On St. Patrick's Day, I'm sure your day is full of green: green clothes, green rivers, green clovers, and green beer. Do you know what else is green? Cash. In a business we're always trying to find more of that green. More leads. More sales. More customers. How do we find the green we are looking for?

It's simple.

Just catch a leprechaun. Once you catch a leprechaun, you'll find their pot of gold and be taken on magical journey without ever having a worry. Sounds easy, right? Well, maybe not so much.

Leprechauns are sneaky and hard to catch -- similar to capturing a potential buyer through your website. You are constantly chasing them and trying to grab their attention. Once you finally catch one, they disappear and you'll never find them again. 

Lucky for you, I have a plan for us to catch those sneaky leprechauns by using some simple tools on your website. 

Step 1 - Make a plan.

If you're going to catch a leprechaun, you better have a clear plan in place. They're tricky little guys and can disappear before you even realize it.

The same goes for your website. When you're building a website, you want to have the buyer's path in mind at all times. What is the end result that you want to see? Is it more names on your email list, more phone calls, or is it purchasing an item? Whatever the case may be, you always want to consider your buyer during this process. To help us in this process, we create buyer personas. A buyer persona is your ideal customer that you want to attract on your website.

See: using a sitemap to build your website.

Step 2 - Be nice. Use a clear call-to-action.

We all want that pot of gold in the end, right? However, a leprechaun isn't going to help you reach the pot of gold if you're mean to him or try to trick him. If you try leading him down the wrong path, he's not going to be one happy fella'. 

Your customers are going to feel the same way. How many times have you visited a website and went to page you weren't expecting to go? The goal with your website should always be to bring potential buyers further down a funnel. 

The best way to do this is to create clear call-to-actions for your page. Good things happen when you have a clear call-to-action. Without them, your website will not be as successful as it could be. 

A call-to-action, also referred to as a "CTA", can be an image or text to quite literally "call" people to take "action". It can be for anything like: "download our e-book", "sign-up for our newsletter", "schedule an appointment". How you phrase and design your call-to-actions are going to determine how successful they end up being for you.

Read more here on effective web design.

Step 3 - Setup a trap with a landing page. 

Legend has it that leprechauns can be lured in by shiny objects. Once you catch a leprechaun, they'll lead you down the path to their pot of gold. 

For your website, the shiny object is going to be the call-to-action that was mentioned above and the trap will be what we call a landing page. Now, we don't want to "trap" our customers because that doesn't sound quite as fun for them, but we do want to hold their attention just a bit longer to hopefully capture them as a lead. 

Common traits of a landing page are to have no navigation and minimal information to take any sort of distraction away. Our goal is to focus the buyer in on one specific task that we have asked them to do. 

Step 4 - Treat the leprechaun like family.

Now that you've captured the leprechaun, it's your job to treat him like one of your own. Maybe he's given you his pot of gold rather quickly, or maybe he's making you work a little bit extra for it. Either way, you still need to nurture him and take good care of him. After all, he's going to make you the richest you'll ever be.

Think back to your buyer persona. They might be at a different point in the buyer path, but it's your job to be with them throughout the various stages during their journey. You can do this through a nurturing process. This could be sending them a follow-up email with something else that might be of interest to them. Or, maybe it's setting up a free consultation or another offer. However you decide to do it, the important thing to remember is that it takes time. Eventually you will reach the pot of gold in the end. 

Now that you know how to catch a leprechaun, are you ready to try it on you own? If you need a little bit more help or want some free advice, send us your website information and we'll give your website a FREE performance review.