If you want to generate qualified leads, you’ve got to start driving qualified traffic to your website. After all, leads don’t just appear out of nowhere! (Although, that’d be nice.)
How do you generate qualified website traffic? You guessed it…by consistently publishing content on your blog!
To truly find success generating qualified traffic through blogging, it’s important to tailor content to your target market. This way, your blog articles are relevant, compelling AND come up in search engines when your target audience is searching.
1. Identify Specific Buyer Personas
The first step to creating content that generates qualified traffic is understanding what qualified means to you. What is the “right” traffic? Create buyer personas to help you identify the traits that the right visitors have that you want to attract.
As a photography business offering services to consumers, you must identify the specific person you want to sell to, as well as the people who are the decision-makers.
For example, you should know the age, general income, and biggest struggles for your ideal client. But you should also know the tastes, stylistic desires, and hobbies of the people you want to reach
They’re the ones who will be searching, reading and eventually engaging with you. When you know these details about your buyer personas, you can put yourself in their shoes – making it even easier to create compelling content for them.
2. Understand Pain Points
After you understand your buyer personas’ demographic information, dig deeper! To truly understand them, and create compelling content for them, you have to know their hopes and dreams, as well as what keeps them up at night.
Remember that knowing what information your audience wants is helpful when creating a content strategy, but knowing what information they need, desire and are desperate for is also vital.
Why? Because your prospective clients aren’t searching for information that’s “nice to have,” they’re searching for information that’s “need to have” and that solves a problem that is stressing them out!
This need for a solution is what’s going to compel your audience to take a few seconds to read your headline, and if that’s interesting enough, take a few more minutes of their valuable time to read your blog content.
When you solve problems for your prospective clients through content, whether they’re problems that keep them up at night or inconvenient bumps throughout their day, you form a relationship with them that keeps them coming back. Eventually, they’ll trust you enough as a problem-solver and resource that they’ll be willing to fill out a form with their information, and they’ll be open to receiving a phone call.
3. Pinpoint Relevant Search Terms
What are they searching for? Start pinpointing relevant search terms by plugging a list of at least 50 potential headlines (that are relevant to your buyer personas and solve their specific problems) into the awesome HubSpot Keyword Tool. There, you’ll see where your content currently ranks and how difficult it will be to rank on the first page. (If you’re not using HubSpot, you can go old school and search in Google.)
Prioritize content you create based on how difficult it will be to rank for the term on the first page of search engines. In HubSpot, that means prioritizing search terms with a difficulty rating of less than 50.
Now that you’ve done your homework, you can plug those terms into your editorial calendar and start creating content around those topics.
4. Pay Attention!
Different times of the year bring different opportunities and challenges for businesses in all industries. Pay attention to the way these “seasons” change the clients you serve.
For example, a professional wedding photographer might focus more on booking weddings during specific months of the year, shooting weddings during some months, and fulfilling photography orders during the following months.
It might fall on deaf ears for you to focus on solving problems for booking weddings during shooting season. Pay attention to the way your specific buyer personas respond during different seasons.
Just as seasons change, news also happens — technology gets updated, influencers make announcements, and events take place that affect the people you serve. Pay attention and stay relevant. Timely topics are golden and can’t be missed!
These are just four tips for creating compelling content that generates qualified leads. What are some of the methods you’ve found helpful for brainstorming and creating content that generates the “right” traffic?
Image by: Flickr user Alcino
About the Author:
Elizabeth Ippolito is co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer of Plume & Post. Find more musings from Elizabeth on Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest.