Are you struggling to get leads from your content marketing efforts? If yes, then you must look for the blog essential elements and tools to make your blog effective and easy to access. Here are some useful tips to convert your blog into a lead generation machine.

No matter what your business model is, content marketing is most effective when it comes to promoting your business online and blogging has become the key source for lead generation. Let’s understand the importance of content in digital marketing and how you can collect more leads by creating and publishing content regularly on your blog.

“53% of marketers say blog content creation is their top inbound marketing priority.” – HubSpot

Drive sales, engage your readers, and boost brand awareness are the top three content marketing objectives. Today, digital marketers are putting more efforts into crafting content that can create a meaningful experience and help businesses to achieve their goals.

Content creation builds an affinity with your existing audience, this way producing content on a regular and targeted style leads to better relationship and it became easy and effective to convince people.

First thing first, creating quality content to serve your target audience is the priority for digital marketers. But, creating and publishing content is not just enough for generating ROI from your blog. To get leads or better results from your business blog, you need to promote it on the right channels as well.

Following content marketing mantras will help you in collecting more leads from your blog by converting it into a lead magnet:

Blog elements that encourage visitors to convert

Element #1: An intuitive blog structure

“To design is to communicate clearly by whatever means you can control or master.”  -Milton Glaser

Design your blog structure to create better experiences for the subscribers and visitors. Creating meaningful experiences always leads to better results and ROI. Create a blog structure that is easy to navigate through different sections.

Designing an attractive blog structure is essential to mark an impression on visitor’s mind. Make it linked to your business networks- social media channels and your professional profiles and let people easily connect and check into for any information.

Design your blog homepage with a sticky header, where you can place all your categories and highlight your business logo (try a free logo maker) and punchline for branding purpose.

Give your users a search option by placing a search bar at the top of your blog if any user wants to look for a specific piece of information.

Also, provide a subscription option to users so that they can access a new piece of the blog through their email whenever a new piece of content gets published on your blog. Don’t ask for too many details, just the name and email address is enough for blog subscription.

Connect users with your social channels and let them share the post on their social profiles by providing easy social sharing options. Place a sticky social counter on the left top side on your blog and provide social connect buttons at the top and bottom of your post.

Element #2: Call to Actions (CTAs)

Setting Call to Action (CTA) on your blog is essential to capture leads through, but, CTAs need to be designed and placed strategically so that they won’t annoy your readers. Putting CTAs on your blog is a great way to drive leads and conversion.

There are different types of CTAs, such as Inline CTA, Bottom CTA, and Sidebar CTA to implement on your blog. If you’re presenting a lengthy post then putting inline CTA makes sense. Placing a CTA at the end of your post is advised to trigger lead collection once a reader has gone through the information on your blog.

However, putting a Sidebar CTA on your right-side column is appropriate if you’re presenting some gated or downloadable content to your audience.

Similarly, you can place Bottom CTA at the end of your blog category pages. Moreover, putting inline CTA under the tiles of your blog section may work for you, just need to put it strategically and need to check if it does not irritate your readers.

For example, if most users are not scrolling your webpage beyond the first fold then you must shift CTA above the fold to get most user’s reaction to it.

That’s how you can create and place CTAs on your blog to generate more user’s action on it.

Element #3:  Social networks to boost engagement

Producing engaging content is among the top 5 content marketing challenges for marketers.

After publishing a well-crafted post on your blog, it’s time to promote it well so that you can generate some good engagements on it in a form of likes, shares, and comments. Comment is the best way to know your readers’ opinion and trigger engagement on your blog.

Using different social sharing plugins to boost sharing on your post is recommended, where you can use Social Warfare, Add This, Share this, etc. plugins to boost sharing on your blog.

Also, using Click to Tweet plugin to enable social sharing within the post.  Showing some industry trends with statistics is a smart way to pull greater engagement on your blog post.

However, using Disqus plugin to enable commenting on your blog is a great way to build your blog audience.

Brands triggered their sales by boosting reviews and comments about their products and services. However, people spend more time on social media and they are busy in connecting and sharing their views through.

It would be an incentive if you offer them to connect to your blog using their social profiles Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, and Instagram, etc.

Element #4: Implement Optin forms to boost lead collection

Audience relevance, content engagement, and triggering users action are the top three things that make content effective.

Putting Optin forms for collecting leads at different sections on your blog based on user behaviour boosts the lead generation process and ultimately results in better conversion.

Analyze first, implement later is the best way to fix your lead collecting forms on your blog appropriately.

To implement different lead collection forms on your blog needs a close understanding of your readers. Otherwise, you are shooting in the dark, to get some light on your aiming target firstly you need to observe user’s behaviour on your blog. By analyzing different user behaviour on your blog you’ll be further able to implement your marketing strategy appropriately.

Once you know your audience well, then you can show forms differently to them. Exit overlay, Time Intent pop up, Scroll Intent Pop up, and Sticky Header & Footer are the form types, which you can use on your blog to collect contacts.

Try to optimize your forms on the blog as per the user’s type and the device type. Optimize your content differently for desktop and mobile users.

However, offering freebies by implementing an Optin Form and customizing it in your own style is a good way to boost lead collection on your blog.

Element #5: Faster blog loading speed

Speed is a killer! It kills your visitors if a webpage does not load quickly.

Your blog loading speed decides a visitor will stay on it or quickly switch to some other!

The ideal website/blog loading speed should be 3 seconds and less, otherwise, it leads to increase the bounce rate as users won’t get a good experience in accessing your webpage.

Fast loading speed should be the major concern for businesses/brands to attract visitors to their website. Optimizing website speed for a faster access will not only attract, but it will convince and convert users into your customers.

Slow loading speeds affect the traffic on your blog to a major extent as nobody likes the slower sites.

And the loading speed becomes crucial especially when users browsing your website on their mobile devices- smartphones, tablets, etc. To present a good user experience to all, you need to optimize your blog/website for mobile devices.

Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) is a technique developed by Google to create the web of the future- fast and optimized. You can easily implement AMP to your blog by installing AMP plugin. This will accelerate your website loading speed on mobile devices up to 4X times.

Also, you’ll get your website in an optimized style for all types of mobile devices and smartphones.

However, you can test your website loading speed with the help of Google tool for speed and Pingdom. Check how fast your website open on different devices and start optimizing it the way you want.

Use these speed optimization tools to check your blog page speed and analyze how it can get faster for creating better user experience (UX).

Conclusion

There is a huge demand for valuable content i.e. blog posts, infographics, and videos etc. for every industry type. Following are the top 5 content marketing mantras to consider if you want to attract, engage and convert your readers into your clients.

Follow these surefire content marketing hacks to collect more leads on your blog. Let’s create content that adds value to your business/brand and start nurturing leads to win your customers.

About the author:

Nick Patel is Marketing Head at WebbyMonks, agencies’ most preferred Front End and WordPress Development Partner. He pens down his knowledge and experience on WordPress, Digital Marketing and Web Design. He loves to explore cutting-edge technology in the digital world. When not writing for technology, you can find him fishing, shooting with his camera or brewing coffee. Feel free to connect with him on Twitter and LinkedIn.