Does your business have a blog?

Would you like your blog to bring in more leads for your business?

You already know you need to create awesome blog content, but there’s more to business blogging than just that.

You also need to include a few tactics to help you bring in the leads you want.

Here are some useful tactics to entice and capture leads used by top marketing business blogs!

#1: Place Opt-In Forms Around Your Blog Content

There are several areas on your blog that you can use to introduce visitors to calls to action such as free trials, free consultations or a simple mailing list opt-in form. These areas include your header, sidebar, the end of blog posts, your About page and your footer.

Unbounce, a landing page software creator, encourages people to try their software or sign up for their mailing list in their sidebar and post footers.

Unbounce has lead generating calls to action in their sidebar.

KISSmetrics, a web analytics software company, uses their blog footer along with the sidebar and ends of posts to encourage subscriptions and free trial signups.

KISSmetrics has lead generating calls to action in the footer of their blog.

While it might seem like overkill to put lead capturing options in so many places on your blog, it’s really not if you consider the fact that a visitor may only notice them at certain points during their visit.

While reading a blog post, for example, readers may ignore your header and sidebar. But if they are impressed by your blog content, then they will notice a subscription option at the end of the post.

Alternatively, if they make it to the homepage of your blog and scan all the way down the latest post titles and summaries, they might be interested in subscribing in the footer.

The key is to place your opt-in form in various locations on your blog where you have captured your readers’ attention.

#2: Regularly Create Free, Downloadable Content

HubSpot has the leading inbound marketing blog to complement their marketing platform. If you follow their blog, you know that they are constantly creating free, downloadable marketing content in the form of ebooks, whitepapers, templates and other valuable digital material. They not only promote their free content on their blog, but on their social networks as well for additional traction.

HubSpot markets free content on their blog and social networks.

In exchange for all of these downloads, people must provide their name, email and additional information about their business. Free content is the perfect lead generator!

The key to getting the right kind of leads with your free content is to create content that will attract your target customer base. You don’t want to capture just any subscriber—you want to capture someone who will want to learn more about your products and services.

#3: Incentivize Sharing With a Referral Program

What’s better than offering free content to capture leads for your business? Offering more free content to those who help you build leads.

Marketo, a marketing automation software business, created a free coloring book for marketers. Their incentive offer was a free hard copy coloring book—and crayons—for each person who referred five people to download the digital copy.

Using referral incentives to generate leads.

Now, instead of just one new lead from their blog, they have the opportunity to capture five more!

Consider ways you can incentivize your readers to refer more leads to your business.

How to Generate More Leads With Your Blog, 5 Tips | Social Media Examiner.