Have you ever ran water into a leaky watering can? Can you guess what happens? By the time you get it to the flower bed, there’s no water left, and you have your Great-Aunt Bea hollering from the porch asking why the hell you didn’t fill the can in the first place.

Putting aside fond childhood memories, websites without a clear strategic conversion plan operate in the same way. You pour all your money into advertising, SEO and social media to drive visitors to your website, but without a strategy to capture those visitors, they’ll just come and go without ever contacting you.

Think of it this way; it’s like placing an advert in a newspaper that sends people to look at a more expensive advert in a magazine. You still haven’t got them interacting with you.

As Aunt Bea would say, that’s just unacceptable. (Actually, she would scrunch up her face and say, “Why you little shit!” usually, right after I made a witty comeback to her. It was hilarious. But that’s beside the point.)

Unfortunately, the interwebs aren’t like they once were. You use to be able to follow in Kevin Costner’s footsteps and just build it (a website), and they (visitors) would come. A lot of amateur web designers on places like Etsy or DIY services like Wix and Squarespace use the same templates and just switch out the photos, colours, content and “customize” it just enough so it looks somewhat unique. Basically a pretty online brochure. 80% of today’s websites fail to convert visitors because they follow this approach and that just isn’t going to cut it in a web market where 16 million websites go live every month.

In today’s go-go-go world with attention spans dwindling more and more, you have to work incredibly hard just to get the ever so fickle Ms. Beaverhausen to stay on your website for more than 8 seconds, let alone get in touch with you. (Remember, Ms. Beaverhausen will only speak to you if you’ve proven your worth.)

Your website should be a 24/7 online salesperson; always working to convert your average visitors into leads and sales. You have to have the tools, resources and action plans in place that grabs Ms. Beaverhausen’s attention, charms her and gets her to hand over her digits. That’s when you can begin to nurture this lovely lady into a sale.

What are these strategies? Conversion tools: call-to-actions, lead magnets, sales funnels, email automation, newsletters and so on. The list of conversion tools you can utilize in your website strategy is endless.

Once you have a well thought out strategy in place, you can then make your SEO, social media marketing and advertising apart of your overall website strategy, saving you money in the long run.

When your website is a strong, sturdy watering can, ready to collect all those visitors coming your way; you’ll be able to make Aunt Bea proud and water your business’s garden and grow your profits.