How To Generate Leads Online Without Spending Money
A business can only survive if it generates new leads on daily basis. With the Internet, now new leads can come directly and organically to your business website through blog contents. Such “pull” marketing is known as “inbound marketing.”
Inbound marketing relies on innovative contents, such as articles, videos, images, audios (podcasts), ebooks, and other materials that are distributed online. Each of them contains SEO keywords, which can be pre-determined or organic.
This is how it works: Prospective clients usually search online with certain keywords, phrases, and terms when looking for information or to shop. So, when they type in what they’re looking for, they’ll be taken to website pages or blog posts containing such terms.
Even when simply looking for light-hearted information, we use Google or other search engines to find them. For marketers, it’s a huge opportunity to influence and direct where people should go online. This explains why most online businesses have a blog on their site.
There are two ways to approach it: Set up an online business with a blog or start a blog/online publication with a business. Either way, use the blog to generate traffic and leads to the business.
The thing is, what should you write on the blog? Below are several ideas for brainstorming. Please note that by “articles,” I’m referring to all kinds of content, which can be text, image, video, and audio based that are generally introduced by texts or articles or blog posts.
1. Write authoritative articles related to the business (specific articles). It’s ideal for B2B and specific B2C businesses.
2. Write articles in several categories that are of the interest of the customers (leads) you’re aiming. This can be outside the scope of the business, but is still relevant to them.
3. Write articles that most people like to read (general articles) to generate massive traffic, such as news articles or shareable informative and emotional articles.
Whichever you choose, if you can make the post viral, it would be tremendously beneficial to the business. However, find out the conversion rate of your business, as every business is different. By “conversion rate,” I’m referring to how much targeted or untargeted traffic would produce one sale or one strong lead.
For instance, in my own online publishing business (now defunct), it took 3,000 untargeted hits to sell one infoproduct. Thus, you’d need to determine in advance how many hits your site would require selling one unit. Based on this calculation, then, you can allocate resources accordingly.
Having viral posts would definitely generate massive traffic, which can be achieved with solid strategies. Here are several tactics that you can immediately adopt.
1. Locate pre-viral contents based on specific keywords, terms, and phrases.
You’d need a list of the keywords, terms, and phrases of the contents you’d need to curate. Finding them before they go viral is key, so you can curate them early and publish your own version of those pre-viral contents. Knowing that the topic has the so-called “high virality” level, it’s likely that your post will go viral, even before the original goes viral. So, write fast!
While Buzzsumo analyzes contents after they go viral, Almighty.Press tracks contents before they go viral. Use Almighty.Press to locate pre-viral contents early, so you have time to re-package them and call it your own. Using Almighty.Press is free during the trial period.
2. Curate those contents.
First things first, what’s content curation? According to Beth Kanter, the author of The Networked Nonprofit, “content curation” is:
Content curation is the process of sorting through the vast amounts of content on the web and presenting it in a meaningful and organized way around a specific theme. The work involves sifting, sorting, arranging, and publishing information. A content curator cherry picks the best content that is important and relevant to share with their community.
It isn’t unlike what a museum curator does to produce an exhibition: They identify the theme, they provide the context, they decide which paintings to hang on the wall, how they should be annotated, and how they should be displayed for the public.
Curate pre-viral articles related to your business to be used as “raw materials” of your posts. As a curator, you re-organize the information to provide something extra to the audience.
3. Create posts based on and around those contents.
Several examples of high-traffic content curation blogs that you’ve probably visited or read:
Note that the curators/editors of those blogs create articles based on a specific theme and use others’ relevant articles to make a point. Curators don’t just slap a bunch of links to an article, but they add value by providing analysis or description.
4. Share and advertise the new articles on social media.
Leverage the social media to share and advertise your new articles. Allocate a budget to attract traffic via social media. Next, somewhere in the article, you can invite readers to visit the “store” page or to subscribe to a newsletter. Voila, your sales leads have just magically appeared.
In conclusion, start using Almighty.Press early to properly curate news and articles, even if you’ve just started your online business. Properly curate them and be creative and innovative in re-packaging them for your blog, which is your “inbound” lead generation machine that never sleeps.
