Driving visitors to your Web site — and coaxing them into providing contact information — is one of the best tactics for generating sales leads. However, only 4–8 percent of people who click to a site leave their personal information, according to Khalid Saleh, president of Invesp Consulting, a conversion optimization firm in Farmington Hills, Mich. To boost your lead generation efforts on your site and convert qualified prospects into customers, consider these four surefire tips:

1. Spread your wings. Place your Web site’s URL is as many places as possible. That includes your email signature and all social and business networking sites, says Andy Sernovitz, CEO of GasPedal Ventures, a Chicago–based firm that specializes in word–of–mouth marketing.

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2. Don’t sell – inform. Robert Basso, co–owner of Advantage Payroll Service’s regional office in Hicksville, N.Y., touts his offerings through e–newsletters and an online video program called Basso on Business (BassoOnBusiness.com), where he interviews business owners about what made them successful. By informing rather than hard–selling, Basso gets a steady stream of visitors — and potential clients — to his site.

3. Don’t get too nosy. Have you ever started to fill out a form for a free download only to be turned off because it asked for too much information? That’s called friction. “You can increase the number of leads you receive from your Web site by simplifying your contact forms,” Saleh says. “We usually recommend that our clients do not ask for more than a name, a telephone, and an email address.”

4. Respond quickly. The odds of qualifying a lead decrease dramatically the longer you wait to follow up. “Calls placed within the first five minutes of receiving a lead via the Web have the highest likelihood of making contact,” says Mike Scher, president and co–founder of Frontline Selling, a consulting firm in Ridgefield Park, N.J. “The odds of contacting the lead drop 10–fold within 30 minutes of the Web submission, and drop another 10 times by the time an hour has passed.”

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