Posted on by Bob Ottaway

How Blogging Can Get You Free Leads

As a business owner or manager, you are always looking for a way to generate more quality leads for your product or service. One of the best ways to do that may be on your own website. By becoming a Thought Leader in your industry through blogging you can get people onto your site and turn that traffic into free sales leads.

Search Engine Optimization

By utilizing blogs to get traffic, you are participating in search engine optimization, or SEO. This means optimizing your website to appear higher on Google and other search engines. This is a common practice that is vital to generate free leads that are organic and establishing your site for long-term success.

Two key parts of SEO are optimizing for certain keywords, or the words and phrases that people search for, and obtaining backlinks. Blogging is a great way of doing both.

  • Optimizing for Keywords: Each blog gives you an opportunity to target a new keyword that is related to your industry or niche.
  • Backlinks: Business2Community found that companies that have active blogs have 97% more links to their site.

Optimizing for keywords means your site will show up for people when they look for businesses in your industry. Getting backlinks will tell Google that your site has more authority and you will rank higher. Getting both of these through blogging means more traffic and more leads.

How to Get Backlinks

Sadly, getting backlinks through blogging isn’t as simple as putting out good content into the world. If your blog is big enough, this may be possible by writing the right type of content, but for most sites, more work than just writing content will have to be done.

The biggest piece of this is blogger outreach. While most people aim their blogs at potential consumers, the best way to get backlinks is actually by writing your site for other bloggers so that they will share it with their audience. That means finding the right bloggers that write about your industry and reaching out to them to see if they are interested in backlinking.

This is a complex process. You have to find the right bloggers, establish a rapport, find the place for them to link to you, and write to them suggesting that they add this link in a way that doesn’t feel like spam. This is far and away the most popular way to get backlinks through blogs. Others include guest blogging and submitting to resource lists and link roundups.

Turning Readers into Free Leads

Once you have done everything, from optimizing your blogs for the right keywords to obtaining backlinks, and you finally start getting traffic to your site, you are probably wondering how you are supposed to turn those website visitors into leads.

Here are some of the key things to look for in your site for converting traffic into free leads:

  • Ensure that you’re getting the right traffic. Some website managers get the idea to write about anything that will drive traffic, as opposed to writing about the topic or industry that the business is about. This may be successful for driving traffic to the site, but those visitors will not submit forms or call your business.
  • Make sure your website design is up to par. If your site is difficult to navigate or people think the site looks out-of-date, they won’t be interested in going any further than either reading your blog. A good website design keeps users interested and guides them around the website with ease.
  • Include a call-to-action. Somewhere on your site, whether in the header or in the D-Column, there has to be a call-to-action. In fact, we suggest having multiple. A good call-to-action is typically a phone number, form that can be submitted right on the page, or button that takes the user to a page to fill out the form.
  • Find your Unique Selling Proposition. The people who visit your site are most likely visiting your competitors’ sites as well. You need something to stick out from the competition.
  • Do what you can to build trust. Everyone is wary of internet scams. This leads to potential customers avoiding perfectly legitimate businesses because they aren’t positive that they are trustworthy. To gain that trust, you can show Google reviews in the D-Column of your site and put any badges that you may have in the header.

These are a few of the best ways to change the way people view your site and interact with your site and ultimately turn them from traffic to leads.

Getting Professional Help for Blog Lead Generation

You have seen in this article that blogging with the intent of getting free leads is a lot more than just writing content. There’s a lot that goes into it and it requires constant work and attention. That means that business owners and managers probably won’t have time in the day to effectively utilize a blog for free lead generation.

Instead of handling this mountainous task in-house, look towards an agency that specializes in SEO. This will free up time for you and guarantee that the job is done right.