Your company’s blog can do a lot of different things. You can use it to showcase the range of products or services you provide or share company news.
But does your blog generate leads? Here are five ways to make sure the content you create for your blog is fueling your lead-generation machine.
1. Make It Useful
Not everyone who lands on your blog is there because they’re interested in your business specifically. They might just be interested in the type of service you provide or the product you make.
That’s why the content you create on your blog needs to be useful to your readers. It should help them solve a problem, or teach them how to do something new.
Before you create a new entry on your blog, ask yourself:
- Would I want to read this?
- What am I teaching my audience?
- Will this help them make more money? Does it solve a problem?
- Does this help them put a certain fear to rest?
If you don’t have good answers for those questions, you may need to rethink what you’re writing about.
2. Write Often
It’s nice to imagine picking up a trumpet and playing like you were Miles Davis. But very few people master their art right out of the gate, whether we’re talking about jazz or blogging.
You’re not going to write one really good blog post and start raking in leads. If you want to bring people to your blog, and then turn those readers into leads, you’ll need to post on a regular basis. Once a month won’t cut it. Your blog should feature fresh content at least a couple of times a week.
3. Be Engaging
In addition to being useful, and published on a regular schedule, your posts should be engaging. Let’s look at a few of the elements an engaging blog post should have:
- A headline that gets readers’ attention and tells them “This is something you need to know.” You can go with a numbered list (the way we did here) or share knowledge (“What I Learned When I Hired a Landscaper”).
- Organize the story you’re telling. It’s important to remember that people tend to scan more than they read when they’re online, which means you may want to break up your content into shorter, easier-to-digest sections, using bullet points, numbered lists, or sections with subheads.
- Include at least one image with every blog post you create. Pictures help you tell your story and make your content more engaging. If you have an infographic that works in tandem with your written content, that’s even better. Posts that include images account for 87 percent of total interactions on Facebook, while Tweets with images receive 150 percent more retweets than those without.
4. Always Include A Call-To-Action
You’ve written the final sentence of a blog post, but you’re not quite at the end. Each entry on your blog should invite your readers to do something. For example, you could offer a white paper or an e-book that goes into more detail about the topic you’ve just covered in the blog post.
These are known as “calls to action,” and each of your posts should include them as a way to turn readers into leads (and then leads into customers.) Some numbers to back up this point: the marketing website Search Engine Journal says it had a 212 percent increase in leads per blog after it started adding CTAs to its blog posts.
5. Be Patient
Like we said earlier, it’s rare in life that your work yields results right away. Your blog needs someone who can write quickly and write well, but it also needs patience. It might take a few weeks or a few months, but eventually leads will start to come in.
Blogging can be a challenge, and one your business may not be ready to tackle on its own. IQnection and its digital marketing team can help you craft blog posts that are engaging and informative so that you can start attracting leads to your site.
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