6 Easy Steps to Blog for Quality Leads
Wanted to introduce to you a friend of mine who is a marketing coach and is also running a painting company in Southwest Florida: Steve Burnnett. He will be writing a few blogs for me on my site now and then. Welcome, Steve. and Here is his first article:You may not be a “writer” by trade, but if you take just 10 minutes and use these 6 easy steps, you will soon find that weekly blogging may become one of your top 3 lead generators.
In October of 2009, (one of our slowest months in SW Florida) we had one of our biggest months and every job we painted was a closed lead from blogging! Here’s how you can do it, too.
Step 1. Length
Your blog should be 200 to 400 and no more than 500 words. Blogs are meant to be brief and not a book. If you are on a roll with great information or a great story, great! Cut your blog in two or three or more sections and post it as a series which will draw interest to watch for the next one in the series. Bonus: Adding a picture is a great idea, as well. As they say, “A picture’s worth a thousand words.” Even a funny picture about your story will draw interest.
Step 2. What to write about.
When writing, you should consider being of value first. We all have enough information about how fantastic we are and why we are there best option all over our web site along with testimonials and pictures of beautiful homes.
To be of value in our blogs, we offer ‘how to’ tips or very interesting information: how to paint a popcorn ceiling, how to cut in a wall, how to paint a six panel door. While this all sounds redundant to us, it it great information for our prospect.
Give all the details away! Once the prospect, even a DIY’er (Do It Yourself-er), sees all the steps involved, they will immediately see you as the expert without you ever saying so and the DIY’er is now having second thoughts about attempting the project and contacts you!
Step 3. Story Teller
Share stories about some of your experiences. Stories are captivating. Plain information without a story, is not. Tell a story- not where you came in and saved the day- but to reveal that you are human and share about some challenges you faced with a certain process, product, or application technique.
Your point of this blog is to save them the chance of facing the same challenge.
Step 4. Title
Your title is very important. It must be very catchy and concise. In 3 to 7 words, you must hook them so they want to take a few minutes to actually read. Also, and very important, is to include your city or a surrounding city and your niche in some of the titles- especially in the content. You can’t do this to every title as it will be obvious. This is done for SEO. (Search Engine Optimization- which tells where to put your blog in the Google search listing, beginning or end!) Each blog can show up as an individual listing on the search pages.
Prospects are most likely to find you by entering your “city” and “niche” into the search engine: Google search: Chicago Painting Contractor. Therefore, some examples of titles could be: “Picking the Best Color for Your Chicago Home”, or “Painting a Popcorn Ceiling in Seattle”, or “Sarasota House Painting Tools”.
Step 5. Content
Short and sweet: pepper your blog with the name of your or your city and your niche (painting).
Step 6. The most important step!
The biggest key for us in using a blog for lead generation, was when I bought up the domain names of the cities in my area. For example, I live in North Port, so I bought: northportpainting.com, puntagordapainting.com, and venicepainting.com. Now some of these domains go straight to my main painting website. One of them, however, ‑venicepainting.com- has it’s own website as our target market for that year was Venice.
Buying these domain names and hosting them to your website, brings you right to the first page of the search, if not at the top, as well as on Google Local (shows up on Google search w/a map). For a while, when I searched “Venice FL painting contractor”, we showed up 7 times on the first page with 2 of them being on Google Local, with a map.
So, the 6 easy steps to blog for quality leads are:
1. keeping your blog form 200 to 400 words
2. when writing, give value
3. tell stories
4. Hook them with your title and include your ‘city” and “niche”
5. Pepper your blog with “city” and “niche”
6. (Most important) Buy up all the domain names of your surrounding cities + niche.
Do this and you will be sitting well on Google, my friend.
Much success,
Steve
