Blogging Generates Leads. Period

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Blogging generates leads. Most people just don’t get it though.

One of the most frequent questions ever asked, in all my 16 years of doing digital marketing is this: how long before blogging generates leads for your business?

The answer (you won’t like it): depends.

Before you ask that question, there are many other questions you’d need to ask yourself:

  1. What’s the business you are in exactly?
  2. Assuming you answered the question above as clearly as you could, what exactly will you blog about? [ Blogging about your business all the time — about your team meetings, about the last weekend outing, and if you go on and on about how awesome your business is — won’t cut it).
  3. As you go about blogging, what plan do you have in place to promote your blog posts? [ your blogging efforts are incomplete without promotion, distribution, and traction ].

The answers to questions 1,2, and 3 — in the form of consistent execution — must be on forever.

What’s your business and what will you blog about?

Depending on who your target audience is going to be (which in turn depends on what your business is about the problems you seek to solve), your blog takes the life of its own.

The fetchprofits blog is all about digital marketing — because that’s what we do here and we want to help small business owners get the right insights and tips on digital marketing.

Freshbooks, for instance, is a great software for freelancers to help themselves with Invoicing. On their blog, they tend to write about all sorts of things that freelancers find value from.

Campaign Monitor is an email marketing software. Their blog is focused on educating small business owners and digital marketers on the power of email marketing, email marketing automation, and more.

Most successful businesses thriving online have a blog content strategy. Period. Of course, you’d have to optimize blog posts for lead generation as well, use popups on your site, and more.

Take a look at these 22 different companies that kick ass with content marketing, and you’ll see a pattern.

Blogging Consistently Is Key

Successful blogging isn’t about shortcuts, silver bullets, and Search optimization hacking. There’s way too much fuss going on about how many blog posts you should be publishing.

Publishing velocity is the underrated, often untold blog strategy you miss.

While Huffington Post publishes one post every few seconds, Brian Dean barely published any while being successful.

You aren’t Huffington Post, Brian Dean, or James Clear. You are not Neil Patel either.

You are who you are. Pick a frequency of publishing you can commit to, and then commit to publishing regularly.

If you are consistent, you’ll generate more leads from your blogging efforts than businesses that aren’t consistent with this study from Hubspot proves.

Whatever you do, just don’t buy right into some guru’s claims that blogging is easy, that you can just publish a 6545 word blog post per week and you’ll get a million unique visitors in 6 months flat.

That won’t happen. Nada.

Use Lead Generation Elements

You can’t make blogging generate leads for you by “just blogging”. You could write all you want and publish for years altogether but just doing that won’t work.

You won’t be able to generate leads without using lead generation elements such as pop-ups, opt-in forms interspersed between your blog posts, and others.

Ensure that you generate leads from all that traffic coming in, regardless of the actual amount of traffic you get by using a tool like OptinMonster to start generating leads right away with list-building tools such as exit-intent pop-ups, embeddable forms, and more.

As such, here’s a simple three-step formula to ongoing profitability with blogging:

  • Use OptinMonster to start converting casual visitors to subscribers by building lists (depending on what offers you make)
  • Nurture your leads with Mailchimp or Drip or some other email service provider you use.
  • Push your sales emails mixed in with your normal, lead nurturing emails with a 10:1 ratio (one sales-centric email for every 9 or 10 information-based emails).

Generating leads from blogging is stage two. Stage one, however, is to generate traffic to your website through blogging.

What are you focusing on?

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