Posts Tagged Edition

Lead generation business is big time Internet marketing for small businesses today. It’s a simple 3-step flow to: 1) sing, 2) ping and 3) ding! your way to increased visibility that promote leads.

1) Sing your company’s praises with happy customer testimonials on your website. Nothing beats converting leads to actual sales by using satisfied word-of-mouth referrals. Yet, this alone would not be effective in generating leads if no one came to visit your website. 

How to get visitors to your website? Luckily, small business owners can now easily and affordably set up a blog using WordPress, Typepad, Blogger and other web services.

Once your blog is up and running, you start blogging or writing smart, useful and fun articles that show the breadth and depth of your expertise. Of course, you’d include links on your articles back to your website—and that’s how online surfers get to visit your domain.

Yet, that’s still not enough to get the mega hits you’d like to end up prospecting with. So, you’ll want to join social groups such as Facebook and LinkedIn (the leading social site for professionals and businesses) and the new kid, Twitter, with its 140-character microblogging “tweets” or posts. 

Once you start telling friends and followers on your social sites about your posts, and they find your suggestions extremely helpful and they’ll start referring your posts to friends in their other sub-groups. Before long, your snappy posts have garnered you followers, legions of whom are keen to hear what you have to say with your updates.

So there you are—star of your own blogging show. A “pro celebrity” in your own right, effortlessly sending scores of visitors to your website, based on writing your heart out in your blog posts (also called articles).

They say love of doing what you enjoy doing eventually pays for itself, and this is clearly where singing your songs of expertise and authority will gain praise for your main website, as well, and generating leads.

To get started, get a complimentary peek into SUREFIRE SOCIAL for Small Business that has a written guide and new videos constantly updated to reflect cutting edge trends.

2) Ping! As you keep up writing your articles, keep in mind you’re building up an archive of relevant pieces you can repurpose later on. Such as seasonal fall and spring tips for home maintenance. Such as seasonal holiday goodies your catering service never fails to surprise—from golden orbs of chocolate persimmons to frosted amaretto snicker doodles. 

Each time you submit an article for publication on WordPress, it’s automatically “pinged” to search engines. And less your articles get to the bottom of the slush pile, be sure to sprinkle them with a light dusting of SEO keywords.

For example, it’s important to use SEO primary keywords in the title and first paragraph. Sprinkle in a few longtail (lower-ranked keywords) SEOs in the body of your article. That’s how search spiders will locate and index your article. The more you write, the more you’ll be noticed.

3) Ding! Statistics reinforce how potent this form of viral communication and info-sharing is:

  79% of American adults used the Internet in 2009, up from 67% in Feb. 2005 (source: Pew Internet & American Life Project; October 8, 2009)    300 million Facebook members use 300,000 servers, and Facebook is on tap to add another 300,000!

You get the idea. Small business marketing strategies jumping on this new wave of online social media because it’s low-cost, easy to control for out-going content and most of all fun to implement and are head and shoulders ahead of competition in generating leads.