Dotty Scott, a marketer with 15+ years of blogging experience, walks through using blogs to generate leads and sales. Post consistently, optimize for search engines, link to your offerings, and use lead magnets to collect emails. Repurpose posts on Medium and tie each one to a specific goal: growing your list or making a sale.
Blogging for lead generation. Let's take a look at blogging. As a business owner, I have blogged for 15+ years. And all that means is I write articles and I put them on my website. That's it. That's what a blog is. So if you have information in your head that you want to get out so people can read it, then blogging is a good thing for you to do. A lot of business owners have business coaches that have said, you need to start blogging. And they'll tell them it will increase their visibility online. It will enhance their expertise. You will become the person known in whatever market you're in for being an expert in blah, blah, blah. But yet. They don't really grasp what the power of blogging is. I wanna share that with you. All of what I just said is true. It will make you an expert in the eyes of your readers. It will definitely enhance your online visibility. Essentially, it enhances your search engine optimization because it gives the search engines more information to index. And that's what search engines love to do is crawl around and index as much unique content as they can possibly find. They thrive on that. That's their whole mission and purpose of existence. So it will definitely do that. However, there's some things to know about blogging. It does take commitment. If you put out 5 articles and then say you do that once a day for a week, and then you wait a year before you put anything else out, you've lost everything. There's no point in blogging if you're gonna do that. If you're gonna consistently do one a month. At least that is a consistent pattern. Every month the search engines know I'm gonna come back to this website and I'm gonna find new information. That is valid. Not too effective, but it is valid. Uh, if you are going to put out an article once a week, that is 4 times more effective than doing it once a month. So there's that. Uh, the consistency is a good thing. It is a needed thing, and it actually trains the search engines on what frequency they're going to come visit your website. That's been known for years. Um, now, what do you actually put in these blog posts? First of all, you want to write them in a search engine friendly way. So there is an actual method for writing blog posts. I have a course on it and it will teach you everything you need to know about writing an optimized blog post. You can even download a cheat sheet that will give you the formula. So that is all on my website. But there's more to it than just how you write it. There's a reason to be writing these blog posts, and I'm assuming it's part of your marketing plan. And I'm assuming you have services or products that you promote as a business. Are the blog posts enhancing these services or products? Are they linking to them, to your service page or your product page that it is talking about? For every service that you sell or every product that you sell, You should have around 4 or more, a minimum of 4, we'll say that, blog posts that are expanding on some piece of that service or some benefit of the product, something expanding on it and then linking to it. That is part of search engine optimization. It's part of becoming an expert for that service. Whatever it is, and it will help you sell that service. So you're not just blogging to put your information out there. You are blogging to succeed in business, which means selling. So do you have a course that you're pushing? Let's write some blog posts on that topic and let's sell it. Let's link to it in the actual blog post. So that they can have the opportunity to purchase it. Are you trying to create more leads? Are you trying to build your list that you market to via email? Put something in these blog posts that they can download by giving you their name and email address. So let's grow your list. That's a great use for blogging. Stop. Just putting information out there. Start putting information out there with a plan to collect names and grow your list, to sell a product or service. And then now let's start repurposing that on social media, on platforms like Medium and other article posting platforms. So that you are getting more exposure for every single blog post. It's not just one thing anymore. You can turn that post into many instances online, many links back to your website online. And again, have a purpose for that post. You're selling something, you're growing your list. One of those two things. There's probably more things that you could be doing, but whatever fits into your marketing plan, make sure that your blogging is enhancing and growing that plan.
