Why A Blog Is The Best Lead Generating Tool

(republished 2020-04-04)

A blog is a fantastic tool. Think of it as a tool, a tool you can use to get leads to any type of business you may have. Blogs are tools that need to be in use regularly to keep them working for you. They do not do the work for you, but they do help you to accomplish some of the hardest aspects of your job: getting leads and getting sales from them.

Since their are millions of potential customers available to you online, you likely want to attract as many of them as possible to your website, where you can promote your product or service and get sales.

Why A Blog And Not A Website

Websites can be difficult to manage and they often leave the customer with an impersonal feel.

Here are a few problems with websites, in general:

• Most websites are not changing – The home page gives great information and the rest of the pages help to sell the item. This is usually a good thing, but can keep search engines at bay and limit the personality of the website.
• Websites make it difficult for you to communicate with your readers – You can only communicate through email, rather then the easy and helpful communication of comments.
• Websites can only be bookmarked so many times – One time on each page is not enough to help either most social ranking.
• Websites are expensive – Yes, expensive to manage – especially if you plan to have many pages of content available to the consumer.
• For many, blogs are more enjoyable and even easier to manage then a website – Even if you do not know any HTML, you can run your own blog.

3 Reasons Why A Blog Is Optimal For Lead Generation

For all of these reasons, it is often a good decision to incorporate the use of a blog to help you with lead generation.

The benefits of blogging are many. Keep these things in mind when you set out to establish your blog.

Here are three reasons why you should use a blog.

• Blogging gives you constant new pages that search engines like Google love. This is a fantastic reason to incorporate a blog into your business because it is an easy way to get regular search engine ranking benefits that websites often keep limiting.
• While blogging is easy enough to do, keep in mind that it does take a regular commitment. If you do not have the ability or time to manage your blog, their is help available. Many professional bloggers ghost write blogs for individuals. You can hire someone to do this type of work rather inexpensively.
• Communicating through a blog is essential. It is a much less formal way of speaking to others, and it does require a lot of commitment on your part. Not only do you need to keep posts going, but you also have to keep the dialogue going too! This can be rather difficult to do in some respects. Getting to chat with consumers is not something many people like to do.

5 Tips To Generate Leads With Your Blog

To generate leads to your blog, you have to create blog posts that somehow, even indirectly, relate back to your blogs topic and overall goals.

Here are some additional tips to help you with setting up a blog that ranks well.

• Post basic information – Information to help educate readers who are looking for something to learn. They are often looking for answers to their questions above anything else.
• Blog posts can be short, as short as 300 to 250 words – Keep your keywords in line with the length of each post, going for under 3 percent. Too many keywords can cause the search engines to notice this and negatively rank you because of it.
• Do some research to find unique items to talk about in your posts – What are people really looking for? Use blog posts to identify questions your consumers may have, as a learning tool for them.
• Enable comments, with approval – Most blog posts do allow for individuals to post comments. You should have these mentored so that you can avoid spam comments, or even worse, profane ones. But, allowing others to post comments can give you many benefits. It may give you ideas for new blog posts. It may help you to answer their questions and therefore gain their respect. It may even help you to get the sale!
• Keep blog posts engaging – Make them interesting, as this will attract a range of different people who may be more willing to book your blog to come back to repeatedly. You want this regular readership to be possible!

There is more to do to get your blog posts to translate into leads. Again, to get the leads, you have to ensure that your blog is attracting the right type of visitors.

Get Social

One of the keys to getting traffic to your website is to be social. Get out their and talk to others. Encourage them to come and visit your site, but in an indirect manner. What you won’t to do is to spam people or otherwise push them to visit you. Rather, you want to position yourself as:

• Interesting
• An expert in the field
• Someone that is fun and cool to talked to

When you do this, chances are good people will follow you back to your blog, you want them to click on that link that will bring them to your blog.

Social bookmarking and social networking has become one of the easiest, most enjoyable parts of the Internet Marketer’s business. All you need to do is to help others to learn about you, about your blog. Social bookmarking is a good place to get the process started.

So, how to get social active with your blog through bookmarking websites?

Step 1: Write newsworthy posts 

Step 2: Sign up for a variety of the Social Bookmarking websites – There are many of these, but the following are some of the most important to join:

* Digg.com – Over time, you can develop a good base of friends to help push your posts farther.

* MySpace.com – Get some friends on MySpace and every time you publish a new blog post, send out a message to all of them to let them know about it.

* StumbleUpon – Is a great website. All you need to di is to “stumble” any article that you find is interesting and unique. Those who use StumbleUpon are then able to read your post, too, as they stumble their way through sites.

* Facebook – Facebook can serve as a fantastic tool for building your clientele. Create a relationship with your followers and and publish your new posts on your Facebook Fan Page.

* Reddit – Reddit is a site that I use a lot and I like it. Post text message, a link to your new blog post in a subreddit and hope that other followers will upvote and write a comment about your post. But, before you start with Reddit, learn as much as you can, because Reddit is different….

* Twitter – You should not ignore the power Twitter can have if your use it right!

The goal will all of the sites is the same. Meet other people that you may know and new people you don’t know. Develop a relationship with them and they will get back to your blog, read your posts and then hopefully head over to purchase items from your site.

Step 3: Use these websites

In order of any type of social networking to work, you do have to use them and use them frequently. It only takes a few minutes to drum up quality traffic to your website just through these resources.

Promoting Your Blog

Networking is essential throughout the blogging world. Therefore, you first order of business is to find those business that work close to your own, but may not be direct competition.

There are several things you can do to promote your blog:

• Write a guest post – You write a post on their blog, they write a post for your blog. In turn, your readers get something new and interesting to read. In additional to this, you gain some readership from the other blogger’s reader.
• Comment on posts – You should be active in these individual’s blogs. To do this, all you need to do is to leave a few positive, yet informational comments on their blog posts. When you do so, you will be able to leave your website’s link. This does several things for you. You are likely to get some added traffic from individuals who read your comments and want to learn more about you. Another benefit is the backlinks.
• Benefit from backlinks – Your link on other websites is crucial to the well being of your website and blog. This is why your website’s link should be on your blog, too. Google loves to see links to various websites on their pages. If five other websites have a link to your blog, it shows Google that your website is useful, interesting or something good.

Making Leads Work For You

Now that you have people coming to your website through all of your hard work imaging your blog, you may think you can just sit back and relax. This is not always the case. You may need to do a bit more to get the most you can get out of those leads. After all, you want and need sales to happen.

One thing you should do is to have an opt-in list so visitors can sign up to your mailing list. After that you can set up an email marketing campaign. This allows you to send regular messages to those who visit your website and sign up for your emails. You can use this email marketing campaign in various ways:

• Use it to help promote your business sales and new products by sending and email to your visitors letting them know about it.
• Share knowledge and tips with your subscribers.
• Use these email marketing campaigns to encourage individuals to visit your blog, to read the latest messages and posts that you have their. Keep them updated.

With an email marketing campaign, you have another way to pull leads that once came to your website back to your website. Prior to setting up and using this type of marketing campaign, to avoid any spam vibrations and to help you to get the best results, learn how to use an autoresponder and how to run a proper email marketing campaign.

Sum it up

In order to ensure you are using your blog to get the most leads you can, be sure you are incorporating each of the following items:

• Have you set up a blog that is information based and original?
• Is your blog conversational and personal?
• Post frequently or hire someone to do the work for you.
• Create blog posts that are teasers for what your website has to offer.
• Offer a contest or otherwise encourage participation in your blog posts

Using a blog to promote your business is a goal you should have.

Get your free ebook and learn more how you can use your blog to generate leads.

Feature Image Attribute: Designed by Freepik