Another way to generate leads is to comment in blogs, forums, and online communities. By being active and relevant online communities and leaving comments on blogs and forums, you can create a network of links back to your site. While many of these incoming links are discounted by search engines, they do create hundreds of pathways for potential clients to find your website.
People are always asking me if they should use pay per click advertising along with SEO, when they are already doing well in search engine rankings. In a word, yes. There are a few different reasons why this is a good idea for any business.
If you are using pay per click ads while you are already showing up high in search engine result pages, your site gains more valuable screen real estate on these results pages. When you have a larger presence, your site gets more traffic; meaning more conversions and more profits for you. It’s a simple thing, really – while it’s not free, it can and does usually more than pay for itself in terms of revenue generated by your website. The second compelling reason is that pay per click advertising lets you use many different keywords or key phrases at the same time, whereas SEO is geared towards a small number of terms. As any website owner knows, it’s hard to get a good search engine ranking for several different keywords or key phrases at the same time. You can specify which search terms your ad will show for with PPC ads; giving you a lot of flexibility and giving you exposure to a broader potential audience.
Blogs, as you know, are a little bit like online journals that list all the post in reverse chronological order. One of the key benefits to having a blog on your website is to establish pre-eminence in your market or become a thought leader. A lot of blogs have become prominent in their market and many people in related areas or unrelated areas actually start linking into your blog and feeding off your information. It’s like a pyramid with people underneath you, all looking to your for guidance and thought leadership in a market. It could be extremely powerful, but it does require effort, a strategy and a long term vision.
A more tactical way, but also a good way to use blogs is for Long Tail SEO. Long Tail SEO basically means that search engine optimisation that’s based around a lot of more specific search terms that a lot of users are using. What you might not know is that only a small fraction of searches on Google are actually what you might consider the major keywords in your market.
Let’s say you’re a plumber in Melbourne. Yes, a lot of people are searching for “plumbers Melbourne”, and if I had to optimise that website that’s probably the keyword that I would target first. But a lot of people are searching for “cheap plumbers Toorak” or “fix broken tap” and many different terms like that. Those are what we call Long Tail Terms. When you have a blog, you can actually post multiple posts on your blog over a period of time, even 100 or 200 posts that all address different issues and topics based around your core subject.
What this means is that you start ranking well in search engines for dozens or potentially hundreds of these long tail search terms and that generates a tonne of additional traffic to your website, which, over time, can really add up. So, how do you generate all this content assuming you have a blog? Well, there are a few options:
1. Hire Someone To Write It For You. There are many places where you can find freelance writers to come up with your content, including Guru.com and Elance.com. If your aim is to become influential in your niche, you may have to rework the content which these writers produce for you. You can also be very specific in what your criteria for the work they produce for you are.
2. Recycle Content. Recycle other contents such as newsletter articles, brochure content, other email documentation, or other types of contents that exists in your organisation but are not published widely. By doing this basically you’re leveraging existing content to reach a wider audience and basically get more bang for your buck for the content you’ve already generated.
Website owners should not neglect the lead generation potential offered by blogging -if you have a clear vision for where you want to go with your business and the dedication to stick with the business to build success, you can get a lot of traffic to your site this way. You can go to becomeablogger.com for more information on getting started I blogging, there is a series of instructional videos available here. Another good resource is entrepreneurs-journey.com by Yaro Starak; one of Australia’s, if not the world’s, most famous experts on blogging as a business tool.


