Monday, October 13, 2008

Blog Your Way to Lead Generation

By David B. Ascot

One way to generate leads for your business is to comment on blogs, in forums and on online communities. If you can stay active in these forums and communities and find the time to leave comments on blogs and forums, you can build a lot of back links to your website. Some of these links will be ignored by search engines, but they perform the valuable function of giving potential customers hundreds of different ways to get to your website.

One thing people ask me a lot is "Should I use SEO and pay per click advertising, even if I'm already doing well in search engine rankings?" I have to answer yes to this; there are a number of reasons why.

First, if you're using pay per click advertising while you are already doing well in the search engine rankings, your site receives extra space on those results pages. By taking up more space on these pages, you get more traffic - and of course, more conversions. It's simple enough - while you do have to pay for it, it more than pays for itself. The second reason to use pay per click ads and SEO is that search engine optimization lets you rank highly for certain keywords and key phrases. However, it's hard to get a good ranking for several different keywords or phrases at once. Pay per click advertising allows you to specify the phrases which will be used. You have a lot more flexibility and can generate more traffic and profits.

Unless you've been living under a rock for the past few years, you are well aware that a blog is a type of online journal. Maintaining a blog has a few advantages, one of the biggest is that you can use this virtual soapbox to establish yourself as an expert in your niche and build your brand. A lot of bloggers have managed to leverage this platform into becoming dominant players in their field. It takes some hard work and you'll need a long term strategy to succeed at this, but blogging can be very powerful at generating leads and income for your business.

Another good tactic is to use your blog for Long Tail SEO, which is SEO based on a larger number of specific search terms which are heavily used. Something a lot of website owners are unaware of is that very few searches using Google are performed using what they may think are the biggest keywords for their market.

So as a site owner, what does all of this mean for you? Your site will start coming up higher in search engine rankings for several different search terms, giving you a lot of extra traffic. This traffic can add up over time. If you do have a blog, how can you possibly come up with all of the content that you'll need? There are a couple of ways to make this a possibility:

1. Get Someone To Write It For You. You can find writers on Guru.com or Elance.com and you could also find freelance writers to write blog post on topics that you either specify or instruct them to look up for you. If you're looking to become a thought leader, the problem with this might be that the actual content that they're developing is not the peak content that you need to put out there in order to be considered a thought leader. So, you might need to put in your own time to do that, or you might have to edit the post of other people in order to produce the content

2. Recycle Content. Recycle other contents such as newsletter articles, brochure content, other email documentation, or other types of contents that exists in your organisation but are not published widely. By doing this basically you're leveraging existing content to reach a wider audience and basically get more bang for your buck for the content you've already generated.

Blogging can provide website owners with a great means of traffic generation, as long as they have a plan for the future of their website or business and are willing to stick with it. You can learn more about using blogging effectively at becomeablogger.com, which offers a series of how-to videos. Another good resource to use is entrepreneurs-journey.com by Yaro Starak, and Yaro is one of Australia's, if not the world's, most famous experts on blogging as a business tool.

About the Author:

No comments: