Attract Higher Quality Leads to Your Website
You have your website. You’ve been using techniques to drive traffic and it’s going great. You look at the visitor totals climbing higher and higher every day. Then you take a look at your revenue and it’s not growing at the same pace. What the… ?!?!
We learned from the internet giants that more eyeballs equal more revenue… so what’s the deal?
Not all traffic is created equal. There’s traffic, and then there’s the right traffic. Getting the right kind of traffic is the key to generate high quality leads (converting eyeballs into potential revenue).
Cash is king — or, wait… content is king? Well, as long as you’re making money, they can both be kings.
First, Have a Point
I’ve been blogging since early 2005. Blogging was a lot different then (for me, anyway). I’m a writer; I love to write. I started a blog one day because I was bored at a conference (literally). I just wrote about all the bizarre, true things that happened to or around me (the way I saw them), and some people happened to find it funny.
Not really the point here, but I thought I’d give a little background. My point being that there really was no point to my blog other then telling stories and repeatedly discussing the insanely large amounts of coffee I would drink, the brands of coffee, my feedback on all the coffee shops I would visit, etc.
In 2005, over 1,000 readers was pretty good considering I didn’t advertise, I didn’t even know what SEO was (and most people still didn’t even know what a blog was), I didn’t care about keywords, I had no calls to action… I purely did it for fun and it just happened to make people laugh and keep them coming back. These days you just can’t do that anymore and expect people to find you.
Now, I have a business and actually try to provide value to my readers and clients through marketing services and content… which just so happens to include a blog. This time around, I try my best to keep it clean, offer relevant info to our readers, and stay on point (although I just realized I’m not staying on point, so let me get back to it).
Buyer Discovery
To get the right traffic, you need to determine what the right traffic is. It’s a basic concept, but easy to move to the back burner when you’re itching to get moving. But, it’s a crucial part of a successful business. If you don’t know exactly who your potential buyers are, it’s going to be very difficult to convince visitors to hand over their hard-earned dollars to you.
One starting point: your current customers. Take some time to listen to your customers both in-person and online.
- conduct interviews
- use social media tools to see what’s being said about you and your industry
- read blogs (and especially blog comments) where your buyers might hang out
Try to take the research as deep as you can. Find similarities, differences, and extrapolate buying behaviors. If it turns out all of your customers are also Yankees fans (unlikely!), then you go out and target the remaining Yankees fans.
Next Steps — Black Hat vs. White Hat
Now you know exactly who your buyers are now, you’ll want to reach out to that audience to generate high quality leads. There are two philosophies: a black hat or a white hat approach. Black hat techniques are quick fixes, which can sometimes be seen as shady. Some black hat tactics may even work for a time…but it’s only a Band-Aid. They might get your site traffic, but it’s probably not the traffic you want in the long run. White hat includes a lot of elbow grease and leg work, but those tactics have lasting value.
Conduct link-building by reaching out to real people and asking to link. Which people should you ask? The people who run sites that you discovered are relevant to your buyers during discovery. It’s all coming together nicely.
Continue reading the original, full post here for more info on keywords, AdWords, and tailored strategy.
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Originally published at blog.undergroundcreativegroup.com.
