Written on January 30, 2019
Your blog is a powerful lead generation tool if you know how to use it. While a blog is never a tool for passive income, it is, potentially, very cost effective in comparison to other tools available, such as paid advertising.
Before your blog can generate leads, it needs to meet several criteria:
Posts should be:
In addition, you will need to post frequently to keep the interest of your users (this also helps with search engine rankings); but how frequently is frequently?
According to Hubspot (a leading internet marketing platform), while posting up to 4 times per month will bring negligible benefit, posting 16+ times monthly could potentially increase your sales leads by 450%.
Companies that published 16+ blog posts per month got about 4.5X more leads than companies that published between 0 - 4 monthly posts.
Posting frequent quality posts that serve your market demographic will help to build brand awareness, trust and loyalty. This in itself can help to boost sales leads, but alone this will be inefficient.
To get the most from your blog you will want to funnel your traffic. There are several methods that we recommend.
While you don’t want to bombard your readers with plugs for your products and services, visitors are often grateful for the content that is given to them and the occasional call to action is generally well received.
Use various formats such as:
By using a combination of these methods, you will likely get the best result. However, avoid posting CTAs to often as they can lower the perceived value of the content and could start to annoy the readers.
Ebooks and whitepapers are an efficient way of funnelling prospects. While the content on your site is exchanged freely, ebooks can be leveraged for customer details — most importantly, email addresses.
Here is an example of an ebook we used on Veggie Guide generate leads:
This ebook was used to generate leads from vegan run business owners looking to improve their marketing.
While many believe that social media is the key to generating sales leads online, email is clearly head and shoulders above social platforms in both effectiveness and reliability.
While social media platforms have algorithms to prevent businesses from reaching their followers en masse for free (as they want you to pay to boost your posts) email is decentralised (no-one owns it). Therefore, it is a lot easier to reach your potential customers and direct them towards your website.
Think of your newsletter as an extension of your blog. While it is OK to send the occasional offer, I recommend using your newsletter to update your users about new posts on your blog and to provide unique information. This could be in the form of a free email course. This will keep you out of the spam folder and further encourage loyalty toward your brand.
Just as you may visit a shop on the high street, you may not always be in the right mindset to buy. The same is true for those who visit your blog. Nurturing these visitors is simple and will deliver a much higher return.
Your blog acts as a magnet to draw in a specific audience. Look after your readers and you will develop loyalty and trust. Using tools such as ebooks and other leverageable content, you are able to gather valuable details which allow you to remain in touch with your visitors. As your readership and mailing list grow, so will your prospects and sales.
If you would like to discuss how your business could benefit from a content strategy, get in touch now and we can arrange a chat.