Between market research and depth of experience, generating leads from blogging is becoming more of a science than an art. As you may know, blogging is especially potent for lead generation because it allows you to target a specific customer base with an already existing interest in your services. With this in mind, it should come as no surprise to learn that today more than three out of five B2B marketers use blogs for lead generation.
Opt-Ins
Like any type of content creation, your blogging efforts should be matched with an equal amount of energy in promotion. One way to get your promotion off to a great start is to liberally use opt-in forms around in the margins around your content. This includes the sidebar, the bottom of your posts, the about page, and even the header or footer of your page. While this might seem a bit redundant, these forms serve as a powerful reminder to anyone who becomes impressed with your content at any stage of their journey through your site.
Free Content
One thing that makes some sites so successful is the amount of free content that they produceeverything from e-Books and templates to whitepapers and infographics. Valuable content gets shared and cited, which creates the traffic that can ultimately generate leads. One found that more than half of 500 pay-per-lead advertisers found whitepaper leads to be between valuable and extremely valuable.
Pop-ups
While pop-ups have earned a poor reputation over the past few years for being exploitive, obnoxious, and abusive, recent research may highlight something quite counter-intuitive: they work. In short, an opt-in pop-up designed correctly can drastically improve subscription rates while still having a negligible effect on bounce rates. If you could double your subscription rate with an intelligently designed popup that will agitate as few people as possible, why not give it a try? But proceed with caution and remember to keep your pop-up from becoming agitating or you , or even be penalized by Google.
Networking
The number of leads you create from your blog is primarily a combination of your net traffic and the percentage captured with a call to action. One way to pump up the traffic end of this equation is to integrate your blogging with major social media portals like Facebook and YouTube. Doing so your readers to share content, and according to HubSpot, of marketers collected at least one lead from Facebook in 2013. Facebook in particular is simple to integrate with effectively, especially with calls to action through the recent cover photo image as well as link-based captions in photos.
The Big Picture
If you take traditional blogging wisdom to heart, you may end up over-focused on elements that are less important to your ultimate goal of lead generation. While your blog does have to follow the lions share of the rules for bloggers, like the need to create content delivery on a sustainable schedule, you can also overlook some of these rules when they interfere with lead generation. For example, while some industries wont require great networking to create leads, others will need them just to have a shot at becoming visible in a niche with higher content saturation. Certainly this alone underlines the importance of being aware of the unique demands your niche demands of you at every step of the design process of your blogging.