Blogging for Lead Gen: 5 Best Practices

Blogging for Lead Gen: 5 Best Practices:
Savvy business owners have been using blogging to generate new leads for their products and services for years now, and they’re reporting impressive results.
If your marketing goals include increasing qualified traffic to your website and gaining greater visibility with your target market, the benefits of blogging are clear—but maximizing this strategy takes more than typing up a few posts and hoping for the best!
Smart business blogging requires smart business blogging habits… and here are five tested-and-true tips to get you on the right track:

• Put great content FIRST. Providing valuable, relevant information that your leads (and your current customers) care about is the first step to creating an engaging blog. Try offering tips, tricks and hints for using your products more effectively, or offer recent news about big changes or developments in your industry. If your content is interesting, people will want to share it, both on their own blogs and via social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google+.

• Set up a posting schedule to keep your blog fresh. You don’t have to publish every single day, but you do need to keep a regular posting schedule. Take time to map out what and when you’re going to post for the next few months, and you’ll find blogging less of a chore when the time comes to write. Of course, that doesn’t mean you can’t tweak as you go—but a bit of planning can save you time and trouble later. And remember: Regularly updated content is something the search engines love.

• Create easy ways to enjoy your content. An organized blog is an easy blog to enjoy. Use categories and tags to make it simple for your readers to find the content they care about most. Create categories by making a list of your most important or often-used topics, and use tags to label more specific content on your posts. By implementing that simple bit of organization, your visitors will be able to click through both your categories and your tags to find more content that interests them.

• Use keywords throughout your blog. If you’re using search engine optimization or search engine marketing to drive more traffic to your website, be sure to use those same keywords as your categories and tags, and throughout the content you publish. Between regular content updates and keyword usage, Google and Bing won’t be able to resist you… and neither will the leads who spot you in their results!

• Build a connection with your leads. Be sure to encourage comments on your posts by asking questions and by responding to anyone who leaves a comment of their own. In addition, don’t forget to provide lots of ways to get in touch if your readers want to know more. Provide links back to your site, an email address and even a phone number… as well as links where they can find you on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.

Business blogging is a terrific way to increase your ranking in the search engines, draw targeted traffic to your website and generate qualified leads. Start out with these five smart strategies, and you’ll get more value out of every post.