Blogging

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.

It’s 2018 and blogging is no longer an obscure idea. There are a lot of people who make their living from blogging and do quite well at it. At the same time, there are many more people who don’t do well at it. One of the biggest things that set successful bloggers apart from the ones who are unsuccessful is the niche they choose.

Choosing a niche is more important than ever before since competition is so high. If you don’t choose the right niche, one of two major things can happen.

First, you might choose something where there’s too much competition, and you stand no chance of differentiating yourself. Your topic might be so broad that you feel like you’re trying to target everyone, and in reality getting no one to come to your site.

The other problem is when you choose something so specific that no one is even looking for what you’re blogging on.

You have to get somewhere in the middle in most cases, and the following are some specific tips that can help you choose a profitable niche for your blog.

Start Doing Some General Searches

A lot of experts will tell you to base your blog on your passion, and that’s good advice because it’s much easier to dedicate time to something you love. At the same time, you have to make sure passion lines up with what other people are interested in as well. You also have to make sure that there is a demand for what you’re passionate about. If you’re passionate about finances and making money, you might want to do some searches and see what more specific questions people are asking about in these areas.

For example, you might see a lot of questions like “what are penny stocks” or “how should I invest $1,000.” These are great search questions that can really give you a strong direction to head in when you’re choosing a blogging niche.

Rethink Finding a Niche

When you think about finding a niche in the traditional sense, it can limit your blogging, and you may not end up coming up with a strong concept.

Sometimes, it can be better to reframe your entire niche search as looking for ways to solve a problem. Ultimately you’re identifying a problem that you think enough readers will have to help you build a successful blog.

Your blog solves their problem and fills a need. It can grow from that problem over time, but this gives you a good starting point. A lot of blogs start out being based on an extremely specific topic. Over time, they grow and evolve, and their audience expands, so they’re not stuck on just that topic, but it gave them a place to start.

Think About Creating Your Audience First

If you’re feeling stuck or like you have nowhere to start with your niche search, think about an audience first. Create a very specific audience you’d like to connect with and cater your content toward. Create a persona for that audience.

Who are they, what do they like to do, what are their interests, their jobs, their ages, and so on.

Consider Profitability

If you’re building a blog as a business, profitability has to be a top priority. If you choose a niche that you’re super passionate about, but it’s not likely to be profitable, you’re building a hobby and not a business.

Think about how easy it will be to attract advertisers, and do affiliate marketing through the niche you’re considering.

Look around and see if other people blogging in your niche are making money. Is the competition too high or too low? Those are good indicators of profitability as well. There should be some level of competition present. Otherwise, there’s probably a reason for that. However, if there’s too much saturation, you’re probably not going to be able to be profitable because it’ll feel like you’re lost in a sea of other people blogging on the same topic.

Finally, you’re going to have to think about how much content can be created based on the niche you’re going with. You need to be able to solve a problem in a way that’s unique to you, but it also needs to be able to serve as a foundation to drive tons of content. Without quality content, your blog is worthless.

If you’re choosing something so narrowly focused that there’s no way to build the content out beyond the specific concept, you may have to go back to the drawing board.