By Kristi Hines
Published May 14, 2013 
Does your business have a blog?
Would you like your blog to bring in more leads for your business?
You already know you need to create awesome blog content, but there?s more to business blogging than just that.
You also need to include a few tactics to help you bring in the leads you want.
Here are some useful tactics to entice and capture leads used by top marketing business blogs!
#1: Place Opt-In Forms Around Your Blog Content
There are several areas on your blog that you can use to introduce visitors to calls to action such as free trials, free consultations or a simple mailing list opt-in form. These areas include your header, sidebar, the end of blog posts, your About page and your footer.
Unbounce, a landing page software creator, encourages people to try their software or sign up for their mailing list in their sidebar and post footers.
Unbounce has lead generating calls to action in their sidebar.
KISSmetrics, a web analytics software company, uses their blog footer along with the sidebar and ends of posts to encourage subscriptions and free trial signups.
KISSmetrics has lead generating calls to action in the footer of their blog.
While it might seem like overkill to put lead capturing options in so many places on your blog, it?s really not if you consider the fact that a visitor may only notice them at certain points during their visit.
While reading a blog post, for example, readers may ignore your header and sidebar. But if they are impressed by your blog content, then they will notice a subscription option at the end of the post.
Alternatively, if they make it to the homepage of your blog and scan all the way down the latest post titles and summaries, they might be interested in subscribing in the footer.
The key is to place your opt-in form in various locations on your blog where you have captured your readers? attention.
#2: Regularly Create Free, Downloadable Content
HubSpot has the leading inbound marketing blog to complement their marketing platform. If you follow their blog, you know that they are constantly creating free, downloadable marketing content in the form of ebooks, whitepapers, templates and other valuable digital material. They not only promote their free content on their blog, but on their social networks as well for additional traction.
HubSpot markets free content on their blog and social networks.
In exchange for all of these downloads, people must provide their name, email and additional information about their business. Free content is the perfect lead generator!
The key to getting the right kind of leads with your free content is to create content that will attract your target customer base. You don?t want to capture just any subscriber?you want to capture someone who will want to learn more about your products and services.
#3: Incentivize Sharing With a Referral Program
What?s better than offering free content to capture leads for your business? Offering more free content to those who help you build leads.
Marketo, a marketing automation software business, created a free coloring book for marketers. Their incentive offer was a free hard copy coloring book?and crayons?for each person who referred five people to download the digital copy.
Using referral incentives to generate leads.
Now, instead of just one new lead from their blog, they have the opportunity to capture five more!
Consider ways you can incentivize your readers to refer more leads to your business.
#4: Try Hello Bar
Hello Bar is a simple script that places an attention-grabbing bar at the top of your website. You can see this tool in action on The Daily Egg by CrazyEgg, a heat map reporting tool.
How Hello Bar looks on the CrazyEgg blog.
You can use Hello Bar to create a call to action linking to anything on your website. This includes your new free content, webinars and other pages devoted to capturing leads.
Use the call to action most relevant for your audience and your marketing needs.
#5: Use a Popup
You?re probably not going to like this one, but it?s pretty much a fact that if you have a popup opt-in form or call to action, you?re going to draw more attention to it. Popups are not just for Internet marketers anymore either. Many businesses are using them.
Last year, Dan Zarrella, social media scientist, did a study that showed the bounce rate on his site (the rate at which people left his site after looking at only one page) did not change when he had a popup versus when he didn?t. But subscription rates fell when the popup was removed.
Results of a study on popups and bounce rate.
While you may have to deal with a few complaints here and there from those who despise popups, the truth is, most people are used to them now. As long as you don?t create one that is hard to close, the people who are uninterested in signing up will likely just close it and continue to read your content.
So who is using popups? For starters, Social Media Examiner has a simple popup from AWeber for their mailing list.
Popup opt-in form on Social Media Examiner.
Jay Baer uses a popup on the Convince & Convert blog for his social media and content consulting business.
Popup opt-in form on Convince & Convert.
You?ll also see popups on blogs by Chris Brogan, Neil Patel, Amy Porterfield and many more well-known names in the social media industry.
There are several ways you can create popup functionality on your website. Some mailing list services like AWeber have their own popup forms. WordPress users can also take advantage of plugins like Popup Domination, WPSubscribers and many others.
So how do you get the most out of your popup opt-ins? The best converting popups are the ones that offer free content, a clearly defined goal for what the subscriber will receive and a one-time only display. If you have opt-ins in other areas of your blog, then people can always choose to subscribe at another time.
Use These Lead Generating Tactics
Be sure to set time aside to review your marketing strategy and see how some of these tips can help generate leads. If you are not happy with the leads you are getting from your business blogging, some of the tactics mentioned above are sure to help you.
What do you think? What ways do you use your blog to generate leads for your business? What works best for you? Please share in the comments section below!
Tags: blog, blog content, blogging, business blog, call to action, content marketing, email lead, email opt in, kristi hines, lead, social media engagement, social media marketing
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