Blogging has been popular among businesses for a while now, and for good reason.
When done correctly, a blog can serve as much more than just a way to publish news releases – it can help to educate your readers, showcase your expertise, and answer the most common questions that your audience might have.
In fact, your blog can even become your most powerful lead generation tool, if you know how to use it correctly.
But how can you generate leads with your blog?
Well, there are a few ways how you can use your blog for attracting prospective customers, but here are some of the most important strategies that you should implement if you want to turn your blog readers into leads that are eager to buy from you.
Optimize Blog Content for SEO
Developing quality content for your blog is hard work, so you need to make sure that those efforts don’t go to waste and that you’re rewarded with high search engine rankings.
Luckily, you can use in-depth and informative content to target profitable keywords and increase your blog’s traffic, bringing you a ton of leads who are already interested in what you have to offer.
But in order to reap the huge benefits that ranking high on the SERPs can offer, you need to make your content stand out from the crowd of articles covering a similar topic. That means you can’t just churn out mediocre articles on multiple keywords and expect them to automatically appear at the top of the results.
Search engines have learned to recognize quality content using advanced algorithms, so methods that try to cheat the system by stuffing keywords are doomed to fail.
Instead, your best bet for achieving sustainable results is to simply do your best and create content that’s informative and covers the subject better than other articles that are available.
The good news is, if you do take the time to create quality posts, you will not only be ranked higher on Google but will also have a much better chance of getting people to actually read your articles, which should be the end goal anyway.
Beyond just making sure your articles are useful, you should also make it easy for the search engine bots to understand it – that means having a clear structure, marking all the headings, and adding meta descriptions.
Luckily, you can use one of the best free WordPress plugins that help to optimize your posts and ensure that they are SEO-friendly, so you don’t need to be an SEO guru to be able to figure out all the technical details.
One of the most popular options is the SEO plugin by Yoast, which helps to optimize titles, meta tags, meta descriptions, as well as social sharing info on each post, helping you to streamline the process and do it more quickly.
Have Clear CTAs in Your Blog
Even though people come to your blog to read useful information, if you don’t tell them what to do next, they will simply leave your site after reading the article, and you’ll lose a potential customer forever.
That’s why you need to make sure that you always provide clear next steps for your readers in the form of a call-to-action, or CTA.
Most of the readers on your blog are on a journey towards solving their problem, so you need to act as their guide and make sure that there’s always something they can click, subscribe to, or buy, depending on where they are.
What’s more, your CTAs must be compelling and make a strong argument for why they should take action because otherwise, it will be hard to compete with all of the distractions that are always present online.
But how exactly do CTAs look like?
Well, there are a number of ways that you can display CTAs on your blog, including banners, buttons, links, or lines of text that are anchored to link to another page or a landing page.
You need to ensure that these buttons and links are placed in convenient places on your pages so that clicking on them isn’t a disruption, but instead the next logical step.
However, one thing to consider is that you don’t want to overdo the process – if you flood each blog post with too many CTAs, they will become a distraction and may cause a significant part of your audience to leave your site before even finishing the read.
Instead, try to figure out the best spots for inserting links that help to enhance the article or build on it, serving as a helpful suggestion instead of a sales-y pitch.
Create Shareworthy Content
Even though SEO can be a powerful lead generation strategy for your blog, it usually takes time to start bringing results.
That’s where social media can be so helpful – if your content is useful, chances are that people are going to share it on their feeds, which can help attract hundreds or even thousands of visitors to your site in a matter of hours.
However, just as with SEO, if you want to achieve good results, you need to put in the work.
The content that gets shared on social media the most is usually very helpful, informative, and actionable. In fact, 94% of social media users carefully consider how the information that they share will be useful to others, so if your content doesn’t serve that purpose, you can’t expect anyone to share it so that you get a bump in traffic.
As we already discussed before, the key to success is making your content better than what others are creating, but with social media, there are other elements in play as well.
Usually, content that receives the most shares provides a hot and different take or perspective, shedding new light on a subject and promoting a discussion among people interested in the topic.
That’s why your best bet is to use your own expertise in your field and try to add value to the conversations that are already happening.
To get started, you could talk to your customers and figure out what some of the most pressing issues and problems they’re facing. Analyze the most common questions that they’re asking and try to pinpoint the areas that are causing the most confusion.
Then, use your expertise to provide a new take on the issue and offer helpful solutions to the problem, or at least outline steps that could be taken.
But don’t just make it an opinion piece – cite studies, other sources, and try to make your blog post the most in-depth article on the subject online.
You should also make it easy to read – split up your content into different segments, use smaller paragraphs, and make sure to include plenty of media such as images and videos. You can find high-quality royalty-free images that can be relevant to your topic and help make the article more pleasant to read.
Finally, make sure that if the reader wants to share your article, the process is as simple as possible – include social media sharing buttons on all your posts and also share the blog posts on your own social media pages as well.
