your e-commerce site.

Also, don’t forget that many social media platforms have groups formed around specific interests and topics. Joining these groups can help you connect with relevant potential customers and generate interest in your band. A great place to start is by signing up for and posting on Facebook Groups that are centered on your niche or industry.

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9. Market to B2B Clients

An alternative way to generate your first sales is by selling to other businesses, rather than (or along with) directly to individual customers. Ultimately, your goal is to get your products into buyers’ hands, whomever they might be.

This can be done by selling to wholesale retailers, either on a local, national, or even international level. Selling to businesses might not result in high profit margins, but it is a way to get your products in front of the right consumer audience. Once you have enough brand awareness, you can start to target customers directly.

Related: How Your Online Business Can Nail Customer Service

10. Refine Your Product Descriptions

You’ll only make a sale if your site’s visitors understand your products and what benefits they offer. This means creating clear and detailed product descriptions. It’s important to include all the relevant details and specifications, as well as high-quality images and other media.

Some users might research products beforehand and only visit your store to make a purchase. However, others will begin their buyer’s journey on your site and will be entirely dependent on the information you provide.

You want to ensure that those users can learn everything they need to know about your products without having to leave your site to find more information. To make that happen, you’ll want to find out what questions your target audience is asking, and include those details for your products.

11. Streamline Your Checkout Process

You may have generated interest in your products, but people aren’t buying because they’re frustrated by your checkout process. For that reason, you’ll want to do everything you can to reduce cart abandonment.

If users have to create an account or are forced to answer too many questions during checkout, they may decide it isn’t worth continuing. Each additional step is a chance for your customers to change their minds about following through on their purchases.

One practical step to take when streamlining your checkout process is asking only for essential information, such as billing and shipping details. You may also want to include a progress indicator to let customers know how close they are to being done.

Related: How to Choose the Right Payment Gateway for Your E-Commerce Website

12. Attend a Trade Show

Of course, there are also ways to market your brand offline, such as by attending trade shows. You can likely find both regional and national events that are relevant to your niche and audience. There are plenty of sites that compile trade shows by industry and enable you to search for them, such as 10times, EventsEye, and TradeFairDates.

At these events, you’ll get to meet both individual customers and wholesale vendors. You can drum up interest by offering free samples, exclusive coupons, or promo codes to any visitors who come by your booth. While it takes a little more work than some of the other options on this list, trade shows are an excellent way to get some exposure and start building relationships.

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Get Those Online Sales

Launching your online store is only the first step in starting an e-commerce business. Getting your first sale can be a real challenge. However, by taking a few well-proven steps, you can start your e-commerce store off on the right foot.

One of the best strategies for getting those initial sales is to put a lot of high-quality content out there, via your blog and social media profiles. You can also host giveaways and offer discounts to drum up interest or look into less obvious options such as marketing to B2B clients and attending trade shows.

If you’re looking to build or grow an online store, our WooCommerce hosting packages make it easy to sell anything on the world’s biggest e-commerce platform. Don’t hesitate to check them out!

The post 12 Ways to Get the First Sale on Your New E-Commerce Site appeared first on Website Guides, Tips and Knowledge.

source https://www.dreamhost.com/blog/ways-to-get-first-sale-new-ecommerce-site/

Line and Grid: Building Brands and Breaking Boundaries

The solid, intersecting lines of a grid are foundational tools of graphic design. Designers use grids as a guide to create visual flow and rhythmic space. Grids keep their projects consistent, balanced, and harmonized.

And the best designers know when it’s time to break out of that framework.

That’s the concept behind Alex Banman’s Toronto-based business, Line and Grid, which represents the intersection of bold, classic design principles with making a strong impression in connecting to an audience.

“The purpose of my business is to multiply the value of my clients’ marketing efforts through brand design,” Banman says. “I usually work with smaller-sized businesses, directly with the owner.”

In launching his business just over two years ago, Banman broke out of his own personal grid by pivoting from a promising young career as a talented branding designer to making it as a business owner.

“I’ve always felt that I wanted to run my own business,” Banman says. “The pressure was building for years; I had waited a long time for the right moment. I felt that I wasn’t going to start unless I just started at some point.”

So he took the leap and created his own one-man branding agency, building up an impressive portfolio of clients in industries from real estate to duct cleaning, designing logos and branding websites, fliers, even trucks.

In the process, he’s embarked on a crash course in marketing — both for his own business and his clients — and has found DreamHost, his trusty web host, to be a surprising key partner in his success along the way.

Related: How to Tell Your Brand’s Story (And Why You Should)

Breaking the Grid

A native of British Columbia, Canada, Banman made his way to Toronto after studying design in college. As a large city center, Toronto was a great place to jumpstart a career in graphic design.

“I was always interested in starting my own business,” Banman says. “But I spent about seven years working in the industry before [making the leap].”

Trained in design for print, Banman taught himself some coding skills and worked several jobs in digital branding before being hired by a real estate agent. “I built his brand from the ground up; I did his print materials — promotional booklets, mailers, and business cards — and also published his websites and digital ads.”

Working for others gave him some practical experience in moving beyond the principles of graphic design to seeing for himself how these principles actually help business owners connect with clients and reach their goals, providing context for his skills in creating a visually-stunning graphic.

“It helped me see how my work fits into the bigger marketing machine,” Banman says.

Even through this success, Banman felt the pressure building to act on his dream to break out on his own. Partway through 2017, he started making plans — wrapped up projects with his employer, rented a coworking space, and in February 2018 finally took the leap.

“I was really excited to be doing what I wanted to do,” Banman says. “I was nervous in some ways, but I was also quite confident because I had done reasonably well as an employee. It was definitely a mix of emotions. I wasn’t sure what would happen. There were so many challenges — every single day during the first year and a half of my business. It felt like I was learning something new every day.”

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Selling the Skillset

By his own admission, Banman was idealistic, even cocky, when Line and Grid was newly minted. But as he got down to business, he soon enough got a taste of the real-world challenges of going solo in the marketing industry.

Fortunately, Banman was able to keep his real estate employer as a client but found that garnering new ones didn’t come easily. He had hoped to get some leads through networking in his coworking office space, but that wasn’t working out. Part of that, he says, was because his business’s services are so intangible — and the other part was how much he had to learn about selling himself.

Line and Grid founder, Alex Banman

“I realized how niche my skillset is,” Banman says. His work for others had been part of a bigger marketing strategy, allowing him to focus on just one part of that strategy: branding design. As a business owner himself, Banman realized that while he could create an effective logo and crisp website design, he had a lot to learn if he wanted to actually get eyes on that branding.

“If you aren’t getting your designs and your messaging in front of people, it doesn’t matter how good it is,” Banman says. “I had to broaden my understanding of marketing and the role my specific services play for a business. So that was a big lesson. And still, I’m still getting a handle on that and learning about the technical side of marketing every day.”

Banman discovered that an essential piece to selling himself — and keeping clients — was crystal clear communication.

“In the past, I’ve been a bit of a rock star designer — I was confident that I was bringing something super valuable to the table,” Banman says. “Since I’ve become the business owner, the way my clients feel on a day-to-day basis in communicating with me is hugely important.”

The clients Banman works so hard to land could drop him at any time — a fact he’s all too aware of in every interaction.

“I’m younger, I’m new at this, and what I sell is intangible,” he says. “People are very careful and wary. The quality of my communication with clients has been extremely important. I’m careful about being clear — so they understand exactly what’s happening each step of the way — and making the experience positive and enjoyable.”

Related: RetroSupply Co. Creates Vintage Tools for Modern Designers

The Power of Branding

While Banman helps his clients with some aspects of marketing, his primary work and passion is branding. Branding is anything that defines a business’s ethos, connects with its customers, and makes it stand out among the clutter of competition. This includes logo design, along with any visual messaging across print and digital mediums.

“Branding is so powerful because it multiplies the success of a businesses’ marketing efforts,” Banman says. “It helps people remember the business. It generates buzz in the marketplace. It solidifies the business as a market leader, when the message is communicated clearly. Clienteles trust branded businesses more than unbranded businesses.”

Banman has seen again and again how effective branding can be at turning around a business. One client, in particular, stands out — a small duct cleaning company in Vancouver.

“The project actually failed at first,” Banman says. “I did quality work and what we agreed upon. I made some website changes at a set price, and I did some design work. But I also promised more clients and web traffic. And a month later, we weren’t seeing the results.”

So he headed back to the drawing board.

“We did some research in the marketplace, and I made suggestions based on that and came up with some new strategies,” Banam says. “The short term, we had positive traction. And he was happy; he was selling more.”

The long-term results were even more telling. At the end of the year, the client discovered he made 150% of what he had made the year before and attributed the success to Banman’s work.

“He was able to pay off all his debts,” Banman says. “He’d been in debt for years, ever since he started the business himself. He was able to completely get out of debt and was super busy. That was definitely the project I’m most proud of since I started my business.”

Banman’s work is all about the design. There’s nothing like pulling up an empty doc on Adobe Illustrator and getting lost in the flow of making art, watching a design take shape. It feels great, he says, to create something and send it out into the world.

“My inspiration comes from my client’s goals and their company ethos,” he says. “It’s inspiring to see how passionate the business owners are about delivering a certain quality of service or product and how much they care, and what they do to deliver a quality product or service. And then also their goals and what they want to achieve and what they want to reach with their business for themselves and for their families and for their communities.”

Related: How to Create a Brand Style Guide for Your Website

Joining the DreamHost Fan Club

Imagine you’re at a restaurant, and you’ve just asked the waiter for a glass of water. Four hours later, he shows up, exasperated, and says, “That will just be a few more minutes.”

Banman felt like that waiter when he confidently told his client it would be no problem to migrate a domain — not through DreamHost — for him. Hours later, passed around from support person to support person, Banman came up short on his promise.

“It was just making me feel like I look super incompetent,” Banman remembers. “I thought it would take me a few minutes to migrate the domain, and it ended up taking hours. I don’t price by the hour; I give a quote upfront so there’s no unexpected costs. Fortunately, this client understood and asked me to bill him extra. If he hadn’t, I would have lost out on revenue there.”

The experience shocked him — a longtime DreamHost customer, he was accustomed to a simpler way of doing customer service.

“So with DreamHost, it’s just completely painless, every single time,” he says. “The service is reliable. The user interface is intuitive. And it’s affordable. It just works really well for a business owner like me.”

Banman doesn’t remember exactly why he chose DreamHost in the first place, though he does say that the name and design — the branding — spoke to him. It didn’t take long for his web host to grow on him.

“I’m just absolutely a huge fan of DreamHost — maybe a little more than the average person for a hosting company,” he says. “Getting things done is easy. The packages are affordable and economical for small businesses like me and the ones that I serve. But the main thing that I think is just so important is the customer service is absolutely incredible. Hands down, I can’t think of any better customer service.”

Banman always works with his clients using their system of choice, but when clients are looking for suggestions or building a website from the ground up, he recommends DreamHost. He’s proud of how his own website can act as a portfolio for him, showcasing his design skills and his own brand ethos.

“As a graphic designer, you have to have a great website,” he says. “I like the bold, modern look of my site. It’s about communicating boldly with a clean-cut, cold, sharp aesthetic. The work is front and center. I want clients to be able to see exactly the level of quality of what we’ve done in the past and therefore, what we can do for them.”

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Branding and Rebranding

Like many small business owners, Banman is focused on growth, especially since Line and Grid is in its infancy. As part of that growth, he’s planning to rebrand a bit himself, improving his business to better meet his clients’ needs and attract new ones in the future.

“My next biggest goal is to just market my agency a little more aggressively,” he says. “I’ve come to the point where clients have a positive experience with me; I’m streamlining the process more; I’m improving my skills all the time. And it’s time for me to get a better handle on the technical sides of marketing in order to reach more clients.”

While some new business owners might look forward to hiring employees and delegating some of their work, Banman’s vision is slightly different. “Rather than maintaining a price point and servicing more clients over time with a larger team, I intend to improve the service more and more and serve higher-paying clients as time goes on.”

For now, there are more design grid guidelines to follow (and still more to break) as Banman builds his business, outlining his own future.

The post Line and Grid: Building Brands and Breaking Boundaries appeared first on Website Guides, Tips and Knowledge.

source https://www.dreamhost.com/blog/customer-spotlight-line-and-grid/