If you are new to lead nurturing, the plethora of articles and guides might confuse you and make you feel like you are digging into an incredibly complicated strategy.

But it’s not like lead nurturing is a rocket surgery. Actually some people have done it before it was cool and easy to be leveraged with technology.

Lead nurturing is often misunderstood because some people are using it badly, and don’t want to admit that.

But you are lucky, you will find out from the start only the good and important parts of nurturing leads.

So prepare yourself to learn a great and effective strategy to turn leads into profitable relationships for your business.

The purpose of this article is to introduce you into the concept of lead nurturing, why is it important for your business and what are some few actions steps you need to take to start nurturing prospective leads.

Nope, I am not talking about cafes, pubs or Starbucks. They are online communities where, instead of sharing beers around, you’ll have to stick to sharing tweets and likes. Here are my favorite places for  getting in touch with web marketers and staying up to date with latest case studies, researches and knowledge articles on web marketing.

Econsultancy – Digital Marketers United

Econsultancy.com is a membership based community with amazing research studies and tutorials for web marketers. My favorite part of econsultancy.com is their blog written by a community of more than 100 experienced web marketers.

Besides the blog, they offer an entire collection of up to date research like internet statistics, survey reports, best practices studies and trends and innovation. While the research is not really affordable to everybody, by participating in their surveys you get a free copy as soon as they release the results.

Visitors are humans, just like you and me. In fact the majority of time we spend on the web is as visitors on other websites and not as web developers, designers, analysts or usability specialists.

Visitors are not stupid

No, they just have better things to do than to figure out how certain websites work. Steve Krug truly believes that the secret to web usability is the following law: Don’t make me think. It’s like when going to a restaurant you have to figure out on how to sit at a table without chairs. You won’t. You’ll just move on to the next restaurant (unless you are very hungry ).

Think of how many times you heard managers saying that their website visitors are stupid or not very smart. Now go tell them a little secret: their website visitors are unhappy, not stupid. It can be because they can’t find what they are looking for, the website reacts in ways that they don’t expect or that it takes a lot of effort to get to the desired content.

I don’t believe there is a single usability book out there that doesn’t have at least one reference to the Amazon website. The usability guys and gals working at the website have nailed it down. But what’s their secret? What do they have and others don’t.

How did they help Amazon to get to the amazing number of 76 000 000 unique customers since they launched.

Focusing on getting great content from the lunatics

If there is something to copy from Amazon that is to start focusing on getting great content on your website and… lunatics. Basically, having one will almost automatically lead to the other.

Why great content? Firstly because great content is what engages users. Content doesn’t just mean reviews of blog posts. Content can mean anything that adds value to the end user, from pictures to video, audio and text.

Who are the lunatics? Highly engaged users. I’ve been talking about them and how to focus on increasing their number. As a benchmark, Amazon has 1 lunatic for every  1300 purchasers. At a rate of 2% conversion rate that means 0.001%. At this rate Amazon gains around 1100 new lunatics each month.