Optimized blogs are money-making blogs. Period. Learn how to optimize blogs for lead generation in this post and change how you do blogging (for business).
I recently published a LinkedIn Newsletter talking about how business owners, startup founders, content creators, self-employed professionals and everyone else needs to change their marketing mindset.
Change the mindset to a marketing strategy that’s more comprehensive, coherent, long-term, and sustainable. This is as against the tendency to “not do anything about marketing at all” all the way to “chasing the latest fad in marketing…” — both being huge problems that beset content creators, bloggers, and business owners.
Want to watch a video on How to Optimize Blog posts For Lead Generation instead of reading? 👇
But I know that a lot of business owners, online creators, bloggers, and founders are actually lost when it comes to trying to make the content strategy work for their respective business and hence generate leads from blogging.
Here are ways to optimize blog posts to get leads from your blogging efforts, assuming you get the “blogging part” right:
Blog consistently, no matter what
Before we get to any of this, it is important to understand that your blog strategy should be in place, and that you are committed to publishing high-quality content on a consistent basis.
In the last 18 years, I’ve noticed that lots of business owners have this thing for perfection.
Perfection causes delay.
Because you punish yourself with the need to get everything right, what really happens is that you slow down the process of creating blog posts and publishing them on that publishing frequency that is actually optimal for your business.
Add to that, you will also struggle with several aspects of so-called SEO best practices that you end up writing long blogs (when you can’t).
I repeat: Blogging on a frequency (called publishing velocity) is what really matters. It’s the number one SEO strategy.
Blogging frequency could be something like 1 post per week, or 3 posts per week, or 5 posts per week (depending on your time, resources, and speed of publishing that’s possible for you).
While you are at it, be sure to be blogging for a purpose:
Watch this video to learn more about purposeful blogging:
Add calls to action to your Blog Posts
Each blog post must have a few calls to action embedded inside that blog post. You could have Calls to action (CTA) embedded in the middle of the blog post or at the end of the blog post or both (middle and the end of the blog posts).
Use a few tools third party plugins for wordpress to enable calls-to-action inside your blog post:
Or, you could use Gutenberg block builder to add calls to action inside your blog posts if you need help here is a video:
Yet another option is to use the GeneratePress block builder (available for free) that you could use.
Watch this video to learn exactly how to add CTA buttons to your blog posts:
Use the sidebar
All wordpress blogs come with a sidebar that’s visible on the extreme right side of a blog page.
That’s valuable real estate. Personally, I don’t like sidebars (and I don’t use these).
You can.
Most businesses and bloggers tend to use a sidebar to display widgets like recent posts, recent comments, and more.
You could do better.
Add graphic overlays, buttons banners or anything of that sort including visual aids (if needed), if you like to push people to take an action that’s relevant to your business.
Offer content upgrades
Offering content upgrades is one of the best ways to generate leads for your business. It’s not only a great way to generate leads for your business but is also a way to ensure that you have highly relevant and high-intent audiences signing up as leads thanks to the content upgrades you offer.
Content upgrades are mostly contextual in nature.
Typically, somebody who is reading about a certain topic is likely to sign up for the content upgrade which is on the same topic because it adds value to the particular blog post that you just published.
Let’s say you just wrote a blog post on Facebook ads, you’d then offer a content upgrade for a Facebook Ads checklist.
If you wrote a blog post on WordPress security, your content upgrade could be a handy checklist of the exact steps to take to make WordPress more secure.
Get the drift?
Offer lead magnets
If you think that content upgrades take away too much time or work or resources for you, consider giving out all-purpose general lead magnets. Technically, content upgrades are also lead magnets but lead magnets are more general in nature, but still be specific to the niche of your blog or about topics that relate to your business.
For example, let’s say you run a SaaS business around live streaming software. You can then give away a lead magnet like an eBook or a PDF document with handy tips and tricks to do live streaming better or on How to Make money with live streaming or on Live Streaming Gear.
Need help? Read:
Use a sticky bar or “Hello Bar”
Look at the top of this blog you are reading, and you will find a hello bar or sticky bar.
These are great ways to drive lead sign ups without going intrusive or push offers to customers on their faces.
Note that you can keep changing the actual offer on the sticky bears, depending on your offers at any time.
Make the offer, point the CTA (Call to action) to a landing page or a destination of your choice to allow your visitors to take action.
Use tools like Unbounce and OptinMonster to create amazing, fully-customizable, and those equipped with advanced features such as page-targeting, geo-targeting, and more.
Deploy Pop-ups
You can hate Pop-ups all you want, but they work. What’s not recommended is to “insult” or “shame” those who don’t want to take up on your offer.
Yes, there are popups that insult.
For instance, Popup says: Get 10% Off On Fashion Sale with a button that goes: Yes.
There’s another button that says, “No, I am happy dressed like a hobo”.
Please, don’t do that.
Use tools like Unbounce Popups, OptinMonster, ConvertPro, or LeadPages to add popups to your WordPress blog.
Since we are on the topic of Popups, there are other ways of lead generation closely related to popups as well:
- Slide-ins: Lead generation opt-in forms that slide in (from under, left, or right) — these are usually timed (like after visitors scroll to 50% of the blog post or after they spend 12 seconds on the blog.
- Exit Intent Pop-ups: These popups show when visitors are about to leave your website which then triggers a popup. Exit-intent popups are effective, to say the least.
Use MonsterLinks™ By OptinMonster
OptinMonster’s MonsterLinks™ make good use of what’s called Zeigarnik Effect– a psychology principle which states that when people start something, they’re more likely to finish it.
MonsterLinks™ look just like regular links inside your blog posts. When clicked, however, a pop-up triggers nudging visitors to sign up.
With MonsterLinks, when visitors click a link or button (starting a process), then they’re likely to finish the process and subscribe. It’s usually a 2-step optin process which also increases the quality of leads (apart from being an effective lead generating tool by itself).
Launch targeted campaigns
You’ve come a long way (and you are doing better than most) if you have (or if you implement) any or some of these lead generation tactics for your blog. If you want to take it several notches up and also focus on lead quality, relevance, timing, and more, it’s time to stretch.
Launch targeted campaigns (with the same elements as those above — such as sticky bars, slide-ins, scroll boxes, exit-intent pop-ups, MonsterLinks™, and more) but with a twist.
Control triggers and displays with pre-set conditions. For instance, you could use Geographic targeting to include (or exclude) only visitors from a specific country (or show different offers, worded differently) for users from various countries.
With tools like OptinMonster, for instance, you could set referrer detection (Hello Twitter friend, grab my deal now), or page-level targeting, or Onsite targeting, or personalized popups using visitor names, and more.
Use Coupon Wheels
Want to bring in an element of fun while still generating more than 40% leads than what you thought you could achieve? Try Coupon wheels (these are familiar to you if you ever tried playing with any of those Daily Spin the Wheel contests on Amazon).
Coupon wheels bring in some excitement, anticipation, and a certain level of gamification to your lead generation efforts.
What makes coupon wheels even more powerful is that you could use all of the targeting methods (above) to ensure high-level targeted, focused approach to lead generation, and a consistent flow of high-quality leads.
Learn how to optimize blog posts for lead generation and you’ll never be hungry for leads again.
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