10 Things Most Bloggers Won’t Admit About Lead Generation
How do you get traffic and leads for your website?
In most cases, the answer that you’ll get from most internet marketing experts about lead generation is to simply build a blog that offers a great user experience, do some SEO, and build a following on social media.
Unfortunately, in reality things aren’t quite that simple.
While poking around a number of internet marketing blogs with tips for attracting new subscribers, I’ve come across quite a few points that I think are missing from the helpful tips that they are posting.
So without further ado, here are 10 things that most bloggers won’t admit about lead generation and why.
Secret #1: You Have to Be Good at Networking to Attract Influencers
If you think that you can just reach out to biggest blogs for your industry in order to get them to post or share your content, think again!
In most cases, all you’ll get back (if you get a reply) is their price list for sponsored posts.
Secondly, it only makes sense. Why would a well-known blogger post content from your site when all it does is help you grow your subscribers while doing very little for the blogger in return?
The bottom line is that blogging is a business for the majority of mainstream bloggers.
If you want an influencer to take you seriously, you need to be able offer something in return.
You could try giving away a free trial if you sell a service or free product in exchange for a mention on their site.
Otherwise, it might be a good idea to wait until your blog has a significant number of subscribers or you can find someone who personally knows the blogger you want to reach.
Secret #2: Don’t Only Focus on Making Google Happy
Should you follow Google’s Webmaster Guidelines so that you don’t harm your rankings while you grow your website? Yes!
Should you only pay attention to what Google says and ignore what the mainstream bloggers are doing on their own websites? No!
Ideally, a well-designed blog should make use of the latest recommendations for internet marketing while also ensuring that your strategy is in alignment with what Google recommends.
However, far too many small business bloggers are taking this to the extreme by refusing to use third-party lead generation plugins for fear that their sites will load slowly.
Worse, some get so focused on inserting keywords into their content that they forget to make the content actually interesting to read!
This is a result of many internet marketing experts simply overwhelming their readers with recommendations about SEO every time they post.
Yes, you should forward these recommendations to your SEO team.
However, your blog strategy needs to be a blend of all of the elements that go into a good blog, including UX, content, and conversion optimization.
Secret #3: Video Content
While many bloggers are pushing their latest tips on getting subscribers, if you take a good look, you’ll notice that they are using video to attract subscribers.
In many cases, you’ll find videos on landing pages, blog posts, and even the thank you pages after you subscribe to their blogs.
In turn this video content is also posted to sites like YouTube and Vimeo, which helps them to draw in traffic from social media.
If you’ve been convinced that written content is the only way to get your message across, then you need to start considering using video, as well.
That said, poor quality video might only hurt your blog.
Shooting videos with your webcam from the basement of your home with clutter in the background is not a great way to get your message across to subscribers that you are successful.
If you do video, you need to take it seriously and obtain professional videography and scriptwriting services!
Secret #4: Use Popups
Many people think that popups are spammy and should never be used on a blog.
However, what they say and what they do are two different things!
The reason why bloggers use popups on their blogs is because they work.
However, you’ll still need to test and re-test your popup designs and copy to figure out which versions lead to the highest number of signups for your blog.
Secret #5: Reuse Content Often
Small business bloggers often have trouble attracting leads because they either aren’t posting content often enough or they aren’t making any effort to share older content.
While a lot of bloggers talk about posting new content, what they don’t say is that they’ve taken that old content that they’ve published and turned it into ebooks, videos, and podcasts, and are continuously sharing it on social media.
Secret #6: Update Older Content
The trick to getting more traffic to your blog starts with writing evergreen content.
However, people aren’t going to keep coming back again and again for the same old article.
The secret to getting new traffic to older content is updating it. Take the older content, change out information that is now outdated and add some new ideas about the subject matter.
Secret #7: You Need a Large, Responsive Email List
Are you wondering how the biggest bloggers seem to launch product after product and make thousands or even millions in just a few months?
The answer is in having a large, responsive email list.
By blasting out their latest content to thousands of followers, mainstream bloggers get almost instantaneous results from their efforts.
This is something that you simply aren’t going to be able to duplicate unless you’ve already built a following.
Therefore, in order to get there you need to sell your list as much as possible.
Secret #8: What Worked for Them Won’t Work for You
One thing many bloggers fail to admit is that the steps that they took to achieve success will rarely result in the same success for your blog.
Part of the reason for this is that they got in before the rules changed or there was a specific opportunity there that no longer exists.
So while you’re favorite blogging guru has managed to create a hugely successful blog, you’re going to have to do things slightly differently if you want the same results.
Secret #9: Outsourcing Content Creation
There simply aren’t enough hours in a day to write, edit, and find images for long blog posts every day.
The way that the majority of mainstream blogs have solved this problem is by outsourcing their content creation needs.
From using templates to create infographics and landing pages to hiring writers to write your content outsourcing your content creation is essential if you want to make sure that your blog content is published on a regular schedule.
In fact, many of the bloggers that write articles in the first-person are also using ghostwriters to write their content.
Secret #10: Data-Driven Marketing
While you may feel like leaving a comment on a popular blog is really important, all of the top bloggers are actually using data to drive their internet marketing strategies.
From keyword research tools, to marketing automation, and analytics tools, decisions are made daily based on data alone.
These tools are used to determine everything from what the blogger decides to write about to what products and services they recommend on their blogs.
If you don’t have a data-driven content strategy, developing one is the only way that you’ll get to 100,000 subscribers on your blog.
Wrapping It All Up
Now that you know the real secrets to building a blog, you can start making some real improvements and generating more leads.
The reason why most bloggers really don’t go into detail about this is because they aren’t there to teach you what they do.
They want to sell products, an online course, or other information for a fee.
So if you expect to find advice for free online about how to really get traffic or generate leads for your own website, you should expect that you’ll have to hand over some money first!
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