Posted by Adam T. Sutton in Website Design Tips	July 31, 2007

The rules and guidelines to making better Lead Generation Websites

By Adam T. Sutton, Managing Editor, Mequoda Group, LLC

The Web may be confusing, but you can understand parts of it—and the more you understand, the more money you can make.

As we discussed yesterday, that task can seem daunting, but it's not impossible.

Depending on how you want to monetize your website, there are various rules and strategies that will teach you about the Web and guide you to profitability.

There are rules and strategies to creating a Lead Generation Website, for example. These sites are ideal if you want to make money by providing sponsors and partners with good sales leads.

A perfect example of a Lead Generation Website is LendingTree. This financing research site accepts information from loan applicants, and then banks pitch rates to the applicants. LendingTree receives a finder's fee for every loan closed through its site.

That is the standard Lead Generation Website business model. The partners (banks) indirectly pay to create content that attracts the users (loan applicants) to a website that urges them to make a purchase (a loan). The publishers of the website (LendingTree) get a commission on every successful sale.

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The navigation of a Lead Generation Website is similar to two other website archetypes.

The initial information architecture is topic-based and designed to give users what they're looking for as fast as possible—similar to a Membership Website archetype.

The key here is speed. The faster users are shown the offer they are looking for, the more likely they will click to continue the conversion process. If the navigation is too slow, users will become frustrated and start looking for another site that will make them a good offer.

If you imagine this site as a salesman, then you want the salesman to just make the offer. You're the salesman's boss. Tell him "Stop talking about nothing. Make the offer."

After the offer is made, there needs to be a secondary set of information architecture for the transaction. This should be designed to maximize the conversion rate. Here the architecture is similar to the Retail Product Website archetype.

For the transactional information architecture, picture your salesman having all the forms ready to sign and the receipt ready to hand over. Nothing should slow a user down on the way to conversion.

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Users come to Lead Generation Websites looking to shop, but they still have to be convinced to buy.

Users should be able to find a deal at a Lead Generation Website. That means a deal needs to exist and users need to be able to find it.

If a website has bad navigation, it's not going to matter if the offer is a deal of a lifetime. Users can't buy it if they can't find it.

Also, it doesn't matter how great a website's navigation is if the offer isn't a good one. No one is going buy an overpriced product or service just because it's clearly being offered.

There are rules to making every kind of website. For Lead Generation sites, you want to offer users good deals, offer partners good leads, and have clean and swift navigation. If you break one of those rules, you'll break your profit margin.