Are you wondering how to get more leads online for your business?

Lead generation is a great way to generate new customers and increase sales. In today’s competitive environment, companies are always looking for ways to improve their marketing strategies and get more leads.

There are many ways to generate leads, such as social media ads, email campaigns, etc.

But few companies have unlimited money and time. When that’s the case, you have to get creative when it comes to generating leads.

Leads are the life source of any growing company.

It doesn’t matter how ambitious your plan to scale is if you can’t maintain that momentum with a steady stream of quality leads.

You can definitely pay for leads. However, that should be the last option. Instead, focus on generating leads from sources that don’t cost anything.

With that in mind, you can use your existing cash flow to improve your product.

Here are the top strategy for generating free leads and how to best navigate them:

1. Blogging and SEO

Blogging is no longer a secret; it’s one of the best ways to showcase your expertise, establish industry authority, and generate leads.

Getting visitors to your website is the most important thing when it comes to boosting leads.

How to Optimise Your Blog Posts for Generating Leads

1. Researching what people are looking for is one thing, but researching which words and phrases they’re using to find these answers is another. Answer The Public is an excellent tool for finding questions people are asking that you can answer in your blog posts.

2. Provide unique value to your readers by creating one-of-a-kind, relevant and helpful blog posts. The content should resolve issues the user is facing – especially if they can’t find, or can’t easily find, resolution elsewhere.

3. End with a call-to-action. The actual call-to-action (CTA) you should use can vary greatly from page to post. But when generating leads, you’ll likely want to refrain from asking people to comment or engage. Instead, focus on making sure they fill out a form so you can enter them into a sales funnel. You can also use an exit-intent popup with a simple form and CTA to seal the deal

Get them to do so by offering exclusive content like whitepapers, webinars, ebooks and more.

Typically, these unique offerings can only be accessed through the sign-up form, are of higher quality than a generic blog post and serve the purpose of gathering contact info and segmenting the lead by interest.

Check out these blogging tips to help increase site traffic, rankings and earnings.

2. Third-Party Listings

When searching for leads, sometimes it is easiest to go for the lowest hanging fruit – those searching for answers.

Websites like Quora are ripe with people looking for answers and who are open to advise. Often, the answer to their problems could be your product or service.

And although Quora isn’t a place for direct selling, it is a place to open lines of communication, establish yourself as a thought leader, build trust and build familiarity with your brand.

Typically, the most successful lead generators on Quora are sincere, add value at every exchange, and have a reputation for being helpful.

While you’re doing all those things, be thoughtful about how you place links back to articles you’ve written to get people to your website.

Update your bio filled regularly with relevant offers and links to your content. Users will naturally gravitate there to read more about you if you demonstrate value and expertise.

3. Guest Posting

Guest posting can further your reach and generate more leads by allowing you to tap into other companies’ audiences.

In addition, you’ll simultaneously build backlinks to your website, which Google and the other search engines will use to rank you higher in search results.

They’re truly a win-win tactic for generating leads.

Check out the best ways to find guest blogging opportunities.

4. Cold Calling and Cold Emailing

Cold calling and cold emailing are far from dead and can be a great way to generate free leads.

As with every other lead generation tool, you have to follow best practices to see serious results.

The true art of cold emailing and cold calling comes down to being clear, concise, personalising every touch and consistently following up.

Some useful strategies for generating leads using this channel are to:

• Find or create a list of potential leads

• Ask industry professionals for referrals

• Reach back out to lost or closed opportunities

Once you’ve made contact via cold email or cold call, begin to nurture those leads over time.

5. Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing is a tactic that brings together brands and organisations with influencers who have a niche, loyal following who then showcase your product, service, content, etc to their audience.

Not all influencers want to cash in exchange for a guest spot or review.

Some are perfectly happy doing so in exchange for a free licence to your software, a shout out to your followers or a discount on your product or service.

The Power of Utilising Micro-Influencers vs. Macro-Influencers

Though micro-influencers have substantially fewer subscribers than their multi-million-follower-sized peers, they drive greater engagement and can even be more profitable.

In fact, according to a 2017 study by HelloSociety, micro-influencers drive 60% higher engagement, are 6.7X more cost-efficient per engagement, and drive on average 22.2% more weekly conversions.

Take Instagram, for example. The ratio of comments and likes to followers tends to peak when an account is around 1,000 followers.

Having an account with greater than 100,000 followers sees a serious decline in engagement. That’s because celebrities and high influencers don’t seem as relatable. People tend to interact more with those they perceive similar to themselves.

How to Connect with Micro-Influencers

Connecting is typically the easy part.

Once you’ve found the right one all you’ve got to do is reach out to start a conversation. 

Finding the right micro-influencers in the first place takes a bit more effort.

Check out a few tips for finding micro-influencers.

Lead generation has never been easier. With these five simple tactics, you can quickly turn online visitors into qualified leads.

If you need help getting started with any of them, we’d love to hear about it.

We recommend having a free strategy call with us. Contact us here or make sure you add your listing to Discover Local for free here.