How to Generate Leads From Blogging

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In marketing, lead generation refers to the initiation of the customer’s inquiry or interest in a particular product or service. In these modern times, blogging is becoming increasingly popular among businesses as they have recognized it as a means to generate leads, with some businesses generating on average 67% more leads. By publishing relevant and valuable content, businesses aim to present themselves as an authority in their field and then, with time, convert their readers into actual customers. As a business, you stand to increase the size of your customer network and the number of sales, so why shouldn’t you learn this skill? In this article, we will be discussing 7 tips you can implement to help generate leads through blogging.

7 Ways to Generate Leads From Blogging

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Here are 7 different ways you can generate leads from blogging:

1. Research the interests of your target audience.
2. Write on unique and interesting topics.
3. Include call-to-actions (CTAs) in your blogs.
4. Utilize pop-up messages that urge readers to join.
5. Include exciting content upgrades for customers.
6. Guest blogging on similar blogs.
7. Include the reviews of other customers.

To better assist you in implementing these strategies, let’s go into more detail on each of them:

Research the interests of your target audience

Before you can hope to generate leads from your blogging, you need to understand the intent and interests behind your audience’s search. To do this, you’ll need to do research. You should do keyword research before you pick topics, so this way you can provide content that closely matches your audience’s interests. Also, this will help your content compete better with your competitors. A good search engine optimization (SEO) strategy is important, and when implemented properly, it can help create content of high quality. To assist you in your research, you might consider using tools such as SEMRush or Ahrefs.

Write on unique and interesting topics

Unique and interesting content is another important factor that contributes to lead generation. When writing at times, you might want to consult materials you find online to produce content for your blog. While this is okay, you don’t want to copy everything, as this would be considered plagiarism. To avoid this, you might want to consider a reliable and free plagiarism checker to help check your work before you publish it. If your blog becomes recognized as one that produces plagiarized content it can, in the eyes of your audience, damage your reputation, which might be difficult to repair.

Include call-to-actions (CTAs) in your blogs

After doing the research into your audience’s interests, and coming up with unique and interesting content, it’s safe to say you have done most of the hard work. However, if your readers come to your blog, read your content, and leave, this isn’t a good sign. To avoid this, you might want to consider including call-to-actions (CTAs) to give readers directions on the next step to take. This might include a message encouraging readers to subscribe to your newsletter or a link to an e-book or online form that requires readers to provide their information. You might decide to include your CTAs at the top of your blogs or even distribute them at various points in your blogs.

Utilize pop-up messages that urge readers to join

You might be reading this and thinking that there’s no way pop-ups can help generate leads. However, when done at the right time, can even help double your leads. When your blog is littered with pop-ups, most readers can view this as a nuisance. When getting to the interesting point of a blog, most people find it irritating when their reading is interrupted by pop-ups. To avoid this, you want your opt-in pop-up messages to include incentives that aim to solve the reader's problem and follow the overall theme of the article. Also, you might want to leverage pop-up technologies which can help trigger your pop-ups:

• based on past behavior of the reader
• when the reader is about to exit the page
• depending on the number of pages entered, etc.

Include exciting content upgrades for customers

For most business owners, the main aim behind their blogging isn’t to entertain their readers, but to get customers. One way of achieving this is by offering readers extra content in the form of content upgrades as long as they sign up or provide their email address. Content upgrades are considered by most to be an effective strategy for lead generation as it provides value to the reader in a way the reader can relate to. For instance, if you write a blog on how to build a PC from scratch, as a content upgrade, you might include a video that shows detailed instructions on how to do it.

Guest blogging

Guest blogging on other blogs that are seen as authoritative in your particular industry is a simple and great way to present yourself as an expert. When guest blogging, you might want to consider including links to your own page. People will inherently trust you, and this will help generate traffic to your own website - traffic that you then have the opportunity to convert to leads. Over time, you can conduct a page monitoring process to see how your blog articles are doing on Google. In order to take advantage of guest blogging properly, you’ll want to track the amount of traffic you start getting after you start guest blogging to better inform you if your strategy is working. Also, you might want to do research into authoritative blogs, so you choose the right website.

Include the reviews of other customers

This might be the easiest way to convince readers to become customers, as it is a true and proven method of building trust and adding credibility to your blog. It is common human nature to be untrusting when someone describes something about themselves in a positive light. We might find it to be an exaggeration, and this can be true. However, when other people provide their own opinion on the matter in support of it, it can help boost our trust. The same thing applies to B2B marketing.

Companies that appear trustworthy are those that share customer reviews and provide free content to their readers. For example, if you are a student, websites that offer the best essays are usually the ones that openly display testimonials and share essay samples for free. Similarly, you should never shy away from customer feedback if you want to appear trustworthy.

You might decide to include the following to build trust, boost lead generation and improve sales:

• Customer testimonials
• Social media following
• Ratings
• Certifications and badges
• Mentions of social media platforms, etc.

Final Words

This article showcased some time-tested tips on how to generate leads from blogging. There is no magic solution that will drive all your blog readers to instantly put their trust in you, but if you take the necessary steps, timely produce high-quality content on trending topics, and contribute valuable information to your readers, you will build trust and loyalty, that will in time translate into leads.