9 Ways to Generate Leads Online for Your Business
Finding a way to generate leads for a business is a never ending story. To be a successful business, no matter how big or small, you need to gain new leads and continually generate new sales.
For a small business, only a small increase in leads can make all the difference to the bottom line.
But how do you generate leads that will convert into sales? Where do you focus your efforts, money, and time to get the most out of your marketing budget?
I’ve put together a top 10 list of ways to generate leads and provide you with the best lead generation tools online that can help you increase your conversions, email list subscribers, and potential for business growth and success.
- Focus your efforts on SEO – search engine leads
- Create effective landing pages
- Advertise on search engines
- Write guest blog posts
- Create a free tool
- Engage with your audience – answer questions on forums
- Create useful content – linkable information
- Leverage social media
- Sponsor events
1. Focus your efforts of SEO – search engine leads
Search engine optimization is key to any online business’s success. Being able to drive traffic to your website from search engines is a skill many website owners need to have to help generate leads consistently.
You’ll want to make sure that your audience when they type your brand name or the items, you are promoting or selling into search engines like Google and Bing, that your website is easily found.
How do you do this? You focus on building your content around SEO keywords and perform keyword research using tools like Ahrefs and Spyfu to help find high search, low competition ideas for your content.
After you’ve figured out keyword topics in which you want to compete, it’s time to write quality content around these topics through blogging or adding helpful information to your product pages.
Interlink respective content together to help search engines find your content when crawling and boost your position in search. If you’re in a competitive industry, it can be hard to rank for high searched, high competition keywords. However, produce quality content with the right information, testimonials, and reviews, and gain a good reputation, and you’ll be able to beat your competitors and help generate leads with SEO.
- Accurate keyword tracking with access to over 20 billion keywords
- Track, analyze and compare competitor websites
- Detailed website SEO audits with recommendations
- Website audits to help with on-page SEO
- Analyse competitors keywords, backlinks & rankings
- Discover new keyword opportunities & track rankings
- Research new keyword opportunities
- Compare competitors domains and PPC campaigns for insights
- SERP Analysis to find better ranking opportunities
2. Create landing pages
While focusing on your SEO can help drive traffic to your site, creating targeted landing pages for email campaigns, advertising campaigns, and products can help you convert browsers into money-paying leads.
Using tools like Leadpages and Convertkit can help you produce unique landing pages focused on doing one thing and one thing only, getting people to perform a single action.
Whether you’re looking to increase your email list subscribers count or get people to purchase your product, a well-designed landing page can be the key to increasing conversions.
Many of the best landing page builders will provide you with templates to choose from depending on the type of conversion you’re looking for. There are no coding needed landing page creators with drag-and-drop editors, which let you customize your page’s text, images, fonts, add call to action (CTA) buttons, and more.
A good landing page design to create leads should include:
- A to the point headline
- Key benefits to help get rid of doubts and showcase why they need it
- An image or video to help show what they’ll get
- A bright and clear CTA button
- No clutter that distracts from the main focus
- Add social proof at the bottom of the page to increase trust (optional)
It doesn’t have to be perfect, but a good landing page with these essential elements can help increase the number of leads you get from your campaigns or search.
3. Advertise on search engines
Want to get your website noticed and have the budget to do so? Advertising on search engines can help get your content ahead of your competition and in front of your customers.
Targeting your search based on the terms that searchers are using means you’ll be able to target users looking to buy, those in the frame of mind to make a purchase, or those looking for a new product to research.
For instance, if you’re trying to get people to purchase SEO software, you could target key phrases like ‘Compare SEO Software‘, or ‘ Best SEO software’.
With many advertising platforms, you’ll also be able to segment your adverts to only show for specific countries or cities.
For example, ‘Best real estate agents in Denver’. Targeting these kinds of terms, especially in local search, is a way to generate the leads you need to bring in more business.
Remember, though, that advertising does take some capital, so if you’re a small business looking for free ways to generate leads, read on, as there are a few more on this list.
4. Leverage guest blogging: Write blog posts for other websites
Guest blogging is where you write content for another website. The articles you write often have a link back to your website in return. Some people ask for payment of posts others just let you have a ‘do follow’ link back to your site, which is good for SEO.
It might sound strange to spend your time and effort writing content for someone else’s website, which can help their business, but doing this has many benefits for your business, too, one of which is lead generation.
Creating guest blog posts does take time and effort, but it’s often free to do so. Many websites seek guest contributions from knowledgable and trustworthy sources like you to help bolster their content.
When you write a blog post, you’ll often be able to add a bio about the author with a link to your site. Guest blogging helps create brand awareness about your business. It can also help with SEO efforts, as a link from a reputable website can help boost your rankings, helping your site be seen as a trustworthy source of information.
When it comes to lead generation, that link is also a way for people to find out more about your business, helping them sign up for your email list or getting them to look at your products.
To maximize your efforts, make sure that the website you are writing your content on is relevant to the business you’re in. They don’t have to be a direct competitor but must be in the same circles.
For instance, if you are selling a website builder platform, guest blogging on a domain registrar’s website will help you get in front of the same type of people looking for services to create a website.
Be sure to write quality content, have a do-follow link, and continue to do this on many relevant websites to help build your backlink profile, increase your SEO, showcase your expertise and generate those all-important leads.
5. Create a free tool online
One of the best ways to create leads is to let people do something for free. No matter what industry you are in, there is usually some sort of online tool you can make (or get created) to help you drive more traffic and generate more leads.
For example, if you’re an accounting firm or website about finances, creating a free income tax calculator can help you drive more traffic to your site. If you have no coding skills, that’s fine. Many websites like CodeCanyon.net let you purchase code, scripts, and plugins to add to your website that can provide you with these free tools.
Free tools examples:
- Password generator
- Lorem ipsum generator
- IP Lookup
- Cost Calculator
- Currency Converter
- Loan EMI Calculator
Free tools are an easy sell as there’s nothing to pay in return for using it. Being free makes them highly linkable pieces of content and valuable real estate for you to upsell your services on the page. Say you offer accounting services and have the free tax calculator on your site. You can upsell the visitors by providing your services to do their taxes for them.
Adding a free tool to your site in conjunction with an upsell of some kind can help you generate more leads, but it will also help boost your SEO and website traffic.
Talking of free resources, have you signed up for my email list yet? I send out the latest posts and feature key tools to help you build, manage and grow your online business.
6. Create shareable content
Content creation is key to the success of a website. Without content, there’s not much search engine optimization that you can do to help you compete against your competitors in search.
However, writing endless blog posts isn’t the only type of content you can create. Creating a YouTube channel and posting helpful videos are a valuable way to generate more traffic to your site and, in turn, more leads. You can use video to help promote your service and brands or offer helpful information on how people can solve the problems they have in your area of expertise.
Examples of shareable content types:
- Infographics
- Case Studies
- How To Articles
- Videos
- List Articles
Other media types which are still highly shareable are infographics. Use an infographic maker like Canva, which offers hundreds of templates to create a helpful visual of your content. Support it with relevant data, and you’ll find that other websites and businesses are more likely to share or link to it from their sites.
What does all this promotion do? It helps boost your online presence and enables you to drive more traffic to help you get those all-important email signups or sales.
7. Leverage your social media channels
Another free way to generate more leads for your business is by leveraging social media.
Social media platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest, TikTok, and Instagram can help you increase your brand awareness and get your content in front of your audience.
Getting eyes on your content will, in turn, lead to more inbound traffic to your site and the generation of more leads for you to capture and sell to.
Social media marketing helps with SEO, which can get your site ranking higher, driving more leads, as we mentioned at the top of this post. It’s a cost-effective solution to lead generation, and the right tools don’t have to take up all of your time.
Social media tools like MeetEdgar, for instance, bring all your social media platforms to one place, letting you create posts, automate your scheduling, and engage with your followers from a single account.
Many social media platforms also let you advertise, for a cost, of course. Creating targeted ads on these platforms can also help you find new leads to help your business grow.
Check out my social media marketing tips on how you can make the most of your efforts.
8. Engage with your audience
Interacting with your audience can be a crucial way to create more leads for your business. I’m not just talking about replying to your follower’s messages on social media or liking your follower’s posts, even though that helps.
I’m talking about posting relevant answers on forums your audience frequents. Not necessarily providing links to your content (unless appropriate) but just becoming a valuable resource of information they can trust.
Popular discussion websites like Reddit and Quora let you answer questions and share your knowledge on thousands of different topics.
A great way to gain new leads is to share news on new things in your area. Sharing the latest news will pique people’s interest who want to learn more about the subject. Be relevant and helpful and don’t just promote, promote, promote; otherwise, these discussion boards could work against you.
P.S. you can advertise on these sites too.
9. Sponsor events or partnering with influencers
If you’re a small business, you might not be able to afford some of the costs that come with sponsoring big events that target your audience.
However, other ways could be more affordable for your budget. You can look to connect with people who have a following on social media channels, for instance.
YouTube is a good one for many, where you team up with a channel that gets a decent amount of views per video and sponsors one of their videos. Usually, you’ll get a specific product pitch within the video to get your business in front of thousands of eyes. A typical cost for this is around $2,000 per 100,000 followers on the YouTube channel.
You could, of course, partner with other social media influencers across TikTok and Instagram or sponsor online events like webinars to get your brand in front of more eyes. Doing this will make your brand familiar to many people, and links in the content will drive more traffic to your site or key landing pages to help drive home those sales.
What are the best tools for generating leads?
For an online business, generating leads mainly includes driving more traffic to your website. Then once they’re on your site, it’s up to you to convert those visitors into customers or get them to part with their email addresses so you can work your email marketing magic on them at a later date.
Here are some of the best tools that can help with various aspects of generating leads on your site and off your site.
- Accurate keyword tracking with access to over 20 billion keywords
- Track, analyze and compare competitor websites
- Detailed website SEO audits with recommendations
- Save time planning and publishing, use the composer to add posts no matter the platform
- View scheduled content with details of each post and advert details available with a click
- Monitor organic and paid ad campaigns across social channels
- Segment your mailing list and automatically send your subscribers messages based on their interests
- Schedule when to send your emails, so they are delivered when you want them to be
- Built-in analytics to see how well your campaigns perform
