Don’t have a business blog yet?
Now is the perfect time to set up a blog for your company.
Perhaps, you have a business blog. But it doesn’t collect many leads for your business.
What do you do?
First, I must note that you need to know about the topic you’ll write about on your blog.
You may hire a knowledgeable writer if you don’t know about the topic of your business.
If you know about the topic, I’ll encourage you to be passionate about it.
For writers who are not excited about the topic they write about, readers can see it in their writing. They will feel that you don’t like the topic.
Trust me, your emotions show in your content Your emotions help you write engaging content.
Creating engaging content is the toughest challenge businesses face.
Let your personality shine in your writing. Don’t be afraid to talk about yourself.
Tell readers some things about yourself.
Be human.
Business blogging doesn’t mean you talk about your company in your blog posts. Readers want to know the person behind the blog.
When you don’t talk about yourself, readers feel you’re an employee in a cubicle who writes 10 blog posts per day and can’t wait to get out.
If your content is engaging, it makes it easy to get leads. Prospects will be excited when they read your blog posts.
They’ll want to return to your blog.
Now that you know how important it is to talk about yourself in your blog posts, let’s move to the next point:
Leads.
What are leads?
Leads are individuals who are interested in buying your product or service. Some of them may not be ready to buy at the moment.
They may want to buy one or two months later. Some may even want to buy a year later.
You need to collect their emails.
When you have their emails, you’ll be able to build relationships with them via email marketing.
Email marketing is the best way to makes sales online.
The average return on email marketing is $44.25 for every dollar invested. No other marketing medium beats email in terms of revenue.
Email helps you keep in touch with your leads.
This article will teach you 8 powerful ways to collect leads on your site.
After reading this article, you’ll start collecting leads through blogging with ease.
So, let’s get started.
1. Collect leads on your homepage
The homepage is the most important page on your site.
Most new and returning visitors are likely to visit your homepage than any other page on your site.
The homepage receives lots of visitors because it’s the main address of your site. Visitors remember the address of your homepage more.
For example, Amazon is one of the most popular sites on the web. When shoppers want to buy something on Amazon, first they type its address, which is https://www.amazon.com.
Then they search for any product they want to buy from the homepage.
The benefit of maintaining an active blog is that it sends lots of visitors to your site from search engines, social media and other sites on the web.
People find your blog posts on search engines and social media. Other sites link to your blog posts too.
That’s how blogging sends lots of visits to your site.
The more people come across your blog pages on search engines and social media, the more they remember the name of your site and its address.
They will type your site’s address into the browser when they need your product.
For example, we create content a lot here at GrowthFunnel.
GrowthFunnel is an advanced popup technology that helps you collect leads efficiently on your site.
A lot of our blog posts rank high in Google and Bing. Prospects also find our content on social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter.
The more people come across our blog posts and read them, the more they know about our tool.
When they need our tool, they’ll remember the address or the business name first than any blog posts.
That’s how blogging helps the homepage become a more important part of your business.
For businesses that don’t blog, their homepages become less known than those that blog.
If your business is blogging, then you should collect leads on your homepage.
When you visit the homepage of Digiboost, a digital marketing agency for small business based in San Antonio, Texas, you’ll see that they collect leads.
For example, Databox collects leads on its homepage. They also maintain an active blog.
A Maryland law firm like Nicholas A. Parr blogs and collects leads on its homepage. It’s easier for businesses that blog regularly to collect leads.
2. Webinars
Webinars can help you generate high-quality leads.
If a prospect has taken the time to sign up for your webinar, it means they care a lot about the topic you’ll discuss. They want to learn.
Webinars help you stand out in your niche. A few businesses create webinars.
Pick a topic your prospects want to learn. Create a high-quality webinar where you reveal or show things visitors won’t find on your blog.
Your blog itself is a key here. You’ll use your blog to create awareness for your webinar.
Prospects visit your blog first. Your blog is where they see an opt-in form that tells them about your webinar.
When they fill their details in the opt-in box, they become leads.
For example, Kissmetrics uses its blog to promote an upcoming webinar.
In the above screenshot, you can see
- the date and time of the webinar
- its topic
- the expert who will organize the webinar
- and a call-to-action button that asks you to register.
Kissmetrics uses webinars to generate leads and turn those leads into clients.
If a visitor doesn’t attend the webinar, you can contact he/she again. You can promote an upcoming webinar.
You can give those who didn’t attend the webinar an opportunity to watch it before a certain date you remove it from your site.
Webinars are an online version of seminars or workshops.
Webinars are different from other content online because attendees can ask questions and receive answers.
Attendees can interact with you the way they can’t do in articles, e-books, videos, and podcasts.
Webinars allow you to build deeper relationships with your prospects.
The information you offer in your webinar shouldn’t be on your blog. The content of your webinar should be unique and offer value those who didn’t attend or subscribe won’t get.
3. Let prospects use Google, Facebook or Twitter to sign in
Google is the most visited website in the world. Facebook is the biggest social media platform in the world.
Since Google and Facebook aren’t going away soon, you can let your visitors start using your app or log-in to buy your product using their Google or Facebook accounts.
Twitter is another popular platform on the web.
Why should you use Google, Facebook or Twitter to let prospects sign in?
Most web users hate creating another usernames and passwords on top of those they have.
For example, I’ve signed up for tens of websites already. I had to create a username and password for each of them.
The sign-up process is annoying sometimes, especially when the form is long. Most online forms are boring because they ask for the same information you gave elsewhere.
Instead of making visitors fill boring forms, ask them to use their Google or Facebook accounts to sign in.
Because these services are popular on the web, there’s a high chance that most of your visitors have accounts on them.
Most people are logged-in on their Google and Facebook accounts when they are online.
Google or Facebook help you save visitors’ time. You’ll also gain more leads or users for your services too.
For example, Quora lets you use their platform using your Google or Facebook account to sign in.
Medium lets you sign up using Google, Facebook, Twitter or your email account.
Google, Facebook or Twitter have information you may need about prospects.
These popular services know your prospects’ first and last names, email, location and more.
4. Write headlines that draw attention
The headlines of your blog posts should capture the attention of the right people.
The right people are your ideal customers. Write headlines that draw their attention to your site.
When your headlines attract the right people, getting them to convert into leads becomes an easy process for you.
Karen Brody is a relationship coach for men. She blogs on her site. I like her headlines a lot. The headlines of her articles will capture the attention of any man.
A great headline will not only get the attention of your ideal customers, it’ll also get them to read and share your article with their network.
So much content is getting shared on social media. You need your blog post to stand out.
Your blog post can’t stand out with a mediocre headline. You need great headlines.
Great headlines are the first things people check in a link on social media.
Social media users will click a link to an article that has a great headline because it tells them something they want to read or hear.
How do you write great headlines?
There are four things you should know before writing a headline for your blog post:
- It should be Useful
- It should give a sense of Urgency
- It should be Unique
- It should be Ultra-Specific
These four U’s are important when writing headlines for your articles.
A headline you write should have, at least, two or three U’s in it.
5. Create opt-in offers visitors can’t resist
You need an offer that will entice visitors to give their email addresses.
A lot of business blogs collect emails today.
Web users know how much you want their contact information.
They know that you’re using your free content as a bait to get them into your email list.
When prospects feel your offer is a bait, then you’ve lost. Most of those visitors are less likely to convert. They won’t give you their email addresses.
That’s why you need an amazing offer that makes them give you their emails immediately.
It should be an offer they can’t wait to see in their inbox.
When you create an offer like this, you’ll collect a lot of leads on your site.
The average web user probably sees 10 – 50 opt-in offers on various blogs per day. Make your offer stand out.
Give visitors something they won’t get elsewhere, except they sign up on your blog. For example, Big Sun Community Solar, a solar company in San Antonio Texas uses an energy bill calculator to lure prospects into dropping their emails.
I like how HubSpot uses amazing opt-in offers to get visitors to subscribe to their blog posts.
6. Blog on a consistent basis
I value high-quality blog posts.
When I come across an article on the web, the first thing I do is to ascertain it’s a high-quality blog post. I browse the article and judge it.
If it doesn’t look like a quality post, I don’t read it.
Quality is important when blogging. Quantity is also as important as quality.
You need both.
However, sometimes, you may take too long writing that masterpiece.
If you’re spending days, weeks or months, writing a single blog post, then you won’t be able to collect lots of leads.
You need a lot of blog posts to collect a lot of leads.
The more blog posts you have, the more visitors will discover your site in search engines and social media platforms.
Don’t spend too much time creating a single blog post. You’ll never have a perfect blog post.
Someone is always going to create something great in the future. It may take some time, but competitors will eventually catch up.
But you can beat them through numbers.
If you’ve got hundreds or thousands of quality posts ranking in search engines, it’ll be difficult for them to get to your level.
For example, HubSpot publishes a lot of blog posts per day. They publish up to five. None of their competitors are doing that.
That’s why they receive millions of visits per month from both search engines and social media.
7. Share case studies
Even Google, the biggest search engine in the world, publishes case studies to attract customers using its blog site called Think with Google.
For example, Google published a case study of how a game publisher reached 2 million subscribers on YouTube and grabbed more than 1 billion active users in the process.
Not only Google. Even Twitter publishes case studies too.
Below is a case study of how Coca-Cola used Twitter to generate awareness for its brand.
If Google and Twitter are publishing case studies, why not your business?
Your business needs case studies to build trust with leads.
8. Let other bloggers contribute to your blog
As I wrote earlier in this article, quality and quantity both matters when you’re trying to get lots of traffic from search engines and social media platforms.
One of the best ways to get lots of quantity and quality content on your blog is to accept guest bloggers.
If your site has some decent domain authority (DA) and ranks high for phrases in search engines, you should have no problem finding guest bloggers.
In fact, they’ll come to you asking to guest publish on your blog.
Keep in mind that there are a lot of guest bloggers out there who are doing it for links. They try to send lots of backlinks back to their blogs or sites.
Don’t allow guest bloggers that publish low-quality content to get links.
Thoroughly review each post before accepting it.
Create some guidelines guest authors must follow.
Don’t allow a guest post on a topic that is already covered on your blog
Each guest article should bring a new story to your blog. In fact, the author should share his/her unique experiences in the post.
There are lots of decent guest bloggers out there.
By allowing them to publish on your blog, you’ll have lots of high-quality posts that will receive traffic from search engines and social media.
You can then use blogger outreach service to source genuine white hat backlinks from other bloggers in your niche. This will bring more traffic to your business blog.
That means more leads for your site.
Conclusion
Business blogging is the best way to turn visitors into high-quality leads.
Blogging on your company’s site lets you increase the number of visitors your overall site receives.
Traffic is important to selling online.
More traffic means more leads. And more leads means more sales.
You need to collect visitors’ emails on your site.
That’s easy with GrowthFunnel.
GrowthFunnel is an advance popup tool that will help you collect emails with ease on your site.
It’s free to start using GrowthFunnel. Sign up today.
