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Another way to generate leads is to comment in blogs, forums, and online communities. By being active and relevant online communities and leaving comments on blogs and forums, you can create a network of links back to your site. While many of these incoming links are discounted by search engines, they do create hundreds of pathways for potential clients to find your website.

One of the questions that I’m often asked is “Should I do both pay per click advertising and search engine optimisation, even though I’m already ranking well in the free search engines?” Well, my answer to this is normally “Yes”, for a couple of reasons.

If you are using pay per click ads while you are already showing up high in search engine result pages, your site gains more valuable screen real estate on these results pages. When you have a larger presence, your site gets more traffic; meaning more conversions and more profits for you. It’s a simple thing, really - while it’s not free, it can and does usually more than pay for itself in terms of revenue generated by your website. The second compelling reason is that pay per click advertising lets you use many different keywords or key phrases at the same time, whereas SEO is geared towards a small number of terms. As any website owner knows, it’s hard to get a good search engine ranking for several different keywords or key phrases at the same time. You can specify which search terms your ad will show for with PPC ads; giving you a lot of flexibility and giving you exposure to a broader potential audience.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past few years, you are well aware that a blog is a type of online journal. Maintaining a blog has a few advantages, one of the biggest is that you can use this virtual soapbox to establish yourself as an expert in your niche and build your brand. A lot of bloggers have managed to leverage this platform into becoming dominant players in their field. It takes some hard work and you’ll need a long term strategy to succeed at this, but blogging can be very powerful at generating leads and income for your business.

Using your blog for long tail SEO is also an effective tactic. Long Tail SEO is the use of a larger number of keywords and key phrases which are commonly used by people searching for the sort of product or service which you have to offer. A lot of website owners don’t know that the keywords that they use for their business are not necessarily the ones that all of their potential customers may be using. For example, if you are a plumber in Melbourne, you probably have optimised your site for a key phrase along the lines of “plumber Melbourne”. This is a good idea and I’d do so myself. However, there are an awful lot of people searching with phrases like “cheap plumber Toorak” or “fix broken tap” among others. If you have a blog, you can post entries regularly focused on different keywords and key phrases depending on the specific topic you are writing abut in your post.

Suppose you have a plumbing business in Melbourne. There are a lot of people searching Google for “plumbers Melbourne” and I would also concentrate on this keyword first. However, a lot of these people are looking for “cheap plumbers Toorak” , “fix broken tap” and other terms. With a blog, you can post regularly using different keywords depending on your subject.
What does this all mean? It means that your site will begin to climb up the search engine rankings for many different search terms, giving you a lot of added traffic. Over time this traffic can really add up. Assuming you have a blog, how do you create all of this content you’ll need? There are a few ways to do this:

1. Get Someone To Write It For You. You can find writers on Guru.com or Elance.com and you could also find freelance writers to write blog post on topics that you either specify or instruct them to look up for you. If you’re looking to become a thought leader, the problem with this might be that the actual content that they’re developing is not the peak content that you need to put out there in order to be considered a thought leader. So, you might need to put in your own time to do that, or you might have to edit the post of other people in order to produce the content

2. Recycle content. Content like articles from newsletters, brochures and other sources can be reworked and used on your website. This content can then be leveraged for greater exposure.

Website owners should not neglect the lead generation potential offered by blogging -if you have a clear vision for where you want to go with your business and the dedication to stick with the business to build success, you can get a lot of traffic to your site this way. You can go to becomeablogger.com for more information on getting started I blogging, there is a series of instructional videos available here. Another good resource is entrepreneurs-journey.com by Yaro Starak; one of Australia’s, if not the world’s, most famous experts on blogging as a business tool.