Saturday, December 21st, 2024
Generating leads and traffic to your content on your WordPress blog, becomes vitally important, as it fills a gap to get targeted visitors to your site without paid ads. This so you don’t need to rely strictly on the Search Engines, when they’re ranking your site.
Without using lead generation, you?re basically just publishing your content, then hoping that people will find your lonely sliver of a post in a virtual haystack somehow.
While at times, this does happen in real life, that is, some people will buy things on the spot once they accidentally find your site, but you know the majority won?t.
What you need is to have a lead capture system in place, so you can continue reminding your Internet audience, that your brand exists.
You can then get in touch with them later to share your news and updates, and to persuade them to move down your marketing funnel.
The Content Marketing Funnel
Before discussing the top lead generation methods, what needs to be understood is what a content marketing funnel is, and why it’s important in the overall scheme of your Affiliate Marketing strategy.
The 3 Levels Of A Content Marketing Funnel:
• Awareness Stage – This is when your target audience first becomes aware of your blog or brand. They become your leads
• Evaluation Stage ? This is where those lead evaluates whether your product or service can help them or not. At this point, your lead turns into a prospect
• Purchase Stage – This is when your prospect decides to subscribe to your service or buys your product. Your prospect becomes a customer
When you plan your content marketing strategy, your goal is to put your brand in front of as many targeted people as you can, who has no idea who you are, and turn them into customers.
Sounds like a pretty tall order, right? That?s because it kinda is, but it?s also very much doable.
Content marketing is basically a numbers game. You want to get your brand, blog, product in front of as many people as possible, who qualifies as your targeted audience.
The reason for this, is because only a small percentage of your leads will ever turn into prospects, and an even smaller number of prospects will turn into customers.
The Top 5 Ways To Generate Leads
1. Customer Centric Landing Pages
The ultimate tool for lead generation is known as the squeeze or landing page.
It’s basically just a single page, whose main purpose is to get the visitor?s email address or other contact details.
Lead magnets and appropriate inviting landing pages, work great together.
Your landing page also needs a lead form, where people can enter their name, email address, etc.
Once they enter their details, they can then get access to the promised lead magnet. It?s pretty much technically simple and straightforward in nature.
But if you want your landing page to hum however, to get great conversion rates, you need to follow a few steps.
• It Needs To Have A Killer Call to Action (CTA) – Don?t just use a generic CTA button like “submit” or “subscribe.” If you want to convince people to sign up for your list, then you need to make it highly persuasive.
Try using your lead magnet?s top benefit as your landing page?s CTA! Don?t be afraid to experiment. See what works best for your audience.
• Tell Your Leads Exactly What They?ll Get – Don?t mince words and play coy. Your landing page is your ?This Is It!? moment. List all the reasons why they can?t pass up your lead magnet.
Tell them how it will benefit them, how it can change their lives or improve their business! Use powerful and persuasive words to convince people to follow through on your CTA.
• Use Videos Images And Text On Your Landing Page – Text is powerful, but at times you need a visual medium to help sway people over to your side and your site.
If you can add a short, personal video to your landing page, doing so will make it easier for people to relate to you better.
• Have Superior Graphic Design – If you don?t have a great looking landing page design, then you could be wasting your time, as you have a split-second to get their attention.
A badly-designed landing page, can turn off visitors quickly, so make sure that it is visually appealing.
Then and only then will people actually read your landing page copy, and see if it?s something that can help them.
2. Superior Lead Magnets
Lead magnets are one of the best ways to get people to sign up to your mailing list.
You often hear this mentioned in the online marketing community over and over again because it’s true, and that’s ?The money is in the list.? Many successful marketers stand by this saying.
So, if you want people to subscribe to your list, you?re going to want to learn how to use lead magnets. Technically, lead magnets are ethical “bribes.”
This is because you?re basically “bribing” people to give up their contact details, such as their email address or phone number, in exchange for your lead magnet.
You can, of course, just put up a banner on your blog asking people to enter their name and email address, or any other info that you want, but most won’t bite.
People are going to ask themselves, ?Why should I give you my details?? or ?What?s in it for me??
And this is where the magic of lead magnets come in.
When you offer people something of “value”? that they can?t resist, something so valuable and so useful to them, is when they?re going to be more than willing to give up their contact info.
This is when they?ll say to themselves…
?I really, really need this eBook or this guide. The information is really useful. I can?t believe they?re only asking for my email address in exchange for this life-changing information!?
Do you see what happened there?
People are more easily convinced to follow your call to action, if you give them more than what they want!
There are many types of lead magnets you can use.
The most common ones you see on the Internet, are downloadable PDF eBooks, reports, white papers, checklists etc.
You?ll also see some brands, offering email courses or video courses in exchange for their email address.
To find out what the best lead magnet is for your brand or product, you may need to do some split testing.
The important thing to note, is that the best lead magnets answer people?s pain points.
Ideally, it should not be something that they can easily search on Google, and find the answer to.
Go all out on your lead magnets. Make it valuable and rewarding enough, so that your audience will feel like they really have no choice but to give up their contact details!
3. Guest Blogging
Guest blogging is a popular way, of getting new people to learn more about your brand or your business.
You?re essentially publishing your content, on someone else?s website.
You’ll get instant exposure to highly targeted traffic, and you?re able to immediately expand your network (basically widening your content marketing funnel).
Guest blogging may sound easy to do, but there?s a lot of work that happens behind the scenes.
For instance, not all of your targeted sites accepts guest posts, so you would need to search for the highly relevant authorities in your industry, who will.
You would also need to have a good track record yourself, with some type of reputation.
What this means, is that you?re not going to get accepted as a guest blogger, if no one knows who you are.
So, you need to have published some valuable blog posts on your own site (or others), to even make webmasters consider your request.
How To Guest Blog
What you can do is point them to your portfolio.
From there, they can see for themselves if you got what it takes to contribute to their blog.
When pitching your request to other blog owners, you also need to do your research, such as if they have content guidelines, or the type of content that their audience likes.
Think of yourself as someone who regularly writes for that site, and cares about their audience.
Getting your guest post request approved is the hardest part. You?re probably not going to hear back from most of them that you reached out to.
But, once you get over that hump, and you start submitting your content, that?s where the payoff begins.
Some sites have strict editorial guides that you need to follow. For instance:
• You can only use one link throughout the post
• The article needs to have a certain number of words
• You can only link to your site via the author box, etc
You?d need to take all of these into consideration, and figure out how you can write your content in such a way that people will be curious enough to want to know more about you.
This so people will want to head on over to your site, and become part of your community.
4. Target Long Tail Keywords
The foundation of a successful content marketing strategy, is your blog.
When it comes to blogging, the longer and the more informative the content is, the better it will be for your SEO efforts.
Once your content is SEO optimized, is when you’ll have a better chance of ranking higher on the search engines, which is all based on keywords.
It?s important to note that all keywords aren’t created equal. There are short keywords and long keywords.
Short keywords are 1 to 2 words in length, while long tail keywords have 3+ words.
As you can imagine, there is a ton of competition for the short tail keywords.
Usually, the sites that appear on the first page of Google for these “short tail” keywords, are well established sites with hundreds or even thousands of other sites linking to them!
So how do you think you can dethrone these authority sites, when you?ve only been around for a few months or a few years, and you’ve only got a few backlinks to your site?
This is where long-tail keywords come in.
When you target long tail keywords, you?re essentially going after keywords with lower search volumes, but with far less competition.
This means that you have a better chance of ranking on the first page of the search engines, so your target audience can find their way to your blog.
When choosing which long tail keywords to target, you need to consider the intent behind each keyword.
The 3 Basic Types Of Search Intent:
• Navigational Keywords These are searches for a particular brand or website
• Informational Keywords These are searches for a specific type of information (not commercial in nature)
• Transactional/Buyer Keywords These are searches where the user aims to carry out some type of commercial transaction
The most profitable type of keywords, are obviously the transactional/buyer keywords. These are the keywords with commercial or buyer intent behind them.
Ideally, you want to target these types of keywords, because these are the people who are ready to make a buying decision!
But, not everyone?s waiting for the opportunity to buy or spend their money, on some random product online.
Instead, the vast majority of searches are those that are informational in nature.
For your content marketing strategy, you?re going to want to target both informational and transactional long-tail keywords.
This is the best way to get the most number of search traffic, to enter your marketing funnel and become your leads!
5. The Power Of Video
There are some, who are not comfortable broadcasting themselves on video for the world to see. Some don’t like showing their face or their voice, so videos of this type isn’t for everybody.
There?s a reason why YouTube is the world?s second largest website, and that’s because video is a lot more easier to consume than text.
To produce these videos, you don?t need to invest thousands of dollars, in high-end professional grade video equipment to get started.
You can just use your smartphone camera, and start filming yourself to make your brand known to the world.
There are a variety of places where you can leverage the power of video, such as uploading them to your YouTube channel.
• When uploading your video to YouTube, on the video?s description, include links back to your blog or your landing page
• Add annotations to the video itself, to encourage people to visit your site
• Insert these videos on your blog posts, on your social media accounts, and on your landing pages
The greatest thing about video, is that you can easily get creative with it, such as embedding and sharing your videos almost anywhere on the Internet.
What this means, is that there are plenty of opportunities for people, to get to know more about you and your business.
To Get Traffic To Your Blog
Lead generation, should be at the forefront of your content marketing efforts and goals.
The reason for this, is because we know that the search engines don’t always cooperate, they can be finicky, and won’t rank your blog post on the first page of their results every time, or if ever.
So what you need, is to find and set up ways on how to capture traffic in other ways, otherwise you could be wasting your content marketing efforts, as it will just sit there idle.
By using some of the techniques outlined, which hasn’t even got into social media, you?ll be much closer to achieving the traffic and the success that you’ve dreamed of!
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