You don’t just need a website today. Let’s be honest, it would not take you more than a day to have a perfectly functioning, awesome looking website. At most, it’d take about 24-hours maximum.

You have a long list of Do-It-Yourself website building tools available if you prefer the drag-and-drop variety. Even better, you have the ever growing ecosystem of themes, plugins, and third-party tools available for the already popular WordPress.

If you consider WordPress, here’s how you paint the complete picture:

• Super-fast, managed WordPress Hosting that allows your website to load quickly and remain hacker-proof: Check
• A never-ending list of options in themes to base your site design on: check
• Innumerable plugins that’ll extend the functionality of your WordPress site: check
• Integration with Google Analytics and any other analytics tools you need: check
• Ecommerce: You have options to use plugins like Ecommerce WD, Woo Commerce or many other third-party payment processing systems, right off the bat. Check.
• Ease of doing Digital Marketing,  such as integrating social media tools, project management tools, analytics tools, email marketing tools, digital marketing tools, advertising platforms, etc.: Check

Seriously, a strong presence on the web for your business is only a matter of choice. Once you decide, setting up your website and going live with with a business website is only a matter of time.

Think of WordPress as an automobile Chassis – starting from the Core of WordPress, you can build what you want on top of it.

However, just a website won’t do. Whatever you build on top of WordPress has to get you results.

You can’t expect to go live with your website today and expect your cash register to ring like an ambulance siren. Setting up your WordPress website (or any website) is one thing; making the website work for you is something else altogether.

You want your WordPress website to work like a lead generation machine, here is how it should look like, at the outset:

Generate Traffic

No matter what kind of a business you run, you’ll need traffic. You’ll want highly relevant, engaged, and curious visitors who have a problem that your products or services can solve. Nothing changes this equation, no matter how fancy the world gets.

There’s nothing complicated about getting traffic to your website; but it’s not going to be easy either.

Broadly, these is how you get traffic to your website using multiple channels available to you:

Organic

• Blogging: Publish a fixed number of blog posts each week. Fix a schedule and publish non-stop.
• Content Marketing: In addition to blogging, create other forms of content such as Infographics, Podcasts, videos, etc., and publish elsewhere for adding exposure.
• Social Media: Get social and boost your exposure, branding, and network. Social media gets you traffic, of course. More importantly, it provides you with SEO signals, lets people know more about your brand, and there’s “social” in “social media” as Jay Baer of Convince and Convert puts it.
• SEO: Optimizing your website for search isn’t as fancy as it might have been made out to be. In addition to blogging (primary fuel for SEO), content marketing (add on for SEO), and social media (adds more juice to your SEO), optimize your WordPress website pages for SEO. If you have the bandwidth, consider guest posting on other relevant blogs and publications where your target audience is likely to hangout.

Each of the four organic channels mentioned above are not stand-alone. For your WordPress website to work as a lead generating machine all those four channels have to be active.

You can’t just do SEO without content. Only blogging without Social Media takes out the personality from your marketing. You see where we are going with this?

As a business owner, choosing just one channel at the cost of others is not an option for you anymore.

Inorganic

Organic marketing (above) takes considerable time, effort, and resources. If you are looking for quick results, you should consider inorganic digital marketing which is also known as PPC.

Traditionally, it was PPC (pay per click). Today, however, you also have the option of paying for impressions and views.

• Google AdWords is a platform with limitless potential to send you traffic. If you are careful with your budget, know what you are doing, and if you start small, PPC can be a great way to kick start your marketing efforts.
• Social PPC using Facebook Ads, Pinterest Ads, Twitter Ads, and LinkedIn Ads. You also have the option of using Quora’s social Context ads.
• Mobile advertising using traffic sources exclusive to the mobile domain.
• Display advertising makes use of banners, interstitial ads, and other ad formats.
• If you want to use your existing content for advertising, consider Native Advertising which plugs into major publications and taps into their traffic to send some of that traffic your way.

To get traffic to your website, you have organic and then you have paid. We consider you use both together as a complete marketing mix for best results.

Build Sales Funnels

If you are a blogger, a website portal, or if your business depends only on advertising (based on page views, clicks, and impressions), you’d not need anything elaborate.

Start with a basic WordPress blog or magazine theme and publish content. You can also use special plugins to monetize your publishing business such as Ad Manager WD.

If you are in any other business (including ecommerce), your sales funnels will be different.

Your marketing efforts and the way your WordPress website is designed should focus on just three things broadly:

• Attract high quality visitors to educate, convince, inform, or inspire them on how strongly you are positioned to solve their problem.
• Retain these highly quality visitors by building email lists, using custom audiences on Facebook, gathering audiences on Google Adwords Audiences, building audiences on third-party platforms such as Adroll, and more.
• Nurture and sell depending on how you build your audiences, you’d have ways to nurture your sales funnel with appropriate information and marketing tactics to help make sales happen.

Don’t complicate things by going fancy. These are the only three things you’d need to help build your sales funnel and set things up for a long-term marketing strategy.

Without sales funnels, your WordPress website will never perform to its actual potential. You can just expect to slap up a WordPress site and expect sales to come in.

Test Everything

On the digital medium, it’s hard to:

• Keep your entire digital marketing mix running together.
• Build loyal audiences.
• Make the right kind of offers.
• Make sure that your sales funnel is working like a system

As if this wasn’t hard enough, each one of us comes with previous experiences, concepts, values, ideals, likes, and dislikes.

It makes us human after all. This isn’t bad, except when it starts to creep into digital marketing.

You like the color red. So, your website is splashed with red. Your ads have a red background too. But how do you know if “red” works better or “blue”?

Digital marketing gives you analytics and data. You can test things out easily.

If you have assumptions, test them out. Have ideas? Test them out? Want to try two different offers to see which one sticks? Test your offers.

Don’t assume anything in digital marketing.

You can even test your WordPress home page design. Test whether sliders are affecting your conversions or adding to the conversion flow? Do blue buttons work great or the big orange ones? Does the image of the girl in the ad convert better or the image of a guy? How about an ad without an image and another ad with an image?
Test subject lines in emails, copy, images, colors, layouts, offers, audiences, geographic targeting, and more.

Machines work when numerous other parts work in tandem. Your WordPress site can only work as a lead generation machine when you make each of the moving parts actually “move”.

How is your lead generation machine working?