HOW TO TURN A BLOG POST INTO A LEAD GENERATOR

Blogging is seen to many as a nice to have and not a core focus of their digital business which I feel is a critical mistake for many sites make by ignoring the medium or discounting it as a way to drive leads. While many blog strategies focus on creating complementary content to support your more conversion orientated landing pages, it does not mean that your blog posts themselves cannot be direct lead generators.

Depending on the niche or sector of the market you are trying to target, you’ll find that your search traffic comes from a range of keyword combinations. To the untrained eye, this all looks like a mess of text but if you take your time to curate and deep dive into the numbers and questions asked by potential customers about your service you’ll start to see patterns emerge.

Patterns that may not be ideal for conversion-related pages but perfectly suited to a more contextual experience, like that of a blog post. By creating a more informative and highly relevant piece that speaks to not only the consumers need but their archetype or situation. You’ll also be able to appeal directly to them and turn a blog post into a lead generation tool with limited slippage as compared to complimentary content.

Keyword research

If you’re going to create a blog post that successfully reaches the right users, you need to know what people are searching for, and this is where keyword research comes in. You can use tools like Google Trends, Google Autosuggest, Google Ads planner; YouTube Reach planner, UberSuggest, Keyword.io, Aherfs and more. There are plenty of tools to extract keyword data; it’s all up to you on how many sources you want to use to get a comprehensive view of your industries level of interest.

Protip! If you want to collect question-related search queries in your Google Analytics passively, you can do so using this Regex hack.

Once you have completed your keyword research, its time to categorise these keywords, depending on what you are trying to achieve, you may want to categorise them by archetype, into search intent and content topics.

Once you have found several words that lean to a specific archetype or question is time to ask yourself what these people want to read when performing these searches.

Qualitative research

In addition to your keyword research, you may want to look into additional data such as

• Customer feedback
• UX reports
• Industry journals
• and sentiment on social media and sites like Quora, where you can extract other data into the thinking of your target audience.

If you have no such data and you’re starting from scratch, you could use social media polls and promote it to the right audience with targetted ads or you can create a survey and send it out to a select audience via email.

Once you have this data, you can apply it to your content writing and provide a more in-depth answer than that of any of your competitors.

Internal interlinking

Now that your article is written and posted on your site, the first thing you need to do is scrape your site and look for viable internal interlinking opportunities. Look at landing pages across your website or old blog posts where you mention relevant keywords and update them to link to your new article.

What this will do is drive users to the article via established pages sourcing traffic as well as passing link equity to your new article.

Content amplification

Paid amplification is often a step site owners skip because they feel that blogging should be attracting traffic naturally. Still, as markets become more competitive, you cannot leave anything to chance. You should start to take additional steps to get traffic to these pages as soon as possible.

You can start by creating a search ads campaign on Google Ads and Microsoft ads and begin driving search traffic from Google and Bing to your article. These search campaigns will give you initial traffic so you can gauge the effectiveness of your content without relying on improved rankings. This initial traffic may also lead to your first network shares via traditional social media or dark social media as readers want to share this valuable piece with someone they know.

Next phase would be to put together a campaign on social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram and driving targetted traffic based on interest sets to your article. This will not only send traffic to your site but encourage sharing within these networks and establish a base for this content to be syndicated via social media.

If your content is appealing to a social audience such as food or travel, it may even lead directly to leads as you content and audience match perfectly.

Lastly, if you have an email database, you could promote your article via a general email unless it is too niche for your entire user base. If so you may want to segment your email list before sending off a mail.

Content outreach

So we’ve come to the end of tasks entirely under our control. Now its time to reach out and expand our efforts offsite. If you’ve created a high-quality piece of content over time, you will gather some organic links, but we shouldn’t leave this to chance if we can help it and this is where link building comes into the equation.

You will now need to scour the web via various search engines not only Google, since these results are customised, and you may miss out on valuable placements.

I recommend using:

• Google
• Bing
• DuckDuckGo
• dSearch

If you have any search engines in your local area, you may want to use those too, such as Yandex in Russia.

Start looking for articles that provide complementary information or would benefit from linking to your comprehensive piece. Once you’ve made a list of these articles, try to reach out to the webmasters directly via email or their social media channels, and in some cases, the comment section fo their blog works too.

Once you’ve made contact, state your case on why you would want a link and what you can offer them in return for providing you with a link if they’re a tough negotiator.

Turn blogs into cash flow.

As you monitor the performance of your blog post at your discretion, you may feel it your amplification efforts should be reduced and allow the organic reach it now gets to be the sole driver of traffic to the article. At this point, you can now enable the post to start earning back what you spent on application and turn into a net positive in terms of ROI over time.

While that post continues to bring in traffic, you can use your budget to focus on repeating the process on another niche with another targetted piece and start building several content streams that will be highly contextual lead generators over time.

In some cases, these posts could turn into what some call “anchor posts” as they bring in large amounts of traffic. In most cases, they may not bring in high volumes but have high conversion rates as they speak to a select group but resonate with that group so well, that it turns a more significant percentage of readers into leads.

About the Author

Che Kohler is the co-founder of nichemarket, a South African Business Directory and digital marketing agency. He is an avid blogger who specialises in writing about marketing tech and cryptocurrency.

Source: appclonescript.com