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Lead Generation – How To Turn Your Blog Into A Sales Lead Generation Machine

19/11/10

Lead generation is the most important part of the marketing process.  With internet marketing, lead generation can be almost fully automated.  If your using a blog as your content management system, it becomes even easier!  But in order to maximize your lead capture, you have to do it right.  This article tells you exactly how.

First, let’s discuss where lead generation fits into the overall scheme of things.

The best way to turn people into clients on the internet is to lead them through a proven staged process:

Step 1 – Attract people to your website.  People become visitors through a variety of means – searches, ads, etc.  There’s tons of information out there on how to drive traffic to your website.

Step 2 – Convert visitors into leads.  Probably most of the people who visit aren’t viable leads, but some are.  How do you find out which?  Offer them something of value – an ebook, a white paper, a short video course – for free, in exchange for their name and email address.  Companies like Aweber fully automate this process for you, so that your website can automatically capture leads and build a lead list 24-7.  The free offer model is the most effective lead generation technique on the planet.

Step 3 – Convert leads into customers.  Your lead list is your captive audience.  Direct them to helpful information, like maybe a blog you’ve set up just to inform and communicate with them.  Establish a relationship over time.  And regularly, give them your sales pitch.  Offer them something of value – a discount, a bundled product, whatever – and put a time limit on it.  It’s far more effective to work your lead list for customers than to try to sell directly with a website.

Step 4 – Convert customers into clients.  Once someone has bought from you, put them on a different list and offer them things you wouldn’t offer to first time buyers.  Marketing to established customers makes them repeat clients, and clients are the most valuable thing to have – clients give referrals.

Now working backwards, let’s see what it takes to generate 100 clients.

Let’s say that in each step of the conversion process you achieve a 10 percent success rate, just for this example.

To get 100 clients, you need to have 1,000 customers.

To get 1,000 customers, you need to generate 10,000 leads.

To generate 10,000 leads, you need to attract 100,000 visitors.

To attract 100,000 visitors, you need to get the attention of 1,000,000 people.

Wow, that sounds daunting!  But we can improve our odds significantly in a few areas.

1. If you use proper SEO, linkbuilding, and/or pay per click, and your target landing page gets on the first page of Google for your main keywords, you can get much better than 10 percent traffic.  The first Google result can get as much as 40 percent of the search traffic!

2. If you truly offer something of value, you can capture far more than 10 percent of the potential leads.  A good offer can net you 30-40 % lead capture!  This optimizes lead generation fully.

So taking those two 40 percent figures and adjusting our example, if we optimize the process we might be able to generate 100 clients from as little as 65,000 visitors!

Now let’s consider the best way to use a blog to generate leads.

Let’s say you’ve written a bunch of keyword optimized blog articles, and you do what you can to get them ranked highly in Google, or you’ve bought Adsense to have a high PPC placement. So you think you’ve got the traffic part taken care of.

And you have a solid free offering, something with a perceived value of $30-40.  Something your visitors will want do download.

Now think about what a blog typically looks like.  What do you see when you visit most blogs?

In short, you see about a million things to distract a visitor.  A busy blog screams CLICK ON ALL THIS STUFF!!

Now consider if you were trying to get a visitor to do one specific thing.  Like, for instance, type their name and email into an opt-in box to download your free offering.

If you gave them a million other options, do you think it is more likely, or less likely, that they will do the one thing you really want them to do?

No, you want to give them as few options as possible.  In fact, you only want them to see two things

IN THAT ORDER.

If you put the free offer in a sidebar, you will get less opt-ins that if it is the lead page element.  Same if you put it on the bottom.  You want your free offer to be ‘above the fold.’

So for your article lead generation campaign, you want a blog that looks like this:

There are several ways to get the free offer opt-in at the top of each article.

1. Manually, create a table at the front of every article.  One row, two columns.  In the first cell, place text or a graphic that describes your free offer.  “Download Our Video Marketing Course (a $100 value) FOR FREE!” In the second cell, place your Aweber HTML code for the opt-in box.  Don’t ask for anything more than the visitor’s name and email.

2. Several blog themes allow you to create ‘squeeze elements’ which are automatically posted at the beginning of each article.  The best is the Squeeze Theme.  The editing features are robust enough to include videos and graphics in pre-formatted templates along with the opt-in graphics.

Lead generation is an art and a science.  Do all the right things to get going, and with practice you can improve on the art.