One of the best ways to generate leads for your business is by blogging.
As a freelance writer, blogging has been my only source of leads for the past 3 years and not only has it been a sufficient source of leads but I often have to turn clients away. I’ve learned quite a lot in the process; one thing I’ve noticed is that having a blog doesn’t automatically guarantee you’ll get leads. You need to have a clear understanding of what you’re doing as well as what your approach is.
In this article, I’ll be sharing 6 tactics that’ll guarantee leads from your blog if you aren’t already getting them or that will double leads from your blog if you’re already experiencing success with it.
6 Tactics To Generate Leads from Your Blog
# 1. Make it Clear that You Don’t Want Everybody
The number one mistake you can make when trying to generate leads from your blog is trying to attract everybody; unfortunately, this will only have a negative effect.
You don’t need everybody as your client; in fact, making it clear that you don’t want to work with everybody will result in better leads. It automatically positions you as someone who wants to get results for your clients while also repelling people you don’t want to work with.
It’s not always about the number of leads but about the quality; for example, as a freelance writer, I’ll prefer 3 clients that spend at least $10,000 each with me in a year than 15 clients that spend $1,000 each with me in a year.
After getting a lot of low quality offers from my blog, I decided to include a small note on my service page that says I’m not interested in working with everybody but only with people who want results and that have the budget to afford my services.
After putting up this note, the number of client requests I get monthly reduced but the quality of each request improved significantly; not only did I close significantly more deals but each client spent a lot more money with me and I didn’t have to spend more time than necessary on leads I wouldn’t have closed or that wouldn’t have benefited me on the long run.
# 2. Make Sure It’s Impossible to Visit Your Blog without Knowing What You’re Offering
If you want to get more leads from your blog, the number one rule you should follow is to ensure that nobody visits your blog without knowing what you have to offer.
Very early in my blogging career, the leads from my blog were nonexistent. However, after updating key pages on my blog and my most popular posts to reflect that I offer my services as a freelance writer, the number of leads I got from my blog increased significantly and my revenue more than doubled.
On my writing blog, I get a lot of emails from freelance writers who can’t seem to generate clients from their blog; more often than not, after taking a look at their blogs, I’ve noticed that the number one mistake they make is not letting their readers know what they’re offering.
Here are a few tips:
- Create a page that features your service/product and ensure it’s displayed prominently in your blog navigation menu or sidebar; make sure it’s located in a section where people can see it no matter what page of your blog they are on
- Include a short note and call to action below your most popular posts that encourages people to check out your offer
- If you offer different services, vary how you advertise them on key posts/pages on your blog; the more relevant an offer is to the post you advertise it on, the more your chances of getting leads
- To ensure that it’s impossible to visit your blog without knowing about your services, besides having a link to your services in your navigation bar or side bar, make sure at least 50% of all posts/pages on your blog reference what you have to offer
# 3. Make Sure Your Website is Very Fast
The faster, the better.
While speed alone won’t solve all your lead generation problems, it’s probably one of the easiest tips to implement in this article.
According to data from Tagman, just one second delay in your website speed can result in a 7% decrease in conversions; if this happens for each second delay, you can only imagine how much of your other lead generation efforts would be wasted due to having a slow blog.
Here are some tips to make your blog faster:
- Limit the number of plugins you install; unless a plugin is really necessary, don’t install it. If you can achieve a certain functionality by tweaking your blog design, then tweak your design instead of installing a plugin
- Install caching plugin like W3 Total Cache or WP Super Cache to make your blog faster if you use WordPress
- Use a CDN to optimize your blog for better speed across different locations; a good start is MaxCDN
- Minimize the use of images on your blog and install plugins like WP Smush.it to compress images for your blog.
# 4. Publish Resource Posts Instead of Tips
If nobody visits your blog, you won’t get any leads.
One of the first steps you should take to generate more leads from your blog is to drive a lot of traffic; you could do this using various tactics – such as guest blogging, social media, video marketing etc. – but the best way to actually generate traffic that your blog can retain is by publishing resource posts instead of tips.
Tips post will eventually expire but resource posts won’t.
To give you an idea of what I mean, here are two example resource posts on my blog:
The first post listed above has been viewed around 80,000 times and it was published around 2 years ago; it constantly gets thousands of views monthly even though it was published years ago and as a result has been a source of consistent traffic to my blog.
The second post, that was published very recently, was viewed around 5,000 times the month it was published; it still drives consistent traffic to my blog.
You need traffic first to get leads and a resource post that is well-positioned to address your audience needs will not only result in more traffic but also leads from your blog. Every resource post I’ve published have significantly outperformed other types of posts on my blog.
# 5. Write an “Ultimate Guide”
Just like resource posts, writing an ultimate guide to a topic your readers would love to know more about can be very powerful for generating traffic and leads.
An ultimate guide is usually a comprehensive article that addresses a major problem your readers have; the idea is to answer every question they have about a certain topic. Ultimate guides are not only longer articles but they’ll also contain visuals, examples and multimedia content, if necessary, to effectively pass across your message.
An example of a very successful “ultimate guide” for me is the ultimate guide to guest blogging; this is an article that has been viewed tens of thousands of times, has gotten hundreds of links and comments and, most importantly, has resulted in several deals worth five-figures.
In other words, just one article can be that powerful; besides effectively marketing your blog, writing the right articles can also be very powerful for generating leads for you.
# 6. Publish a Case Study
Another approach that has been very effective for generating leads on my blog is publishing case studies; while case studies won’t necessarily result in a lot of traffic, they show your readers how you approach a certain problem and how the approach you advocate solves this problem.
This proves that what you teach works, makes you credible and ensure you’re more likely to be hired.
Conclusion
You’ll notice that 3 of the “tactics” in this article are about publishing a certain type of post. The reason for this is simple; how successful you are at generating leads from your blog will depend largely on the type of posts you publish.
Let me know what other methods you use to generate leads from your blog in the comments!
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