The Enduring Power of the Speaker Website

This week we hosted our first Peer to Peer call with Pomona Partners speakers discussing their challenges and success stories when it comes to online presence.

A lot of the discussion was about LinkedIn and the return on investment from time spent there. And about other channels: podcasts, TikTok, and Substack. But I really wanted to highlight the continuing power of that most traditional form of online presence: the website. And in the Pomona spirit of transparency, I thought I’d do it by sharing the real numbers from my own website in the past 30 days.

Needless to say, these are quite sensitive numbers, so please don’t share them outside of the Pomona Partners community.

Real Data

tomcheesewright.com has been around in one form or another for nearly 20 years. Though it has been hosted on many platforms (Blogger, Medium, Wordpress, Squarespace) and was for a long time on a different domain (bookofthefuture.co.uk), some of the content has been consistent across that time. Most importantly, my website is my single biggest source of enquiries.

According to Squarespace’s integrated analytics, over the last thirty days, tomcheesewright.com has seen around 2500 visitors, including

1. 1082 coming direct to the site
2. 654 coming from email campaigns
3. 588 coming from natural search
4. 84 coming from paid search - i.e. Google AdWords

This is quite high for me. Average is probably around 1500-1700, but it drops as low as 1200 and spikes up to around 3,000 depending on what I’m doing that month.

From those visitors, there have been a total of 15 form completions

1. 6 enquiries to my contact page
2. 4 newsletter subscriptions
3. 3 enquiries to my Speaker services page
4. 1 enquiry to my Consultant services page
5. 1 enquiry to my Automotive industry landing page

Of the eleven enquiry forms

1. One was a request for guest posts - I always ignore these
2. One was mistaken identity or spam
3. One was from a student asking to interview me
4. One was for a speaking gig on a cruise
5. One was for a PR campaign
6. One was for a keynote for a tech firm
7. One was for a conference keynote
8. Two were from my SEO guy doing some testing
9. One was from a national government seeking consulting services
10. One was from a company seeking some consulting services

So, that’s 6 out of 11 that are real, monetisable enquiries. One of those has closed (won) already. Two others have become opportunities for other Pomona Partners speakers because I have a competitive or diary conflict. The rest are being negotiated. And I had a fun chat with the student doing research for her masters.

According to Google Analytics:

1. 3 of the form completions can be attributed to paid search
2. 4 of the form completions can be attributed to organic search

I don’t know which forms these were, or which enquiries. They might have been spam. They might have been newsletter subscriptions. But statistically, that’s around half of the form completions, so it’s a good bet that a chunk of the value my website has delivered in the last month has come from SEO and PPC.

How do you attract the right sort of traffic?

This isn’t a piece of training content so I won’t answer that here. But check out the resources library. There are lots of useful articles in there!

What I will say is this: there is a reason that at Pomona Partners we focus on Proposition, Profile, Performance, in that order. Nearly 50% of my website engagement this month came from people searching for a proposition that I had articulated in words they understood and were searching for. They found me first because of the time I’d spent building my profile, adding weight and credibility to my site over others.

Social media is brilliant. There are lots of ways to build a following and reach prospects. But don’t neglect the humble website.