Joydeep Bhattacharya How to Create A Lead Generating Funnel Using Your Blog … Wow-Score collecting now The Wow-Score shows how engaging a blog post is. It is calculated based on the correlation between users’ active reading time, their scrolling speed and the article’s length. Learn more How to Create A Lead Generating Funnel Using Your Blog Joydeep Bhattacharya
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If you decided to stick with it and have been continuing to populate your blog with content, congratulations — because you have a tremendous platform of lead generation ready to be exploited.
It’s time for you to reap the benefits of the investment you’ve put into your blog because we’ve got the most practical, valuable, and dependable means and methods of using your blog as a vehicle of lead generation — both qualified and unqualified.
Struggling to get leads from your blog? Here is a smart guide to generate leads!
CTA Potential – Are You Tapping It?
This one goes down as the most differentiated growth hack you can rely on to transform your blog into a lead generation funnel. The key to success is to envisage each of your blog posts as a landing page, with a distinct goal, and call to action (CTA) button that takes your viewer towards that goal.
Whether you want to get the reader to subscribe to your newsletter, take him/her to a satisfaction survey, invite for a site tour, ask for signup, get their Skype id, invite them for your tool's beta testing, or get them to download your content, you’ve got to create calls to action that get the job done. Use one or more of the following methods to get your CTA right:
- Tie a benefit (such as a free e-book, download) with the CTA.
- Ensure your CTA button is responsive; it must load properly on mobile device screens
- Use emotional words, appeals, and strong command verbs in your CTA phrases
- Fear of Missing Out (FOMO) works well for e-store blogs; example – Hurry up! Sale ends in 2 days.
- Check out these CTA button best practices
Leverage Videos To Drive Conversions and Build Your Pool of Leads
Considering short attention spans of web users, and the surge in mobile internet browsing, the relevance of video content for driving conversions can’t be overstated.
Here are some stats that drive home the point.
- More than half of online shoppers use mobile device browser searches, and find visual information more relevant as influencer of their actions
- Videos on your landing page can increase conversions by 80%
- Whereas viewers consume a paltry 20% text content of web page, the completion rate of 30 second videos is 90%.
- A Forrester research concluded that video content was more than 50 times likelier than web content to land on first search engine result page.
- Use methods such as catchy thumbnails, subtitles, auto looping videos, etc. to drive more conversions. Tools such as Nutshell, Magisto, and Animoto help you create marketing videos in a jiffy. Check out more video landing page best practices here.
Deliver Quality Webinars To Woo Qualified Leads
There’s a whole community of hard boiled web users out there who know better than subscribing to your newsletter or parting with their email ID/Phone number in exchange of some content or a free download.
How do you convert these visitors into leads?
It’s hard, but doable nonetheless, by getting them hooked on to the content. Plan and deliver high quality webinars using tools like ClickMeeting for subscribers, as nothing is more beneficial and successful in terms of ramping up your blog’s brand equity, and filling up your mailbox with subscriptions.
Make Your Posts Easy and Super Fast To Consume
We leave the content quality up to you, but here are some time-tested and research backed tips that can make your blog content easy, quick, engaging, and entertaining to read.
- Go for font size close to 14-16 px; it’s among the most convenient to read
- Sans serif font is proven effective as a suitable web font, go for it
- Don’t go overboard with images, unless the subject matter demands so, because they can cause distractions
- Small paragraphs, bullet points, section headings, key phrases in bold – remember these rules
- Prepare a table of contents with in-page hyperlinks for larger posts
- Make the title catchy; refer to this awesome guide of post title creation best practices
- Use quotes, stats, questions, anecdotes, and make them stand out in italics
We recommend you check out Neil Patel’s guide on making your blog content easier to read. You stand to gain anything between 20% to 50% increase in readership by following these tips.
Simplify The Blog Design
It’s odd, yet true – Simplicity of design can take your blog’s effectiveness to higher levels, and can help you convert more visitors and surfers into subscribers. A sleep looking blog with broad and prominent navigation buttons immediately manages to inspire trust with viewers.
Begin by writing down the key goals of your blog, and identifying content and design elements that contribute towards its achievements.
Pareto’s 80:20 Rule comes next. Identify the 20% content that accounts for 80% user attention, and strip down the rest to the bare minimum.
Check out this collection of super successful blogs and the way they ask their viewers to subscribe; simplistic, single field buttons are getting the job done, it’s clear.
Auto Responders – Tapping the Potential of Qualified Leads
If your blog posts are related to the kind of business you are into, you can leverage auto-responders as means of collecting qualified leads. B2B and B2C services, SaaS products, subscriptions, and e-courses use auto-responders to great effect.
Here are 6 reasons why auto-responders deserve your time and attention
- It’s the simplest and most effective channel of permission marketing, completely opt-in based
- Great way to get your blog viewer into a ‘reciprocate’ mode, driving him towards your goal
- Build goodwill with viewers
- Helps organize leads into categories, and separating qualified leads from unqualified ones
- Automated follow-ups free up your time
- It’s the beginning phase of putting a part of your sales process on auto pilot
Aweber and Mailchimp are among the most widely used tools for auto responder and email marketing. Check out quick reviews of other similar tools. And, use one or more of these tactics to make the most out of email marketing and auto responder for enhancing viewer engagement.
Hundreds of blogs out there started off by generating a couple of leads, before slowly transforming into sophisticated lead generation funnels for their parent businesses. It’s time for your blog now.
What goals do you have for your blog in the first quarter in 2017?
