So you have set up a great blog that is relevant to your business and you keep getting a lot of visitors to your page. Your blog is also being actively back linked because of the interesting content you carry.
Is this enough? Are you satisfied with an increase in search engine rankings or do you actually want to get business out of the people visiting your page? If these are your goals, then a good blog is definitely a reliable way to identify people who are interested in your business and have the authority to initiate the purchase.
The main challenge is identifying someone who is interested in what you’re selling when they visit your website. A million hits to your website do not count a lot towards lead generation if you have no way of identifying the people who visit the website. To get a visitor to your blog to identify themselves and provide contact information, you need to deliver something valuable.
You can do this by offering whitepapers for people who register for your service. You can also do this by offering free trials of your service. When people sign up, you receive a lead that you can pursue further and try to convert into a sale. Your blog should have a clear call-to-action to the visitor asking them to sign up for the service for a particular reason.
This call to action should be eye-catching and the proposition that it offers should be worthwhile from the customer’s point of view. A very effective call to action would include asking the customer to contact you via phone or email to receive a particular trial period offer.
The next aspect of generating the leads via your website involves the placement of the call to action. One place the CTA should feature prominently on is the landing page of your blog. This alone will not guarantee that people sign up. A nice strategy that some websites use is to have a small screen asking people to sign-up irrespective of the site that they visit.
This sign-up form is usually very small and captures just the name and e-mail address. Another way to include the CTA is to place it on the pages of your blog which receive the maximum number of visitors. A clever landing page and CTA will go a long way in helping you to generate leads for your business. Newspapers and magazines used a technique to generate leads for people to subscribe to their services. It was simple.
They offered a free book or limited subscription to any reader that sent in names and addresses of people that they felt would enjoy their magazine. The same strategy can be applied to blogs online, by offering premium content to users who refer other customers to you. You could also encourage these people to spread the word about your blog by sharing it on social networks.
Another often overlooked aspect of lead generation via blogs is tracking people who share or “like” a particular article on your blog. Sending out a personal email to see if they are interested in the kind of work that you do is a worthwhile investment to generating a fruitful lead. Experiment with these techniques to see which ones deliver the most to your lead generation efforts.
Mark DwayneAbout the Guest Author:
This guest post is brought to you by Mark Dwayne of BuyTimewarnecable.com, a site that offers savings and current information on time warner cable internet.