[00:03]
Darren Jamieson: On this week’s episode of The Engaging Marketer, I’m going to be talking about how you can completely waste your time with a website and not get any business through it. ‘Cause that’s what most people do.
You see, I’ve been building websites for a very, very, very, very, very long time. Since the ’90s, in fact. And when I built my first website back in, I think it was ’98—I think it was 1998—I used a free website hosting platform at the time called 20m.com.
[00:49]
Darren Jamieson: 20m.com. “M” stood for megabytes, and it was called 20m.com because you got 20 megabytes of free hosting to put your website on. And much like some of the online platforms that work today that are free, it put a banner ad on the website advertising. So you get the website for free, they put adverts on it—everyone’s a winner.
And it wasn’t like today’s advertising websites where you can basically drag and drop and build a website and it’s really easy and anybody can do it. It was for nerds. It was for proper nerds, and I was a nerd. And I was learning to build websites back in about ’98.
[01:23]
Darren Jamieson: On 20m.com, I created probably about half a dozen—maybe up to 10—different websites. I know one of them was Transformers.2m.com. You could get your own subdomains, so I had He-Man.2m.com, that kind of thing, building these websites.
And I had to hand-code them in HTML code and images, and I had to use JavaScript to basically build these websites. Proper nerdy, nerdy stuff. But one of the things I quickly cottoned on to is that you really need to build up a list of people—a list of fans, a list of followers, a list of people that can come back to your website when you send them a message.
[02:03]
Darren Jamieson: Like, “I’ve got a new… I don’t know, a new image for you to look at, or a new—” not MP3; I don’t think they were MP3s at the time—a new WAV file. I’ve added a new MPEG. They were MPEGs back then that I uploaded, obviously very, very small, probably about 300 kilobytes because that’s all you could fit on this 20m.com website.
And the way we did the emails was using, uh, I think it was Pearl as a scripting language. And there was a box for people to put their email address in. They’d write their email, you know: “johnsmith@hotmail.com,” pop it in, and it would go into a text file—a .txt file—sat on the server.
[02:33]
Darren Jamieson: Which was probably the least secure way of storing email addresses ’cause anybody could access it. But remember, this was 1998.
On one of these websites, on the Transformers.2m.com, I had a text file on there where people put their email addresses in. And it actually registered 2,000 email addresses in the space of about, I don’t know, a year and a half—maybe two years, tops.
[03:06]
Darren Jamieson: So I had 2,000 email addresses of people that were interested in Transformers and wanted to hear more information about Transformers. Because back then, it was easy. Back then, anybody could stick a form on a website and say, “Subscribe to my newsletter, and I’ll send you some,” and people signed up for it ’cause that—that’s how it worked.
Now, 27 years later—five, six… 26, 26 years later—it doesn’t work like that. You can’t put a form on a website and say, “Subscribe to my newsletter,” and expect people to do it.
[03:47]
Darren Jamieson: I gave an example at a talk I gave the other week where one of our clients—this is a recent statistic from July, July 2024—one of our clients had so many thousands of visitors per month through the website, whatever it is. I can’t even remember.
But I do remember the stats for the mailer signups, the inquiries. So he’s got a newsletter form on his website because he wanted one. A lot of people have it. A lot of people in his industry have it.
[04:22]
Darren Jamieson: And during the month of July, he had zero people—zero, none, squat, diddly—put their email address in and sign up to the newsletter. He’s got a “request a callback” button on the website where people can put their phone number in, click the button, and he can phone them back.
And throughout the month of July, he had none—zero, diddly squat—people fill that in. Because people don’t want to hear from you.
[04:54]
Darren Jamieson: They don’t want you to phone them up. I’m sorry if you’re a salesperson or if you’re a business owner and you’re thinking, “Where are all these people going to send me my information, or are they going to send me their details so I can phone them up and sell to them and they can become my clients?”
People don’t care about that. It’s not going to work.
[05:24]
Darren Jamieson: Yet, he did have—and this is the important thing—he did have 89 people subscribe to his database. 89 people subscribed to his email campaign, which is using MailChimp.
He had 89 people go into his database as leads with their phone number. Yet, nobody signed up to the newsletter, nobody requested a callback. But 89 people still went into the database, and 89 people went onto his newsletter, and 89 people gave him their phone number.
[05:58]
Darren Jamieson: How did that happen? How? Well, it’s quite simple, and this is the difference that the websites that are successful have and the websites that are not successful don’t have. And it’s something called a lead magnet.
A very, very simple concept: a lead magnet. If you’ve never heard the phrase before, I’m going to explain it in a very, very easy way. If you have heard it before, then bully for you. I hope you’re using it correctly and getting loads of leads like this guy is, and like we do, and like our clients do. If you’re not, then maybe you’re not using it right.
[06:25]
Darren Jamieson: So, a lead magnet is something of perceived value. It doesn’t have to be actual value. It doesn’t have to be monetary value. It doesn’t have to cost you, the business, anything.
It’s something of perceived value that your ideal target customer—and that’s important as well, it has to be your ideal target customer, not somebody that you don’t actually want to work with or somebody you can’t work with. It’s got to be your ideal target customer because it’s a lead for you.
[06:56]
Darren Jamieson: Your ideal target customer will give you their contact details—either email address or phone number, or both, or maybe even landline, mobile, WhatsApp, whatever. How you want to get in contact with them and how they like you to get in contact with them is important. They will give you their details in exchange for this item of perceived value.
Now again, that’s where a lot of businesses get it wrong. They don’t understand the perceived value. They don’t understand what a lead magnet really is.
[07:28]
Darren Jamieson: A lot of people—and you may be thinking this yourself, listening to this—think that a lead magnet is your brochure. Is your catalog of products. Is your brochure of your services—all the stuff that you do.
That is not a bloody lead magnet. Nobody actually wants that. Yeah, they may download it, but they don’t want it. It doesn’t create a need, a desire. It doesn’t solve a problem for them.
[07:58]
Darren Jamieson: Your lead magnet has to solve a problem, or has to say it solves a problem. It doesn’t actually have to solve the problem because, with the greatest will in the world, most people that download your lead magnet probably aren’t even going to read it anyway.
They’re not. They want instant gratification of the “I’ve downloaded this lead magnet, therefore I now know how to do this. I now know how to solve this problem.”
[08:29]
Darren Jamieson: But the reality is, they’re not going to. So they don’t. The way they solve the problem actually is with you contacting them, selling them your service—whatever it is that you do, whatever product you have. I don’t know. I don’t know who you are.
That’s how they solve the problem—not by downloading the lead magnet. That’s just a signal of intent that they have this problem, and they need someone to solve it for them. And yes, you can do that.
[09:02]
Darren Jamieson: So this guy’s business, for example—the one I’m talking about—had 89 people go into his database, onto his mailing list. 89 leads that he can call back. 89 people that can be retargeted, can be remarketed to, to become clients. And many of them do.
They took a trial of his product. They took a trial, a module of his course, and it was one module. It was a video module. It was completely free. It was about 90 minutes long.
[09:35]
Darren Jamieson: They put in their details. It gets sent to them. It gets sent to them—it’s all automated, doesn’t cost him a penny because it’s recorded anyway, it exists anyway.
It’s really just for them to see whether they like it. Whether it’s something for them. It’s them to see, “What’s it going to be like when I start working with this person? Am I going to enjoy it? Is this the kind of thing that I’m going to want to do? Can I get a sense of it before I commit anything to paying money, before I even say, ‘Yeah, give me a call?’”
[10:13]
Darren Jamieson: That is a fantastic lead magnet. So free trials, free demos, free setups are great lead magnets. But also, ways that you solve problems—ways that you fix problems for people.
Now, I mentioned before that not everybody understands the concept of a lead magnet. They think it can be anything. It has to be something that people actually desire—something that people actually need, that they want.
[10:47]
Darren Jamieson: So, if for example, you are—I’m going to be careful what I say here because there are real examples of this—if, for example, you are a plumber, and your lead magnet on your website is, um, “150 different legal ramifications of plumbing” or “100 different questions you should ask your plumber before they start working with you,” or “These are all the different types of bolts and joins that you can use in plumbing”—I’m getting a bit sarcastic now, but you get the idea—something really intricate that nobody really gives a toss about, that’s not actually going to work.
[11:18]
Darren Jamieson: But, if you give somebody something that they’re going to want—maybe, I don’t know, let’s say, “Seven different ways you can reduce your water bill,” or “Seven techniques to…” No, let’s say, “Seven methods you can use to increase the value of your property,” or “Seven ways you can sell your house faster,” and they’re all plumbing-related, such as bathrooms, kitchens, wet rooms, shower rooms—that kind of thing.
That’s the stuff that people are going to want. People are going to desire it because it offers them something that’s actually valuable to them, something that they’re going to need. And then they go into your database, and then they can potentially become your customer.
[11:53]
Darren Jamieson: That’s how a lead magnet works. Now, it’s important that you know why this happens, because if you just have a website and all you have on it is a contact form and a “Subscribe to my newsletter” or a phone number, you’re leaving money on the table.
People will be Googling you. They will be landing on your website. They will be visiting your website, but they will not be inquiring with you. And you’ll be losing business. You’ll be losing clients. You’ll be losing customers. You’ll be losing leads.
[12:25]
Darren Jamieson: So if you do not have a lead magnet—and I cannot stress this enough—it is costing you money. It is costing you money. But it has to be a lead magnet that people want.
And it doesn’t just have to be one single lead magnet. You can have multiple lead magnets on the website. Multiple lead magnets for different services.
So, for example, with Engage Web, we have several services on our website that we offer. So Facebook advertising, for example, or content, or social media. We’ve got lead magnets for all of them.
[12:54]
Darren Jamieson: So if somebody is on a social media page, they might get the offer of our social media calendar—our content marketing calendar—where they can plan their content in advance.
If they’re on our search engine optimization pages, search pages, marketing pages—and we do this on most of the pages because this is the one we want to push people down—they’ll have our free SEO analysis.
So: “Check out your own website. Pop your email. Pop your phone number. Pop your web address into here, and it will give you an instant, instant look at your website from an SEO perspective. And it’ll tell you all of the things that are wrong with it, and it’ll give you a checklist for how you can fix it.”
[13:30]
Darren Jamieson: It does a technical audit of your website instantly and emails you the report. That’s the kind of lead magnet that people want because it’s something of value that they get for free.
Now, if they were reading about SEO on our website and thought, “Oh, I’m interested in that. I’d like to know what mine does, but I certainly don’t want to phone up Engage Web and ask about it because some salesman’s just going to try and talk to me about SEO and try and sell SEO on me, and I don’t want that to happen.”
[14:04]
Darren Jamieson: So, “Oh, I can just pop my website link in here, and it’s going to email me a report instantly done on my website.” That’s of interest. That’s of interest because I don’t have to speak to anyone. I can do it at 9:00 in the evening or 3:00 in the morning—it doesn’t really matter.
That’s what works. And we get far more people doing that—far more people filling that in—than we do filling in our contact form or phoning us up out of the blue: “Ah, I found you on Google. I’m interested in SEO with you.”
[14:34]
Darren Jamieson: They don’t do that. I mean, it does happen. But most of the leads we get via the website come through the SEO audit, such as this.
And you can try it yourself on our website. Happy for you to have a look at it. Go to engageweb.co, look at any page on our website, and you’ll see in the bottom right-hand corner there will be a “Take your own free SEO audit right now.”
Pop a website in there. Pop your email in there. And it will send you an audit of your website. It will tell you what is wrong with your website, and it’s instant.
[15:04]
Darren Jamieson: It uses really clever software, looks at all the tags on your website, looks at what you’re doing, and sends you a list of what’s wrong so that you can fix it yourself.
That’s what a quality lead magnet does. So take a look at that. See what you think. Let me know in the comments, if you’re watching this on YouTube, what you think about it.
If you’re on iTunes or Spotify or Audible, leave me a review. I would love a review of this podcast.
[15:34]
Darren Jamieson: So please, make sure you set up your own lead magnets and don’t leave leads on the table because it’s costing you business.
And I will catch you on the next podcast.