Most of you small business owners out there want one thing from your blog…more leads. Pure and simple. I get inquiries from you saying you want:

• More traffic
• More comments
• Better search rankings
• Higher visibility on social media sites
• etc…

At the end of the day, you probably could care less how much traffic you get.  You could probably care less about any of this noise. What you really want is more leads.

This post is about how to get more leads. Here are 5 tips you may not have heard before:

• Widen your sidebar: A lot of blogs have these skinny ass little sidebars. It’s fine visually, but if you have a call to action in your sidebar you probably want people to notice it. So…make it bigger!

• Do some housekeeping: Bloggers love to add stuff. New widgets. New plugins. New features of all sorts. Before you know it, every page on your site has 50 calls to action.  Do you need that “latest posts” widget, or is it just a distraction? Sometimes the most powerful thing you can do to increase conversions is to simply remove distractions.

• Shorter posts: Let’s face it,   shorter posts take up less space on the page, giving your calls to action higher impact visually. It’s just the basics…the sooner someone finishes reading your post, the sooner they look for what to do next.

• Link to squeeze pages: Squeeze pages are simply pages on your website that are dedicated 100% to lead generation. I’ve moved a call to action from the sidebar over to a squeeze page, and I sent from a 3-5% conversion rate to a 40% conversion rate. Squeeze pages can be linked in your sidebar, from the text in your articles and even directly from your navigation bar.

• Install a call to action at the end of your posts:   I’ve learned that these forms don’t typically convert at a high rate. But the leads I get from these opt in forms are of the highest quality.  I may only get a 1% opt in rate from this, but I almost invariably end up working with the people who sign up using these forms. So…low quantity but VERY high quality leads.

Lead generation from your blog isn’t too difficult. It’s a matter of taking advantage of every single opportunity possible. For example, take a look at my Empower Network Blog.  This blog draws traffic because there are already thousands of backlinks to it from it thousands of members.   It’s already optimized, and has Authority Rankings from Alexa.com, Google and the search engines.…

People skim your content. Everyone knows this, but very few of us optimize our content accordingly. Very few people hang on every word you write, even your avid followers skim your articles. Some people will read just your subheadings. Some will read just the bullet points. Some will read just the first paragraph and the last paragraph. If lead generation is your goal, make sure a call to action is visible to each of these visitors. They won’t see them all; they’ll just see the ones they want to see.

Questions or concerns?  Hit me up in the comments. I’m at your service