- Businesses that blog receive 67% more leads than those that don’t. (Source: TruConversion.com)
- 57% companies have acquired customers from their blog. (Source: Hubspot.com)
- Businesses that blog get 97% more links directed to their sites. (Source: Business2community.com)
- 81% businesses believe that their blogs are critical to their success. (Source: Smallbusiness.yahoo.com)
- By writing 21-54 blog posts, you can increase blog traffic by up to 30%. (Source: Impactbnd.com)
Given these stats, it’s not too difficult to understand that blogging gives you unlimited opportunities to convert strangers to your sites into actual paying customers.
Remember, inbound marketing is all about drawing traffic to your site and converting that traffic into sales-ready leads. And content could be one of the greatest inbound marketing tools in your marketing arsenal.
Building great content, especially blogs, could help you drive users or readers to your website. Therefore, instead of physically going out in the market to promote your business, it makes sense to write informative blogs for your target audience. Because of people visiting links directing to your site, you’ll be able to able to achieve higher search rankings on Google and other search engines.
If you are consistently posting blogs, it will surely help you acquire leads. However, creating blogs for lead-generation implies that you need to acquire best blogging practices. To help you successfully drive traffic to your site and convert that traffic into sales-ready leads, here we present to you some crucial tips that you need to follow.
1. Make a Content Strategy
Although everyone has a strategy in place, it is essential to make sure that your content strategy takes different aspects of your business into account. Many marketers just miss the fact that a well-thought-of strategy is essential to timely implementation of the plan to achieve your business goals and objectives.
A sound content strategy implies that you analyze and understand what your users want to read. In addition, you must also carefully mull over what business attributes you would need to promote in your blogs in order to build a strong brand identity for your business. It also involves getting acquainted with the best keywords for your business to ensure higher visibility for your blogs. Contextual questions, email marketing, conversion rate optimization strategies and long-form content plans must also be clearly chalked out.
When writing your blog, its tone and voice will be important to make a desired impact on the readers. You should also decide on the tone keeping in mind the type of business you run. You must also decide on how to represent your company in your blog articles. All such precautions are essential for engaging your readers in your business.
2. Use Powerful Keywords
A trick to ensure that your inbound marketing blogs rank higher on the search result pages is to place right, relevant and best keywords relating to your business in your blogs. Search engines index blogs by searching for the relevant keywords. Ensuring powerful and relevant keywords will ensure that your website is displayed in top search results.
Every business has thousands of keywords. However, you should do well to know the perfect set of keywords for ranking purpose. Before you start writing your blogs, you must find out right keywords to focus on. But note that highly popular keywords are also the most difficult also when it comes to ranking your websites higher as that will require intense blogging and a lot of time before you move up a little.
A good option is to rely on keywords with lesser competition. This will ensure that your blogs rank high quickly on such keywords. To find out such keywords, research by using Google’s Keyword Analyzer Tool. But don’t forget to keep writing high-quality blogs with keywords that you find are performing well in order to promote your blogs on search results.
3. Answer Right Questions
Just ensuring the right keywords for your blogs doesn’t guarantee higher SERP ranking for your blogs. Nowadays, people search on SERPS to find out relevant answers to their questions related to different businesses and industries. Contextual search is gaining importance in search rankings. Therefore, when writing your blogs, you must do well to address the questions that your target audiences are seeking answers for.
To know what question you should target in your blog, a trick is to ask your sales team to make a list of the queries that prospects usually ask or enquire about. You can get such questions also from your Customer Care team. By answering these questions, you can ensure that blogs are able to resonate well with your target audience.
4. Integrate Your Blogs With Your Content Strategy
Writing blogs with right keywords and answering your audience’s questions is also not enough to rank higher on search pages. Besides these measures, ensure that your blogs are in line with your overall content strategy. This means that whenever a visitor lands up at your website from your blogs, he or she must find the rest of your content on the site relevant to what your blog is discussing.
This helps in sparking conversions and leads. Do not make usual mistake of treating your blogs as some isolated marketing ploy. Rather, your blog should ideally be an extension of your overall strategy for marketing your content.
5. Create Catchy Headlines that Convert
Catchy, powerful headlines are extremely important to ensure that your blogs are able to drive tons of traffic to your site. Your headlines ensure that readers will click on the blog link. But it makes sense to heed some handy tricks to create such attention grabbing-headlines. Experts advise to write 10 headlines on a blog topic and see which one is the exciting one for your blog. In addition, it also makes sense to run headline analyzer tests. There are umpteen tools available for the same. Coschedule Headline Analyzer test is one such popular tool.
Make sure that your target keywords and questions that you want to answer are part of your blog headlines. Also, insert the words such as ‘fear’, ‘loose’, ‘secrets’, ‘critical’, ‘hack’ and ‘dark’ to drive visitors to your blogs.
6. Use Contextual CTAs
For more lead-generation from your blog, ensure that your blogs let the readers have access to more information in case they want to dig deeper. To do this, place a CTA button at the end of your blog article. The button should take them to your long-form e-book, infographic, other blog posts or whitepaper where they can find out more on the topic discussed in the blog. By using this tactic, you turn your each blog into an efficient lead-generation machine.
Also, pay heed to right blog length. While a large number of content marketers believe shorter blogs do well, a number of case studies reveal that long-form content drives better traffic. Moreover, Google prefers longer blogs and articles for ranking purpose. But remember many readers hate skimming through very lengthy posts. So, it makes sense to write blogs that are neither too short nor too large.
7. Know What Your Users Want
Do not blog just for the sake of it. Instead, always keep an eye on the performance of your blogging efforts to know if you are hitting the target or not. One way to do is to know your users’ behavior on your blog site by using Heat Maps. It will help you understand precisely where your users click on your website. Better yet, include them in your blogging endeavors. Place micro-surveys at your blog and ask your readers what they would like to read or which headline do they like the most. This will help you build content that your users want. TruConversion.com is a great tool that can help you use heat maps and fully customizable micro surveys to boost your lead generation efforts.
Remember, blogging is not just art but also science and you need to take both of them into account in order to drive traffic and effectively generate high-quality and sales-ready leads. Don’t leave your efforts midway just because you aren’t scoring early success. Be advised that results take time to show up. Follow these 7 steps and keep posting your blogs regularly with a definite plan and soon you will experience a torrent of lead ready traffic to your site.
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