So you just spent 6 months and lots of money building out your website and you are super pumped and ready to pull the trigger. The big day finally arrives, you launch and BOOM! No traffic on day 1, you launch to crickets. “Why?”, you might ask. You’ll say “I have a great looking website and product or service.”
Well, the reason why is you had no launch strategy. A hard lesson to learn is that if you build it they will NOT come, unless they know about it ahead of time. The whole time your site was under construction you could have been collecting leads and generating a buzz for your launch. Instead you stare at a flat line in your Google Analytics report, except for that one visit from your mom.
So I’m going to share with you an easy way to start gathering leads for your site before you you launch. The one thing you can do to start gathering leads is to add a ‘Coming Soon’ page to your site. Then start promoting your upcoming site on all your marketing channels like Facebook, Twitter or even buy ads. Just start directing traffic to visit your site and capture visitor’s email addresses who are interested in what you have to offer. You’ll want to get people excited in what’s coming and capitalize on this excitement when you launch.
Here are a few things that get people excited and will make them want to return when you do launch.
- Offer an Advanced Discount. Typically I won’t hand my email address over unless I get something back. Coupon codes are a great way to reward your early adopters.
- Offer Case Studies. Show people that what you have works and is an effective solution to their problem.
- Offer an eBook or Mini-Course. Who doesn’t like to learn something that will benefit them right? Offer your knowledge as a way to gain trust and show authority.
These are just a few ways to incentivize leads. The bottom line is just offer an incentive. This will greatly increase your conversion rate.
So what’s the best tool to accomplish the task of adding a coming soon page and collecting leads? The best solution for any WordPress site is the Coming Soon Pro plugin by SeedProd. The Coming Soon Pro plugin makes it super easy to create a captivating and visually stunning coming soon page on your site within minutes.
Plus it integrates with many popular email marketing software companies like MailChimp, Aweber and Campaign Monitor as well as WordPress Plugins like Gravity Forms, My Mail and Mail Poet. The plugin will allow you to work on your website while visitors see a coming soon page. After you launch use is a as maintenance mode plugin.
I’ve seen this approach launch countless successful sites over the years, and if you follow this advice. I’m confident your next launch will be a smash hit too.
4 Responses
Thanks Brain, yep it good to start exposing content as it becomes available. Typically people expose the blog while the site is still in progress or just on the front page of the site. 🙂
Great write up John! I have used your plugin a lot in the past. Favorite way to quickly get up a “coming soon” page. I am launching 4 new sites right now and am debating between your plugin or letting them start indexing while I add content. Obviously with coming soon approach I can work on gaining subscribers and increasing anticipation. However if I am approaching this from an SEO perspective it would seem to be better to let Google start crawling my site as I am adding new content over the next couple months. Tough call I guess.
No problem, you have a great service! Cheers
Hi John, thank you so much for mentioning how you can link Campaign Monitor to Coming Soon Pro! Our customers have been using your service very successfully for their site launch pages, so very much appreciate you encouraging other folks to try the same.