How to Generate Leads from Blogs

How to Generate Leads from Blogs

Lead generation is the number one thing you want your blog to excel at – at least from your perspective. Of course, your audience wants valuable information or access to a product (more on that later), but as the person running the blog, you want ways to make the most of your relationship with that audience

Now, there is an infinite number of ways to generate leads. However, the ways that generate high-quality leads are a little more limited. Thankfully, we have the best ones listed below. If you’re struggling with getting your lead generation numbers up, take a look at these best practices to help you take your blog to the next level.

Own your domain

There’s nothing wrong with putting up a website on a free domain like WordPress or Squarespace. You’ll still be able to upload content and use the other tips featured in this article for lead generation. But sometimes, getting leads starts at the eye test.

Simply put, you just don’t see a lot of high ranking sites (first two pages of a SERP) with domain extensions. While these won’t’ hinder your ability to run a site, they may make your audience second guess its credibility. Buy your domain name and get that simple .com or .org working for you.

Other than having a cleaner name in the search tab, it also removes an unnecessary keyword: your host site’s name. Unless you’re writing content specifically about the host site, ensure that your name is just that – your name.

Centralize content

We tend to think of blogs as only capable of living in one space at a time, but that’s not true. Many people run multiple sections of the same blog. They might keep a condensed version on Facebook, upload a certain niche on LinkedIn, host videos on streaming sites and then save long-form articles for their websites.

While this is good for “growing wide”, it’s an inefficient way to engage across platforms. While you can certainly host your blog anywhere and in multiple formats, you want a hub that centralizes everything. Once you have that, you want to ensure that all your other platforms link back to that central hub.

If someone is new to your blog, a hub serves as a directory, so they can find the medium they’re most comfortable with. If someone finds you on, say, YouTube, linking back to your host site can expose them to your work on other channels. It’s all about creating an ecosystem.

Content schedule

Speaking of ecosystems, the best way to ensure that people keep coming back to your blog is consistency. Think like a blogger, not a retailer. An online retailer generates new leads because it needs new customers to buy the same product. As a blogger, you’re essentially creating a new “product” with every post.

This means you can create recurring leads through a content schedule that tells your audience when to expect uploads. This keeps you in front of their minds and lets you cycle new and old leads through your website every time you upload, be it daily, weekly, bi-weekly or monthly.

The longer the time between uploads, the more you’ll need a content schedule to keep your audience interested between posts.

Call to action (CTA)

“Smash the notification button.”

“Like, share, and subscribe.”

“If you enjoyed this content, please consider sharing it. You never know who else might need it!”

“If you’re interested in learning more, follow the link below…”

You may have heard any one of these statements while reading your favorite blog or watching almost any YouTube video. All of these are examples of a call to action. A CTA is essentially any statement that encourages someone to perform an action, and it’s usually embedded in or follows the conclusion of the content.

While it’s not uncommon to see calls to action at the beginning of the content, it’s almost always bookended as well. This is because the point of a lot of blog posts is to share information or convince someone of something. After you’ve done the hard work of giving your audience what they were looking for, give them a pathway to engage further.

A call to action can be as simple as encouraging readers to sign up for your mailing list for more exclusive content. Of course, once someone volunteers contact information, they become a lead. The easiest way to maximize every single post on your blog is to – at a minimum – include a call to action at the end of each one.

Exclusive content

Speaking off mailing lists, how do you get people onto yours? Incentives, that’s how. A person’s inbox is a sanctuary, where the only messages they get are from people they actually want to hear from. That’s a far cry from social media, where the ambient noise of the people we follow can draw away much of our attention.

When asking for contact information like email addresses, treat that space as valuable as your leads do. Offer exclusive content, a communication channel or even just a non-intrusive way to keep up with the behind-the-scenes of your blog. Making it an exchange creates a relationship between you and your leads, one that you both benefit from.

Understand the types of leads you attract

But once you have a way to contact your leads, what do you actually say to them? Well, it will depend on the goals behind your blog. If you do have a product, you don’t need to hard-sell it at this stage. The way you communicate it should excite leads about the prospect of buying it, which means understanding where the value in your blog is for them.

Website navigation

Lead generation isn’t linear. That simply means you aren’t moving people from point A to point B or from strangers to customers. Every one of your blog posts can be engaged with, and there will be portions of your blog that may not be dedicated to content that you still want leads to engage with.

Product pages, your story and your contact page are just some areas of your blog that you need to be moving traffic through if you want to consistently be generating leads. Why? Because individuals in your audience will engage with your brand and blog in different ways.

Some leads want to know more about the person (or people) behind their favorite content. Others may want ways to get in touch with you (if you want to generate l33e33ads, give them a way!).

Data analytics

You have, no doubt, used the term key performance metric (KPI). In digital marketing, KPIs are usually the metrics we use to track the progress and, ultimately, the success of every marketing campaign. It usually depends on the campaign’s goals or, in this case, the blog’s goals.

If you’re looking to expand your readership, you may look at key metrics like net traffic, likes, shares, comments and subscriptions. If you want to increase engagement on your blog, you could look at those metrics, too, with the addition of open rate (emails), click-through rate (links) and media engagement.

KPIs are the backbone of good data analytics, and strong data is the key to unlocking the insights your blog needs in order to grow.

Utilizing the comments section

One of those KPIs – comments – has an excellent additional function: free engagement! It also ties into another lead generation tool we talked about above – a call to action. Sometimes a call to action is as simple as asking a question at the end of the post and asking your readers to respond in the comments.

When they do this, you have an opportunity to respond, drive conversation, and engage further with the most invested members of your audience. If someone goes out of their way to leave a (positive) comment, chances are they’re interested in hearing from you. It’s fine if only a few people respond per post. Respond to them. The more consistent you are about being present in your comments section, the more people in your core audience are likely to engage in the future.

Don’t neglect your comments section as an excellent place to create engagement, find new leads and, most importantly, have a good conversation with your fans.

Mailing list funnel

So, a lead’s inbox is one of the most valuable spaces you can be invited into, but is there a strategy for consistently getting in there? Absolutely. A mailing list funnel is a journey your leads take before arriving on your mailing list (i.e. volunteering an email address).

Funnels are often paired with calls to action that encourage leads to sign up to a mailing list. This is often done by incentivizing leads with exclusive content, added engagement, free perks, or any other value proposition that makes sense for your audience.

The best thing about a mailing list is that, should anything happen to your blog, you have a way of keeping in contact with your leads. With this, you can move around indefinitely (although only with good reason) while ensuring that your audience can always find you.

Optimize social media channels

While you want to centralize your blog, you will need to make use of other channels to promote it. That is if promotion is part of your strategy – which it should be for lead generation. Whether you’re engaging on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube or any other platform, there are a couple of things to keep in mind when optimizing your social media.

Firstly, you need to find out where your audience hangs out online. While they might engage with you most on your blog, that’s almost certainly not where leads are spending the bulk of their time online. Demographics are a good way to get a ballpark estimate of where they could be.

For example, LinkedIn often caters specifically to professionals between 30-45 years old, with a relatively even split between male and female users. On the other hand, Instagram is a media-first platform designed around visually appealing media, aesthetics, videos, reels and stories around a wide range of interests. It typically skews younger than LinkedIn but has an older average audience age than TikTok.

Secondly, you can only optimize your social media accounts when they link back to your blog. This isn’t just about adding a link to the promotional posts you put up on social media (although you should).

A link in your bio is always helpful, and many blogs make use of the image banner section for branding purposes. Twitter will even let you change the color palette of your profile, which you can use to align your account with the brand colors of your blog.

Backlink in-house content

But links aren’t only useful for external promotion. Take a look at your blog. How many posts do you currently have up? Can they be split into categories or grouped by topic, series or even theme? Think of your posts in clusters, then look at each cluster’s content.

Could you explain a point better by linking to another post on your blog that goes more in-depth? Have you already expanded on a point somewhere and don’t want to use extra words to repeat it? Include 1-3 backlinks to your other posts to encourage leads to move around content and engage further.

Downloadable content

Downloadable content can be a tricky one for bloggers to come to terms with. We often think of engagement through things like KPIs, as mentioned above. But offline engagement can be just as valuable for lead generation when done right.

Creating valuable, branded content that can be shared offline – like PDFs – is a great way to access lead generation channels that aren’t typically available online. These channels include private groups, forums in your niche, information sharing between friends, colleagues and family, etc. Offline content is about making the most of word-of-mouth, which remains one of the most powerful and cost-effective marketing tools available anywhere.

Your blog doesn’t have to stagnate. You can generate high quality leads in a number of ways. In fact, these tips work best in combination – so find the ones that make the most of your available resources and drive that traffic like never before.

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How to generate leads from blogs – Any great marketing or lead nurturing campaign starts with solid research and the freshest highly targeted lists. Impact Enterprise’s highly skilled data specialists can get the data, cost effectively and efficiently. Test pilots are always FREE. Services include, lead validation, data enrichment, contact research, data entry & CRM hygiene; content services include content management, influencer mapping and moderation for social media; AI Data Annotation services include image labelling, language processing and geospatial analysis. 

Impact Enterprises was Established in 2013 and recruits skilled talent from bright young professionals in Zambia, Africa, where 59% of graduates find themselves unemployed and without an opportunity to showcase their skills and dedication. For recurring projects, the company provides a dedicated team to oversee operations for each client and guarantees an exceptional standard of delivery.