How to Improve Lead Generation through Blogging
Another way to generate leads is to comment in blogs, forums, and online communities. By being active and relevant online communities and leaving comments on blogs and forums, you can create a network of links back to your site. While many of these incoming links are discounted by search engines, they do create hundreds of pathways for potential clients to find your website.
One thing people ask me a lot is “Should I use SEO and pay per click advertising, even if I’m already doing well in search engine rankings?” I have to answer yes to this; there are a number of reasons why.
First, if you’re using pay per click advertising while you are already doing well in the search engine rankings, your site receives extra space on those results pages. By taking up more space on these pages, you get more traffic - and of course, more conversions. It’s simple enough - while you do have to pay for it, it more than pays for itself. The second reason to use pay per click ads and SEO is that search engine optimization lets you rank highly for certain keywords and key phrases. However, it’s hard to get a good ranking for several different keywords or phrases at once. Pay per click advertising allows you to specify the phrases which will be used. You have a lot more flexibility and can generate more traffic and profits.
As you are probably aware, a blog is a sort of online journal. One of the best things about having a blog on your site is to build your brand and establish yourself as an expert in your field. Many blogs have allowed entrepreneurs to become a dominant force in their niche market and a source of information for others. While it takes effort and a long term strategy, blogging can be a very powerful tool.
Using your blog for long tail SEO is also an effective tactic. Long Tail SEO is the use of a larger number of keywords and key phrases which are commonly used by people searching for the sort of product or service which you have to offer. A lot of website owners don’t know that the keywords that they use for their business are not necessarily the ones that all of their potential customers may be using. For example, if you are a plumber in Melbourne, you probably have optimised your site for a key phrase along the lines of “plumber Melbourne”. This is a good idea and I’d do so myself. However, there are an awful lot of people searching with phrases like “cheap plumber Toorak” or “fix broken tap” among others. If you have a blog, you can post entries regularly focused on different keywords and key phrases depending on the specific topic you are writing abut in your post.
Suppose you have a plumbing business in Melbourne. There are a lot of people searching Google for “plumbers Melbourne” and I would also concentrate on this keyword first. However, a lot of these people are looking for “cheap plumbers Toorak” , “fix broken tap” and other terms. With a blog, you can post regularly using different keywords depending on your subject.
What does this all mean? It means that your site will begin to climb up the search engine rankings for many different search terms, giving you a lot of added traffic. Over time this traffic can really add up. Assuming you have a blog, how do you create all of this content you’ll need? There are a few ways to do this:
1. Get Someone To Write It For You. You can find writers on Guru.com or Elance.com and you could also find freelance writers to write blog post on topics that you either specify or instruct them to look up for you. If you’re looking to become a thought leader, the problem with this might be that the actual content that they’re developing is not the peak content that you need to put out there in order to be considered a thought leader. So, you might need to put in your own time to do that, or you might have to edit the post of other people in order to produce the content
2. Recycle content. Content like articles from newsletters, brochures and other sources can be reworked and used on your website. This content can then be leveraged for greater exposure.
Blogging can be very effective, but it also requires a long-term vision and sticking with it for a period of time. Some of the best results is on blogging can be located at becomeablogger.com, which is a series of how to videos. It’s pretty entry level, but it’s pretty comprehensive on how to get started blogging. Another great resource is entrepreneurs-journey.com by Yaro Starak, and Yaro is one of Australia’s, if not the world’s, most famous experts on blogging as a business tool.
One Response to “How to Improve Lead Generation through Blogging”
By Perry on Oct 3, 2008 | Reply
I think that a mailing list is still a lot better than blogging when it comes to generating Internet leads, since the traffic appears to be a lot more targeted, and usually, users will not include their names and e-mail addresses if they’re not interested with the business in the first place. Moreover, with a mailing list, you can be more personal with your campaign, sending newsletters and updates right into their mailbox.