Blogging is one of the most effective ways businesses can reach their target audience easily. However, getting your audience at your blog and converting them into your customers is different. So, when you are creating a blog for your business, you have to optimize its web page for lead generation.
You have to keep in mind many things while optimizing your blog for successful lead generation. First, to convert your blog into a lead-generating machine, you must create quality content. This will help your target audience perceive that you’re a thought leader in your industry or vertical. However, only quality content will not be enough.
You have to choose a suitable layout and place the lead generation form or button in the right place to maximize CTR (Click Through Rate) and customer acquisition. The perfect placement of the social media sharing buttons and banner ads also play essential roles in making your blog a lead-generating magnate.
Before getting into details about turning your blog into a lead-generating magnate, it is important to understand how blogging can help your business generate leads for you.
Blogging: How does it help to Generate Leads for your Business?
- Blogging helps to Establish you as a Thought Leader and also Builds Trust
Blogging is one of the most effective tools for establishing yourself as a thought leader, and an effective content marketing type.
Regular and consistent quality blogging with the intent of helping your target audience creates trust among your customers. Everyone seeks a trustworthy person to work with. Blogging also projects you as a leader in your industry, drawing customers towards you. Therefore, it helps to multiply your lead generation and customer acquisition.
In addition, you can make your customers know more about your services by crafting quality content.
- Blogging Boosts SEO
When you blog actively, it creates your digital imprint and makes you more visible. Your digital visibility increases to your target audience and Google (the largest search engine with a 92% market share).
The more your content becomes valuable to your users, the higher you rank in search engines. It has been seen that in companies that use blogging, their inbound links increase by as much as 97%. In addition, an increase in backlinks improves your SEO and ranking in the Google SERP (Search Engine Results Page). This, in turn, attracts more visitors to your blog, thereby increasing your chances of lead generation and customer acquisition.
- Engage Target Audience and Build Domain Authority
Quality content has the power to attract visitors to your blogs, capture their mind space, and increase the probability of turning them into your loyal customers. In fact, it also increases your blog’s domain authority (DA), which also helps to perform better on SERP. However, to engage more traffic and increase DA, you must be consistent with your work. In fact, you should pay more importance to increase your content’s quality.
- Generate Quality Leads
A customer giving your business a lifetime value is always better than a one-time cold lead. As a business owner, you should look for repeat customers and those who provide you value for a longer time period.
To get better quality leads, you’ve to turn your blog into a lead magnet. You have to offer your traffic rewards for sharing their personal details such as phone numbers, physical addresses, email addresses, zip codes, and others.
Once you have received this information, you can use their contact information to target them with personalized and curated marketing or advertising campaigns. In this way, you can turn your blog into a lead magnet and get more quality lifetime customers than cold ones.
10 Ways to Turn Your Blog into a Lead Generating Machine
To generate good quality leads, you should keep certain things in mind while blogging:
- Firstly, you must understand why blogging is important in your field.
- The types of content you should create that will help you become a leader in your industry, boost your SEO, and build a cohesive social network.
- Using a proper layout like banners, CTAs, social media sharing, and the like will add fuel to your lead generation efforts.
Here are 10 ways that you can create quality blogs and turn them into a lead-generating machine.
1. Use CTAs or try the “Hello Bar”
- A “Hello Bar” spans over the top of your page. It contains a call-to-action to pull customers to some post-click landing pages or squeeze pages. If the users do not click immediately, it follows them as they scroll the page without much annoyance.
- A slide-in Call-To-Action (CTA) is a nifty tool that you can place in the lower right-hand corner of your blog. It can have details about your post, links for sale, etc. in exchange for the reader’s personal information. This directly encourages readers to look further into the CTA.
2. Offer Exclusive Content to the Readers
You can try offering exclusive content to readers who are interested in more information. These are called gated content, where you ask a serious reader of your blog to opt-in to read the entire content. This helps you differentiate casual readers from serious ones. It is the serious readers who become your quality leads. You can also create eBooks and share them with your prospective customers for free if they share their personal information. Personalized and informative Q&A webinars for users who give their personal information can also help you generate lots of leads.
3. Integrate your blog into your main website
If you do not integrate your blog into your main website, it may not help you dominate the search engine. A first-time reader of your blog will be able to know about your website and products/services only if you integrate your blog with your business website.
4. Strategic Internal and External Linking
While writing a post, you may use several words related to some resources of posts you have written earlier. Then, link those words so that your reader may visit those blog posts.
Keywords can be linked to other pages or sites providing related offers, deals, a webinar, course sign-up, etc. This will increase your possibility of engaging more customers with your blogs. You can also guide your blog traffic towards your products/services without promoting them directly.
5. Blog Summary Downloads
It is a great idea to add in-depth information, images, and case studies to your blog. But sometimes, readers do not feel like reading a long-form article of 2000 words or more. In such cases, you can offer shorter, downloadable summaries in PDF. These short content are meant for those who only want to go through important points. However, here is the catch. You can offer them blog summary downloads only when they share their personal information, such as their name and email, with you.
6. Offer Perks
Give your customers offers that they can’t refuse. For example, you may offer free shipping or discounts on your products to those who sign up for your email newsletter. This will attract more customers to your posts.
7. Add Subscription
You can offer subscription services that make it easier for your readers to get notified every time you post a blog. In addition, you can integrate subscription plug-ins that allow you to build a subscription list. It’ll also help you get more leads and consequently convert them to customers.
8. Add Social Media Content Sharing Option
You can do so by adding social media icons around your blogs. Visitors can share your blog on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. This will help create a ripple effect and attract more viewers to your blog, create a vibrant community of your followers, and get a chance to convert traffic to customers.
9. Connect with Influencers
Firstly, search for influencers in your industry. Then like, comment, or retweet their posts to become more familiar. Now, put in some extra effort to make them accept your request to promote your brand. You may also pay them to share your targeted quality content to get more traffic, leads, and customers.
10. Follow an Editorial Calendar
One of the most successful ways of generating leads is to post your blog content and share them regularly. You can create your schedule or editorial calendar, say daily, weekly, biweekly, monthly, or others, so that your followers know when to expect quality content from you. Then, to avoid stress, you can distribute your work and blog creation and distribution on a specified schedule to freelancers or other team members.
Final Words
Blogging can be an opportunity for you to connect with your targeted customers and a means to lead generation. You can certainly make blogging a major weapon for your business success through active involvement, practice, and persistence.
If you are still unsure how to make your blog a lead-generating magnet, feel free to contact us to get more information and personalized help.
