“How Blogging Can Increase Your Lead Generation by 67%

When I am asked a question “How do I generate more leads for my business?”, my answer is always the same.

Start with social media networks and a blog – these are the best ways to start generating quick traffic and cash.

I am not saying that a blog will make you rich.

However, it CAN and WILL play a huge role in promoting you and your business and generating traffic and leads for your primary business.

Here are some of the questions and concerns I get in response:

• People wonder if all this effort I tell them to put into blogging will pay off.
• They wonder what their return on investment (ROI) really is.
• They want to know whether all this new content I tell them to post will really make a difference in the search engine ranking and blog traffic.
• Will all this posting really generate leads for their business?
• Will it REALLY ultimately translate into a bigger downline and money in their pocket?

All valid questions.

To answer them, I will need some help from The State of Inbound Lead Generation study by HubSpot.

How Do You Achieve Double Digit Lead Growth?

This study analyzes 1,400 companies – quite a significant research pool, I would say – and shows a direct correlation between how many blog pages are indexed by Google and the amount of blog traffic the site gets.

As a matter of fact, increasing your pages by 50-100 can bring as high as DOUBLE DIGIT blog traffic GROWTH!

The graph below shows that traffic generation jumps significantly once a site achieves 300+ indexed pages.

It’s quite evident that the more blog posts, which make up “pages” in your blog, you create and get indexed, the more blog traffic you’ll get, and the more business leads and money you will ultimately generate. As simple as that.

How do you generate a large number of indexed pages?

• Start a blog and build page volume by posting regularly – every day or at least 3-4 times a week.
• Work on your page optimization to maximize chances of having more of your pages including in Google’s index.

–On-Page Optimization: do your keywordresearch before you write a post; make sure you use proper title and description tags with your keywords included for each page. Use Scribe SEO to help you.

–Off-Page Optimization: one way link building is the key – this demonstrates your popularity to search engines. Use SEO SpyGlass to find the best links.

66% of the companies that HubSpot included in their research have a blog and they generated on average 67% more leads than companies without one.

67% more leads!

Blog Traffic Generation Increases Once Blog Reaches 20+ Posts

The graph below shows that once you write 24-51 posts, your blog traffic generation starts to grow. That’s probably how long it takes to build a blog with enough pages to get indexed by Google and attract links from other sites as well as visitors.

So, blogs can help marketers attract traffic and leads quickly, and marketers who are choosing not to start blogs are simply leaving the traffic for their competition.

Also, the higher post count showed 77% higher lead generation than the lower count.

There are 2 obvious conclusions here:

1. Blogging works to generate traffic and leads.
2. The more you blog, the more blog traffic you will generate.

So, Why Do You Need to Start a Blog?

• It’s much easier to grow a number of Google indexed pages through a blog vs a static website – a very important factor in how much traffic you will eventually generate.
• Blogs have a tremendous capacity to increase the number of keywordsyou have high search engine ranking for. The more keywords you rank for, the more traffic you get.
• Link building opportunity: other sites are much more likely to link to you if you provide interesting and fresh content on a regular basis.
• Recycle traffic: blogs give visitors a reason to come back again and again – it’s much less expensive to keep an existing customer than generate a new one!
• Blogging is the best platform for you to generate traffic, then leads and build trust with them and later grow your business.

How Did This Blog Kick-Start My Business Success?

“It all sounds nice and good in theory, but did starting this blog changed YOUR business, Ana?”

Glad you asked!

I started this blog in September of 2009 and my original theme was Attraction Marketing.

This was my first ever attempt to write a blog, so needless to say, I know how scary it is to start one without having a slightest idea as to HOW to do anything.

My initial failures:

• I had no clue what to write about or how to write.
• I had no direction for my blog.
• I had nothing to offer to my readers.
• I had not clue what SEO was.
• As I started learning more and more about blogging and generating blog traffic, I had to redo many things on my blog, which took a lot of time.

My initial successes:

• I started this blog on the right platform – self-hosted WordPress.
• I had enough sense to outsource some post writing until I figured out how to do it myself.
• I used outsourcing resources like ODesk.com, GetAFreelancer.com to inexpensively do some tweaking with the plugins, themes, and such until I learned how to do it myself.
• I read other blogs DAILY to see what they were doing, what ideas I could adapt on my blog, and what to avoid. Got some great inspiration this way!
• I found the tools to help me make my blog better. The most important ones were Thesis theme and SEO Scribe plugin, which greatly increased my chances with high search engine ranking.

Here Is Where I Am Now:

• About a month ago I made my blog much more topical: narrowed down my focus to Traffic Generation, as opposed to a little bit of everything.
• I changed the look of my blog (added a new heading and an optin box); got a new domain name – once again, much more targeted one.
• I wrote an ebook to offer to my readers (you are more than welcome to get your own copy by filling out my optin form). ***Side note: don’t be scared thinking that you need to write a book for your new blog. You don’t. As a matter of fact, just borrow mine – it comes with free giveaway rights, providing that you don’t change it in any way:).
• I branded my new Twitter account and Facebook Fan Page to match my new blog look – all three are a continuation of each other. Go ahead, check them out!
• Blog traffic? Since in the eyes of Google I started my blog twice (the second time was when I changed my domain name a month ago – actually even less than that), my Alexa traffic ranking (not that I pay too much attention to it) went from some 8 million to low 300,000 as of the writing of this post. In a matter of 3 weeks.
• My lead generation? Started with a lead every other day or three days todozens on a daily basis. Plus my lead generation on my primary business website went up!

Marketing Takeaways:

START A BLOG TODAY!

Want to Get a Second Opinion?

I think it’s a great idea.

I am about to start a blog meme (What is a blog meme?) and tag the following bloggers, whose blogs you might not be reading but should, with the same question I just answered:

“How Did Your Blog Kick-Start Your Business Success?“

Jason Better, Chris Owen, Ty Tribble, Todd Falcone, Katie Freiling, Charles Heflin, Karen Newman, Peter Fuller.

If you are a blogger and would like to take part in this meme, feel free to answer the question in a post on your blog, link it back to this post, and tag more bloggers to do the same.

I look forward to compiling a post with the best answers to help people who are still struggling with whether their business needs a blog.

***We need more people to learn about this post; so PLEASE retweet, share, and digg!***

If you like this post and think it would be valuable to your followers, share the ish out of it for me, would you? “

We told you it was legit. Anyhow, as we can see, leads aren’t this vague possibility of a perk that comes along with blogging. They’re a real bonus!

Want your stats to look like the ones in the graphs (the better ones of course…)? Contact us and start getting more business!