Successful Blogging Generates Leads
When one of my client’s blogs reached 3000 visitors per day, they got a good glimpse of how many leads search engines could potentially deliver in a full year.
I’ve had one of my own blogs hit 5000 visitors per day with 8000 pageviews per day, and it drove considerable ad revenue. And when it comes to content strategy and advanced SEO, blog posts are your most valuable assets. This is because more value can delivered to readers via a blog post.
Another client, a major manufacturer retail brand said “I can’t believe the conversion rates.” And others commented on how visitors stay and read blogs for long periods — engagement and significance. And significance means preferences. And still other clients view their webstats and realize that their blogs generate most of their site traffic from Google, Facebook or Twitter.
If having a million visitors a year to your website sounds interesting to you, then read on to discover how blogging actually could solve your most pressing marketing pains too. Of course, the big pain is acquiring new leads and customers.
Easing your business pains is easy: attract new visitors, nurture leads, and keep them loyal. Customers are looking for great content which creates the buying experience they want to have.
Any Prospect Will Check You Out
Sure you can advertise with a big budget and get easy leads via Google or Facebook. Funny thing though, is that prospects arriving via advertising don’t convert to sales right away. Who trusts advertising? They check your content to learn the truth and get a clearer picture.
So why do they end up on your blog? They know your blog has news, spontaneous personal comments, insight, and interesting perspectives which help visitors understand your value proposition clearly and enjoy their shopping experience. Too often, website marketing landing pages don’t hit the mark with visitors.
Blogs instead, are the path visitors feel help them build a feeling (emotion) that you’re trustworthy, reputable, relevant, competent. They want to like you too and be better informed about the decision they have to make. This is so they can feel confident you’re the right one (company) to solve their pains.
3 things needed: Relevance, Trust and Performance.
They demand that you run through this gauntlet of authenticity.
Giving Google and Visitors What They Like
What’s not understood about search engine rankings and traffic is that Google values well-written, authoritative, fresh, and persuasive blog posts. Valuable blog posts remain ranked on Google for a long time, and continuously generate leads for many years.
I’ve had posts rank well for 10 years. Evergreen blog posts kept fresh can produce leads for a long time.
Generally, the information contained in blogs is enriched, attractive, helpful and assists the visitor’s exploration of a company’s products and services. Blogs help create a pleasant, more personalized customer experience.
What Makes Blogs More Successful?
There’s a lot that makes a great blog post. These are the top ingredients cited by a number of top online resources:
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- longer blogs (3,000 to 10,000 words)
- more editing and perfecting done (sometimes hiring an editor)
- compelling headings
- more visuals and better visuals
- integrated within the digital marketing strategy
- publishing more posts
- promoted on social media and paid ppc ads
- contain lists, news, data, and how to articles
- has links to downloadable eguides and ebooks
- contains videos or webinars
- well search engine optimized
- the value proposition is made very clear
- contained a pain point in a headline
- effective calls to action (via testing) and highly visible, direct links to your sales pages
- cites business cases and testimonials
Whether in the hotel industry, real estate sector, stock investing sector, travel sector, entertainment sector, or digital marketing agency segment, blogging generates significant value by creating good experiences and exciting visitors. And some bloggers have built up significant talent within one industry. Some are major influencers.
In Any Industry, Blogs Power up Sales
Right now during this latest stock market boom period, consider how much sales revenue a public listed company or AI stock market forecasting firm could generate. And how about any kind of bio-tech, software, IT, or other tech company who needs big exposure to find investors?
And there are few limits for Realtors who want to generate real estate leads right now before the big spring sales season. Most Realtors have no trouble finding buyers, yet reaching home sellers is a tough task. Not many homeowners are selling their home.
However, if you know why they aren’t selling and what their goals are, you might be able to get their attention in a great blog post.
With respect to blogs generally, next to Youtube videos (video blogging), they are most desired form of online content due to some features I’ll tell you about below. People like Youtube videos but videos don’t convey the details calmly. Videos are high on hype and personality, but fall short on proof of delivery. That’s why people read your web pages.
How Do You Create EPIC Excellent Blogs? (click here to see below)
How do you create epic level blogs and get them ranked at the top of Google’s search results? Well, that requires some hard work, strategy and expertise, which is the magic I perform for my clients.
The point for you about blogging is that it has to be done well. Most business people don’t do blogging well because they don’t take the time and effort to be epic or strategic.
Reach is the First Step to Sales Success
Blogs Make it Easier for Your Customers to Approach You
Confusion, fear, trepidation, and uncertainty. This is what many visitors feel as they surf the web. With everything online today, consumers feel overwhelmed and tricked. They’re more likely to choose vendors who make things easy to understand and are approachable.
Blogs make people, companies and brands more approachable, relatable, comfortable and friendlier. This is critically important in this era where products, services and value propositions are so complex and hard to comprehend.
People are discouraged easily. Breaking the ice for thousands of prospects isn’t easy, yet a good blog strategist can make visitors feel welcomed, at home and a part of the spirit.
Blogs are a gateway page into your website, and they help to build velocity in the visitors experience. If they’re stirred by the blog, they delve into the company’s website with zest and high expectations, with more commitment to purchase.
Of course, if a company’s value proposition sucks and isn’t competitive, then it will be a hollow visit with high bounce rates.
10 Benefits for You If You Blog
Blogs reach a lot of prospects and influencers. Here’s at least 10 benefits of high quality blogging.
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- improves digital marketing strategy (creating content via analytics and the strategic plan focuses efforts for better results, and avoids lead funnel leakage, and improved SEO adds value to entire marketing mix)
- grows reach (making the company, brand and product widely known)
- generates emotional impact (creates a strong impression that makes the visitor pay attention)
- elevates your brand (helping to get value proposition across laser clear, and building relevance and trust)
- builds authority (convincing prospects you know the industry and products, and them, and achieving credibility to influencers, scientists, journalists and others)
- builds trust (creating a symbiosis between your brand and the prospect)
- creates new leads (generating new visitors and repeart visitors for new sales leads and moving them to contact a sales rep)
- helps customer loyalty (keeping current customers engaged and loyal even when they’re searching the internet for alternatives and keep finding your website)
- achieves higher search engine rankings (creating fresh content for search engines, and generating new backlinks from other websites who report your great post)
- improve social media distribution (social posts need news or entertainment to get shared)
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How to Improve Your Posts
Besides excellent, original and helpful content including data, opinions, videos, photos and service details, you need to have a hook. The hook relates to the pain point the customer is struggling with (e.g., getting seller leads, or low traffic on an IT startup’s website).
Choose The Right Topic: The topic then is vital and must relate to the top pain they’re feeling right now. For Realtors, it is new leads, especially homeowners with homes to sell. Words like leads, closing, sell home, home price, bidding wars, showings, mls listings, mortgage pre-qualifying, and referals are all words related to their pain.
Magnify: Take the topic and their pain points and magnify the issues in the copy. This opens up their emotions and desire for a solution. You’re growing their intent and encouraging to solve things now instead of losing them.
Show Good Judgement and Empathy: Your topics, words, info, and content style indicates whether you’re credible and not a waste of time. They believe your first thought is truly to help them without anything in return because they don’t you well enough yet. Relationships need to evolve.
Solve their Actual Problem: Don’t hit them with pop ups and trial closings, but instead give them great info that helps visitors feel they can solve their pressing pain point such as acquiring new leads.
Use Lead Magnets: By offering something valuable in the post such as a downloadable doc such as a free market report, free glossy calendar for subscribing, contest entry, or a free baby memory book (mailed to them) are ways to enticing high quality prospects to contact them.
Call to Action (CTA): Invitation: Ask them to subscribe or ask you a question about their most pressing issue. What is it they’re thinking that’s the next step in their success, but they can’t seem to do it?
For real estate agents as an example, it can be overwhelming to think about a website with a full CRM they like, and all the work and decisions it entails. Not many Realtors have good websites. They don’t even know what a good website is or how it works to create leads (They should read my blogs!).
Your Blogs Help Differentiate You
Web designs and messaging are similar, especially via SMS, Facebook and mobile web browsers). It is tough to differentiate yourself to impact clients or consumers. Customers only engage with you when they think you have something potentially better than the competition and when they find you personally compatible.
Blogs Are Engaging
Every blog has a valuable viewpoint. Get this viewpoint right and you will find visitors get engaged in responding, and some will leave a comment. Comments help to build credibility in the topic and your voice. Comments are spidered by Google and they help to elevate search engine rankings.
As mentioned in another post that users behavior is the new search algorithm, comments and long time-on-page tells Google the blog and your site was useful to the visitor (they didn’t bounce off). This raises relevance and rankings.
Research shows that old blog posts generate 6 times the number of leads. Why is that? Well, old blogs have likely been read many times, have higher search engine rankings, and are trusted by readers. It takes time for marketing to make a big impact, and when it’s made many impressions at different times in the customer’s buying journey, they may finally agree with what you’ve said and understand it emotionally. That old blog that’s kept fresh remains the most powerful source of leads and sales a company has.
Success Points to Review
Is Your Blog on a Great Topic? Why is yours the right topic, with the right narrative, is authoritative and adds genuine pain easing value? If it’s topical, entertaining, and makes people look smart about their own values, it gets shared on social media. A post can go viral too.
Is it well search engine optimized? When it’s done well within a strong search engine optimization strategy, it can rank for specific high converting keyword phrases.
Flow and nice reading experience: Great posts have a great headline, a hook to draw the reader in and a nice flow that makes it an interesting reading experience.
Abandon Your Old Style of Writing and Communicating
It’s all about communication styles and if yours is the common, tired style that gets ignored, your lead funnel will stay empty.
Skilled formal copywriters have a tough time blogging because it requires a lot of mental gymnastics and a customer focus. You must hit their pain point right away and never let go.
Today, blogs are tremendously pressured to achieve many things. It’s not enough to do one or two things well in your post, you may have to ace 6 or 7 objectives simultaneously as mentioned above (SEO, conversion etc.). And of course, optimizing your posts for Google and Bing is key.
That’s why hiring a really good SEO/Content Strategist makes so much sense. You don’t really more pain do you? Outsourcing means reaching your sales goals.
Why Don’t Corporations Do Blogging Well?
Big corporations are less dependent on blogging, and sometimes don’t want to do blogs because it is seen as lowering or confusing their brand. Many times, corporate brands are stiff and impersonal, because that stiff messaging is laser clear and often effective. They feel blogs can ruin their carefully crafted imagery and messages.
Brands have brand guidelines and this makes using keywords creatively very difficult. And there are legal constraints too. I’ve worked for such a company where every work is combed over by several lawyers before going live. “Going viral” is something that strikes fear in them.
This presents an opportunity for small to medium sized companies to jump into the content, keyword, and topical gaps left by the big corporations. This is how bloggers can create blogs that generate millions of views per year. And that’s just one blog post.
Blogging the Best Route to Success Online
If you haven’t taken blogging seriously, you know know it can be one way to build significant market presence and become a market leader.
Keep in mind that blogs contain great info, captivating topics, descriptive charts, videos, enticing photos, and more. When you consider it, blogs are a power-packed gift to customer prospects.
And if Youtube videos or special media are your real sales superstars, then blogs can help feed them.
If you utilize analytics software and predictive analytics solutions, you can learn more about what visitors like in your posts in particular, and even what they might want to read next.
Call to Action: Hire an SEO/Content Specialist
Even if I wanted to leave content strategy and SEO, I can’t. It’s the best way to build results whether it’s in real estate marketing, e-retail stores, travel sites, or software app marketing. And someone has to do it well for the client.
The way to really excel in creating leads and sales from blogging is to hire someone skilled in blogging, SEO, and social media. Together with your industry experience and insight, you can produce some outstanding posts. If you don’t have those assets, and the blogger has experience and talent in your industry, you can rely on them to blog successfully.
I’ve been blogging in many sectors such as IT, real estate, finance, HR, entertainment, marketing and sports and have learned a tremendous amount from research and assessing analytics.
The economic recovery is not far off, so you need to think about your own pressing pain points and what’s stopping you from resolving them? Whatever it is, begin now and be committed to it.
I will be a huge asset for your marketing and lead generation efforts. Contact Gord at 416 998 6246 to discuss.
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