Three reasons you need to use blogging for lead generation

Leads are often hailed as the lifeblood of a business – and while not everyone will agree with that statement, leads are extremely important to the success and growth of your business

There are all kinds of lead generation activities, such as email marketing and social media marketing, but one of the top sources of leads is content marketing – especially, blogging.

In this blog post, I’m going to talk about the reasons why blogging is one of the best lead generation tools for businesses – and if you’re convinced, make sure to check out the Quick Win here to learn all about how exactly you can use blogging for lead generation.

Reason no. 1: It helps drive more (targeted) traffic to your website

In other words, it gives people a good enough reason to visit your business website. Unless you’re one of the world’s biggest brands, there isn’t much reason why people would want to visit your website – or even find it.

Your business website/online store doesn’t offer much value to a potential visitor unless they are already familiar with your business and want to buy something or they somehow came across your website online and decided to give it a try. Plus, there are only so many times that you can promote your website or landing pages on your different digital channels.

With a good blog, on the other hand, you have something to promote. You’re giving people a good reason to visit your website – to see or read your content or to download a resource.

Blogging doesn’t just help you drive more traffic, it also helps you keep visitors around for longer and gives them a reason to come back to your website and, hopefully, convert along the way as they get to learn more about you and your business.

Blogging also helps improve your search engine optimization; people make billions of Google searches every day looking for content so if you want to feature in these search results and get more organic traffic, then you need to create targeted, optimized content.

For example, if you google “content marketing”, most of the results on the first page are blog posts from content marketing tools and services:

The people who will click on these links will most likely be interested in content marketing and even need some help, which they can get from these tools and services. If the content is good, they’re likely to give away their information (for example, to sign up to your newsletter) and, along the way, even buy from you.

Reason no. 2: Blogging gives your visitors a reason to convert

Following up from reason number one, blogging is a great lead generation tool because it provides value to the reader – and value makes them want to convert. However, you also need to incorporate some well-placed calls to action throughout your blog to get visitors to convert:

• Tell them that they can sign up for your email newsletter to get more content straight to their inbox.
• Add calls to action to relevant blog posts highlighting how your product or service can help them achieve their goals or fill their needs.
• Link to your landing pages to get people to fill out your forms.

Great content helps show off your value and knowledge – an amazing blog that is consistent with both the quality and the frequency of blog posts can even help establish you as a thought leader in your industry (for b2b businesses in particular).

Reason no. 3: It’s one of the most cost-effective long-term strategies

One of the main reasons why blogging is such a cost-effective strategy is that it drives results in the long term. Just one good blog post can help you drive results (traffic and leads) for months, even years, to come. Some of my most popular blog posts right now (the ones that get the most traffic and conversions) were probably published months or years ago.

That’s because even after you’ve finished promoting your blog posts (even though you should continue to promote your blog periodically, for example by sharing it on your social media profiles), blog posts don’t disappear – they start ranking in search results and they can still get shares from random readers.

The right share from the right person can even give new life to your blog posts. You know how sometimes a video will be online for months, but then someone shares it with the right update, and overnight it becomes viral? The same thing can happen to a blog post. Even if it doesn’t necessarily go viral, the right share from the right person can still help you get a massive boost in traffic and shares.

That’s why you should also strive to create evergreen content (content that remains relevant over long periods with few changes/revisions, for months or even years). These types of blog posts will continue to drive results for very long periods and you’ll only need to make a few changes along the way to make sure they’re still relevant.

For example, if you were to write a blog post about the latest Facebook update, that might get quite a bit of attention the first few days or weeks, but it will be completely forgotten by the next update. On the other hand, if you write a detailed ‘how-to’ guide on Facebook marketing, that could potentially remain relevant for years (unless something happens to Facebook, of course).

Conclusion

These are just three main benefits of using blogging for business and lead generation – it truly is one of the most powerful digital marketing tools for businesses, especially as a huge amount of Internet users use ad blockers.