If you have a website, there are only two real reasons to send people to it. The first reason is online sales. Whether you resell products and services or deliver them yourself, getting online sales while you sleep is the ultimate goal of any website. The second reason to send people to your website is to capture their contact information so that you can make a sale in the future. This strategy is especially important if your products or services are complex, expensive, or if you have many competitors.

When designing your website, you need to think about how you’re going to capture potential customers and what you’re going to offer people for their information. Simply putting a box on your site asking people to “sign up” won’t cut it. It must deliver some type of value or provide a promise of value in the future, such as a coupon, a chance to win a contest, or some type of free information or guide.

Below are my top 5 ways to optimize your website for more potential customers:

1. capture box – A great capture box will be integrated with your email marketing system, such as constant contact, mailchimp, etc. You will have an offer that the subscriber will get simply by entering their details. It’s best to only ask for your name and email address if you want the highest conversion rate. If you ask for more information than that, chances are they won’t subscribe.

two. Narrow your options – People are curious creatures. If you put a lot of dropdowns, clickable images, and options on your landing page, people will wonder. Reduce the number of options on your landing page so people only have a few options. Also, make sure the option you want them to choose is in the top right corner. That is the most valuable place on your website.

3. capture pages – A great web strategy is to create a “capture page”. A capture page is a single page that only has text about one (1) offer and all the viewer can do is click to subscribe or buy that one thing. Reduce distractions and conversion rates are really high on these pages.

Four. gifts – Offer something for free to entice people to sign up for your site. It can be something simple like a coupon or something more advanced like a how-to guide. Another strategy is an electronic course that teaches them step by step how to do something.

5. Check your analytics – Last but not least, review what is happening on your site. Get a Google analytics account and review it weekly. There is a particular feature called “visitor stream” where Google tracks where people enter your site and what pages they visit after entering. This is invaluable information for you to understand how your pages work and what doesn’t. From there, you can adjust and see the impact of your changes on a weekly basis.

There are additional things you can do, like SEO and driving traffic to your site through PPC campaigns, but they all cost money. What you need to keep in mind is that you want to have a high conversion rate or subscription rate BEFORE you invest a lot of money in strategies that cost a lot of money. Even then, you want to continue to monitor your site and constantly adjust to improve your capture technique.