Lead generation is absolutely crucial to your business. Lead generation is the practice of finding and drawing in potential customers to your business. There are a variety of ways to do this including via social media or even investing in certain tools that can help you generate leads.

One way you can easily generate leads without stepping outside of your website or investing in any expensive tools is to work through your own blog. In this article, we are going to look at 10 of the easiest ways for you to convert B2B leads through your blog.

1. Make Your Blog Similar to Your Website

The Problem: If someone is landing on your blog, they may never click over to your homepage. Or, even worse, they might find your blog and your homepage separately and not realize your the company that’s been giving them quality content for months.

The Solution: Connect your blog and website. Of course, on your blog you would ideally have ample links to your homepage but that isn’t always enough. At the most basic level, your blog and main website design should be the same. By using the same colors and themes, you create a visual correlation that allows visitors to either or both pages quickly recognize that they are working within the same company when they switch between pages.

You should also, both for correlation in visitor’s eyes and for SEO purposes, link your blog and main website technically. For example, the URL for many website’s blogs is a subdomain rather than their own. This means instead of completely unique URL for the blog, the blog would have a URL like blogname.websitename.com.

2. Use a Call to Action

The Problem: Most people stumble onto blogs the first time because they asked a search engine a question and your blog was one of the initial choices to hold the answer. So, they often go onto your blog, get the answer they need, and then leave. Unfortunately, while this increases your traffic, you haven’t really drawn in a potential customer meaning you haven’t generated a lead.

The Solution: When you are writing your blog’s content, use calls to action. These are sentences inserted in your content - usually near the end of a blog post - that prompt readers to do more that get the answers they need then click away.

A good example of a call to action is when you see a webpage or blog post that says something such as “call now!” or “visit our website today!”

3. Use Prompts

The Problem: As we noted before, you might have a lot of traffic but few leads through your blog. This is because many people come to your blog for a specific question and leave once they get the answer they need. This is an obvious problem because while they may use your content, they won’t participate in your B2B sales.

The Solution: It won’t always work but one method that many websites use is to prompt visitors to enter their email address. Usually, they are promised deals or updates in return for this information. What this does in reference to generating you leads, though, is that it opens up dialogue with the visitor of your website and creates the potential for their visit to your blog to become a purchase through your company.

4. Stay Updated

The Problem: Once you have a reader hooked on your blog, they are more likely to visit the rest of your website and partake in your services. However, if you stop posting on your blog, they have less of a reason to visit it regularly, and eventually they will forget about your blog.

The Solution: The solution to this is rather simple - just keep posting! Even if you are a smaller company with a smaller following, try to keep your blog updated on a regular basis. If you don’t want to lose readers, keep them interested with content that is meaningful and consistent.

5. Have Internal Links

The Problem: As we stated earlier in the article, a problem can arise when people visit your blog but don’t visit your website in turn. Obviously, this is a problem because while a lot of traffic on your blog is good, a lack of traffic on your main website doesn’t help your B2B leads.

The Solution: Before, we stated that you can help this by linking your website and blog technically and aesthetically. However, you shouldn’t be afraid to link to your main website either. This is also a great way to connect readers to specific pages of your website rather than just sending them to your homepage.

6. Create a Content Library

The Problem: Sometimes, when people come to your site looking for a specific answer, they don’t stick around for the full experience of your blog. As such, they don’t have the time to get invested in or attached to your content.

The Solution: Create a content library. You can make a main database where people can browse through your content but your best bet isn’t to stop there. In addition, consider having a “similar content” section on your blog posts. If you suggest other, relevant content to your readers right away, they are more likely to click around your site and get invested. This, paired with tactics like backlinks to your main website and calls to action, will get you more leads.

7. Use Your Blog as Conversation

The Problem: The problem that many businesses - especially small businesses - have is that they don’t know exactly what their customers want or need. In addition, even if they do, it can take a little convincing to prove to customers that they are your first priority, not just turning a profit.

The Solution: Use your blog as a method of conversation with your readers. Make sure that you reply to their comments on posts and answer every time they fill out a “contact us” form. By doing this, you are hearing what your potential customers are looking for and you are making sure they feel heard and cared about when they contact you.

8.Remember to Utilize Headlines

The Problem: Stepping away from some of the other problems that we’ve looked at in this article, there is the issue of people not clicking on your content at all. This, of course, is an issue. This is because while traffic doesn’t always contribute to leads, you can’t have leads if you don’t have any traffic.

The Solution: One way to try and counteract this is to have eye-catching headings. There are a few different ways to do this - many writers choose to pose a question. However, you should avoid anything misleading or clickbait-worthy. If someone clicks on your article only to be disappointed by the content, your only going to lose potential leads.

9. Utilize SEO

The Problem: This is a repeat of the problem when we looked at headlines. To repeat, though, it can be difficult to generate leads through your blog if you aren’t even drawing in readers.

The Solution: Try to utilize SEO techniques in your content. If you don’t know what this is, SEO stands for search engine optimization. You can do this in a variety of ways such as inserting keywords into your content and making sure your site is user-friendly and loads quickly. The main idea behind this is to rank as highly on a search engine when someone searches a term that is related to your business.

10. Don’t Get Away From Your Customers

The Problem: As we have looked at a lot in this article, there can be a problem when visitors come to your website and only stick around long enough to get the answers they need. However, you can have a problem if you are so focused on generating leads that you forget to deliver meaningful content.

The Solution: The last thing you want to do is to get away from the content that brought new readers to your blog in the first place. So, while you want to implement these lead-generating practices, you don’t want to sacrifice quality content. After all, you can’t gain leads if you aren’t even gaining traffic.