So you started a blog, wrote some articles, shared them with a few friends, but now what? Contrary to popular belief, there’s a lot of moving parts behind running a successful blog online, and what you should continue with next.

  • You can focus on creating more content which is always a good thing.
  • There’s the option of optimizing your content for SEO purposes.
  • Don’t forget about generating leads and building your list.

So in this article, I want to focus on the third benefit when it comes to generating leads and building your email list. However, is this a process that’s going to waste your time, or an activity that will pay off down the road? Let’s find out right now.

The Importance Of Lead Generation With Your Blog

It’s been stated that building your email list is one of the best activities that you can be doing with your blog or online business. Whether you agree or not, you need to be aware of why building a list is so valuable.

First and foremost, it allows you to have another form of traffic that you can always control. Nowadays, coming across traffic is becoming more and more difficult. With an increase in advertising and a surplus of social media hangouts, it’s getting harder to capture attention.

You can bypass the increasing costs of advertising by generating leads, as you’ll never have to pay more for the leads that you own, aside from the cost of using an email marketing tool.

Next, generating leads is a great way to send more traffic to your latest and greatest blog posts. Maybe you created a fantastic training, or maybe you have a new offer that you want to tell your audience about. Simply send a quick email in order to get in front of those who need to see it the most.

Those are just a couple of reasons why you’ll want to start building an email list with your blog, and there are many more as well. Let’s take a look at the actions that you can take in order to start collecting email addresses with your blog.

Create A Landing Page (As Well As A Lead Magnet)

A landing page, which can also be referred to as a lead capture page, simply allows you to collect email addresses by offering something that your audience wants or needs (which is referred to as a lead magnet).

The reason you need a lead magnet is simple: it’s going to be something that your audience will get in exchange for their email address. When they enter their email address on your landing page, they get sent to a thank you page, they receive their free gift, and then they get their first email followup as well.

Once you have your landing page and lead magnet created, now it’s time to get it in front of those who need to see it the most.

Make Sure That Every Visitor Sees Your Free Lead Magnet Offer

The last thing that you want to do is create a landing page along with your free lead magnet offer, and then have no one see it. So how can you make sure that this doesn’t happen? Show it to everyone that comes across your blog. Don’t worry, this is very easy to do.

First and foremost, you want to have some type of banner or button that is above the fold on your blog. Above the fold simply means that your audience won’t need to scroll down in order to see this. A few examples of this include on the homepage of your blog, a banner near the top of your blog, and lastly, on the right side-bar of your blog.

Don’t be afraid to sprinkle links in your blog posts that lead to your landing page as well. This can be even more beneficial to your readers because it allows them to get additional valuable information for free.

Utilize Pop-Ups And Alert Bars

There’s a good chance that you’ve seen these before. Let’s start with pop-ups. These are simply non-intrusive boxes that appear on your blog whenever your visitors take a specific action. Here are a few examples of actions that can trigger a pop-up.

  • Moving the mouse to the top of the page and leaving your blog.
  • Scrolling down your blog post a certain percent.
  • Staying on your blog for a specific amount of time.

It’s completely up to you, but what’s important to note is that these pop-ups bars allow you to advertise your lead magnet for free. This is a great way to generate more leads that a lot of bloggers are missing out on today.

Next, we have alert bars which are long horizontal bars that sit on the top or bottom of your blog. They can have a section where your audience enters their email address, or you can link to your lead generation page.

Similar to a pop-up, these can be triggered by specific actions or you can simply have them sit at the top or the bottom of your blog until your visitor hits the X bottom on the alert bar. Once again, LeadPages offers you to use an unlimited amount of pop-ups and alert bars with many of their plans. You can learn more LeadPages through the link in the “Creating A Landing Page” section that is a little way up.

Conclusion

Consider these tips the fundamentals when it comes to generating leads from your blog. Continue to utilize these tips and you’ll be on your way to adding more subscribers to your email marketing list.