The psychology of a human being is complicated as well as interesting. When a friend or acquaintance refers you to a product to use, you definitely get a little curious about the said product or service, they make an appearance in your head. Imagine getting rewards by just referring a product or service to your friends or family. Isn’t it amazing?
There are various types of marketing, one of them being referral marketing. Referral marketing doesn’t get much attention, but the industry knows its value. You might not share about any product you bought, but when you get some discount for sharing, your inner “you” automatically press the share button. Referral marketing is the best way to increase sales. Not only do people bring you more customers, but they become loyal to you too.
Generations Trusting Referral Advertising
Every app, shopping website, and literally every business uses referral programs these days. In this article, we will talk about Referral Marketing so let’s get right into it.
Whenever we get a suggestion from our friend or family referring to a particular product, we are more likely to believe them. However, word-of-mouth is still the best referral channel out there, but it is nearly impossible for a company to track that referral. To solve this problem and encourage and reward their customers for referring their products, companies use referral marketing programs.
As a company, you provide a unique referral code to every customer and ask them to share that code and earn some profit. When people share that code with someone and bring you a new customer, they get reward points or money and you get a lead. As already said, this is not as powerful as word-of-mouth, but it is still a good option as people will share your content to earn points that will be a reward and there is hardly anyone who doesn’t like rewards.
Rewarding Options for Referral Marketing Strategies
There are four ways to provide the reward:
Rewardingboth parties: You can reward both the referrer and your new customer. This way, both the people get the benefit and it is a great way to motivate them to bring in more customers.
Rewardingthereferred: Reward the person who is referred by someone. People who feel guilty to make a profit by referring will love this feature. However, you should analyze the audience first, as not the majority of people feel that way.
Rewardingthereferrer: By rewarding the person who referred someone, you motivate the next person to refer someone else. By this method, you don’t have to spend on both parties and the process will still continue.
NoRewards: You can provide the referring code and reward none of them to share it. Although this is an option, people will not appreciate it much, unless you have great content.
Some Amazing Stats of Referral Marketing
In a survey, people were 4 times more likely to buy when referred by a friend
Over 90% of respondents trust referrals from people they knew.
According to Capterra, 88% of B2B decision-makers rely on word-of-mouth for information and advice.
A survey shows every referring customer makes an average of 2.68 invites.
Companies with formalized referral programs experience more revenue growth.
Surprisingly, only 30% of B2B companies have formal referral programs.
Advantages of Referral Marketing
Budget: The first and best advantage of referral marketing is that you don’t have to spend too much money. The money needed for referral marketing is too little than any other traditional advertisements. However, it depends on you how much reward you wish to give to your customers for sharing your content with others.
Comfort: People are more comfortable buying any product when it is referred to them by their friends or family. Referral marketing is much more effective than traditional advertising.
FastResults: The impact of referral marketing can be seen very quickly. It doesn’t take much time for people to share any content. If you are using referral marketing for an app or e-commerce website, then you don’t have to wait too long to see the results.
ContinuousProcess: People don’t stop referring until you want them to. A will refer to B and B will refer to C and so on. It is a never-ending process. So, you don’t have to worry about the process. However, you should update the process and the system to better them.
LoyalCustomer: The best thing referral marketing do is to target loyal customers. Even if they are not loyal customers, they are still loyal marketers for you. When people get rewards from you, they will prefer your product over others. These were some of the advantages of referral programs.
Boost Your Referral Campaign
Disadvantages of Referral Marketing
Budget: Although you are saved from spending tons of money on advertisement with referral marketing, you still have to spend some money. You will have to give up some profit to the customer in the form of rewards.
The senseofGuilt: Some people don’t share their referral code as they think they will be sellouts. Some people don’t like making a profit out of someone without doing anything but a click. They will have a problem with their inner “sense of guilt”.
NotEfficientEnough: Compared to word-of-mouth referring, referral marketing is just a kid. People are more likely to buy when people heard about the product from somebody. Moreover, people are aware that word-of-mouth referrals are mostly free, so everyone would give their honest opinion. Whereas, in referral marketing, most people prefer to earn rewards only.
Some Top Referral Marketing Software
Now, that you know what are the advantages and disadvantages of referral marketing, you might want to know how you can have this program on your own website or app. This is 2022, therefore, there are services available for everything. You can use any of the below tools to integrate the referral program into your website.·
Referral Factory
ReferralCandy
Friendbuy
InviteReferrals
Mention Me
Ambassador
Genius Referrals
Referral SaaSquatch
Referral Rock
Revetize
ReferralMagic
TapMango
Talkable
Conclusion
Referral programs increase your sales. However, you might feel annoyed when someone WhatsApp you a download link again and again, which will make them some bucks. But by seeing something time and again, an idea to check that service out develops in our mind. And that’s what the ultimate goal of marketing is.
FAQs
What is referral marketing?
Referral marketing is a word-of-mouth strategy created by a business to tempt current customers to recommend the brand to their friends, family, and contacts. It is a tool to expand and increase the customer base. It heavily relies on the internet and social media.
Do Referral programs work?
Referral programs are incredibly successful as people love earning rewards, so they refer the products and services to their acquaintances, and the cycle continues.
Why Referral Marketing is the best?
Referral marketing is cost-effective marketing and its success rate is immense.
Can you make money on referrals?
Of course, you can. You get rewarded for successful referrals.
Lead generation via email marketing, LinkedIn, and social media is great but let’s face it, they’re expensive, and the competition is fierce. Even if you cut through the competition, you end up with numerous leads, interested only in free trials or marketing collateral.
It’s time you stop going after the herd —or try different strategies along with popular ones —to generate leads for your business.
Below are the top 3 most underrated lead gen techniques to fill your funnel. But first, let’s understand how B2B lead generation works.
Lead generation refers to capturing the attention of your audience. Once a person – who initially didn’t know about your product – becomes aware and develops an interest in it, they become a lead.
Generating leads is the first part of the sales funnel. After you capture a lead, your sales team begins to nurture them with content like blogs, paid ads, and other marketing collateral to guide them further down the funnel.
Types of Lead Generation Techniques
Inbound
Who doesn’t like leads coming to them on their own? Inbound refers to attracting potential customers and not chasing them, depending heavily on content marketing.
You put your product out there by posting across various social media channels. One attention-grabbing post makes your potential customer follow your page. From there, they might check your website and read your blogs.
After consuming a lot of your content —valuable, we hope —they become interested in your product and check out landing pages or directly enquire about the product. Then, it’s up to your sales team or copywriters to convert them into paying customers.
Moosejaw Copywriting Example
Inbound lead generation is lucrative but indirect. If you want to take matters into your own hands, you’d like the outbound method more.
Outbound
Outbound refers to engaging with your target audience and making them aware of your product.
As a business, you can send emails, DMs, or calls — pretty old school to be honest — to your potential customers to develop an interest in your product.
Outbound lead generation involves heavy research on the customer’s background. You create a buyer’s persona and find people who fit the mould —your target audience.
Get their email in exchange for something valuable like an ebook, a template, or a free guide. Then, you can reach out to them with a great pitch.
Email Lead Generation Example
You can pursue outbound via social media DMs where you directly message prospects with your pitch, and it’s a bit direct and demands more nurturing. You have to engage — like, comment, and share — their posts before you slide into DMs.
Effective Lead Generation Strategies
Most Underrated B2B Lead Gen Sources
Quora
190 million monthly active users discuss more than 400,000 subjects on Quora — plenty of room to hunt for your prospects. Lead gen on Quora depends on the value you provide. You can generate leads organically and via paid ads. Let’s understand both.
Organic Lead Gen on Quora
Build an authoritative profile: People trust answers from a person of authority. Write a clear bio highlighting your position and what you do. Post valuable content and share wins and failures with proof to build authority on the channel.
Engage in topic discussions: Find discussions by searching for industry keywords. Look for popular answers and analyze how they’re written. Then, implement the same to enhance your solutions. Don’t forget to drop links to an elaborate blog on your website. Remember, you’re there to drop value, not to sell. Your answers should tempt users to check out your profile.
Make connections:Network with people with interesting questions and answers in your industry – that’s the first step to warming a cold lead.
Paid Lead Generation Campaign on Quora
Quora has its own lead gen campaign, allowing users to run ads and gather lead information via the form.
The campaign starts with setting an objective. Since you’re there to generate leads, choose lead generation among other options like app installs, conversions, and awareness. Define your budget, create an ad, pay, and you’re all set to bag leads from Quora.
As a part of lead generation, Quora offers a form to gather user information inside the app. The form contains your brand logo and can also guide users to your website landing page for further details.
You can create a form from the “lead gen tab” or “create an ad” tab on Quora. The form appears with your image and text ads and promoted answers.
Quora Lead gen tabQuora Create an ad tab
Quora is strict about the value your business provides in exchange for user information. Therefore, it only accepts only the forms that fulfil its guidelines.
Guidelines for Quora Forms
Fields: Choose 12 fields regarding contact information, occupation, and location.
Examples:
Name
Email
Job title
Company name
Country
State
Zip code
Headline: The headline of your form should convey what users will get upon filling out the form. The character limit for headlines is 65 characters.
Write a clear headline. Example: “Sign up for the newsletter” or “download our SEO guide”
Don’tuse headlines without any information about your office. Example: “Interested in business?” or “Free masterclass”
Confirmation message: The confirmation message should lead the user to the next step. For instance, if they filled out the form for an ebook, the confirmation message should be, “click below to download your ebook.”
Texts like “Thank you” or “Good day” are unacceptable and will get your form rejected.
Facebook Groups
Facebook groups house 1.8 billion people across the globe.
Facebook ruthlessly cuts down reach on the news feed, making these groups a haven to network and communicate with people in your niche. Let’s understand how you can generate more leads with Facebook groups.
How to Generate Leads via Private-Visible Facebook Groups?
Facebook has two types of groups: public and private. Anybody can join public groups, but I wouldn’t advise that for lead generation. It crowds the community with unnecessary posts, reducing the chances of finding exciting leads.
Create private groups that are visible —come up on search —to everyone. It’s like an invite-only party but for your business which offers a sense of exclusivity to the members and builds a strong community.
Facebook Group
Here, you control your membership as you’re the one to allow people inside the group. You can reduce spam bots as well.
Create Facebook lead Ads for your groups
Create ads to invite more people to your groups. Include videos and ad copies to maximize the impact.
Create onboarding questions to ensure you’re allowing the right people inside your group. Ask questions like, “can you provide email to stay updated with group activitiesand offers?” or “would you like a free guide?” to gather emails while onboarding.
Onboarding Questions
Once you have your group up and running, drop links to lead members to your landing pages.
Hosting a webinar? Drop a link with the post.
Answering a product-related query? Drop a link to the solution.
Remember, the group’s purpose is to build a community—balance lead generation with providing knowledge to avoid being sales. Provide free information and invite people to trial. Then, aim for upselling.
Business Events
Strong relationships always lead to business growth, and what’s better to build relationships than face-to-face communication. As per the Client’s research, almost 85% of business decision-makers like senior executives and board managers believe in the power of in-person events. They consider it “essential” for a company’s growth.
Business events were always famous for lead generation and networking, but the pandemic slowed their impact. Marketers drove towards virtual events and claimed to have seen better results with them.
Either way, events are a great way to generate B2B leads. To create a successful event, you must follow a three-step strategy.
Planning
Content Creation
Outreach
Event
Planning
It encapsulates your ideal customer profile, outreach strategies, and goal setting. Planning involves much brainstorming as you don’t have anything on the table.
How to plan your event?
Create an ideal customer profile, so you know whom to invite.
Assign a team of copywriters, researchers, and outreach experts. You don’t want to miss opportunities to turn a product conversion into a demo appointment.
Pick your outreach channels – social media, emails, or offline. The more, the merrier, as the multichannel approach is the best. If you’re doing it online, create a content strategy for each funnel stage – which brings me to my next topic.
Creating Content
This part is crucial for online events. Buckle up your copywriters to create pamphlets, ads, landing pages, outreach emails, blogs, and social media copy.
Tips for creating content:
Focus more on getting meetings instead of marking sales.
While creating content, put your customers the centre stage. The emails must be about them, and landing pages should highlight their pain points. Then, tell them how you can solve those.
Don’t add too many links to the email copy. The goal is to get them to the event so add the joining link only.
Outreach
Collect data about your attendees’ names, companies, and contact numbers. Your SDRs must research sales and ensure the attendees match your ideal customer persona.
Tips for Better Outreach
Talk about their pain points and ask questions about their struggle. Explain how the prospect may benefit from your product.
Follow up with an email with a summary of your conversation.
Event
Continue your outreach during the event. Follow up afterwards to remind you of your conversation. Also, send emails to people who didn’t attend the event or who didn’t agree to the next meeting.
Conclusion
If you’ve spent enough money on popular yet competitive lead gen methods, but still didn’t see any ROI, try these. These techniques focus on the number as well as the quality of the leads. With the right strategy, these techniques work wonders for your business.
FAQs
What is B2b lead generation?
B2B lead generation is identifying a customer and then attracting and nurturing them to buy your product or services.
How to generate leads for b2b business?
Attend business events, Send cold emails, Be active on online forums, and use remarketing.
Why are B2B sales hard?
There are many chances to make mistakes, sales cycles are longer, and lack of time are some of the reasons that make B2B sales hard.
Do you feel that your business and sales processes are falling short somewhere?
If your marketing efforts are proving insufficient results for lead capture and generation, it’s possible that your sales processes are faulty. The process of converting awareness into action is slow and can lose many potential customers.
Even if you start from scratch, the growth of your business doesn’t come from putting in endless working hours alone. One of the most effective tools to build a reliable revenue stream is a sales pipeline.
What Is a Sales Pipeline?
Sales Pipeline is not just another buzzword!
You must have heard about the ‘Sales pipeline’ in the meetings or conversations. It’s not just jargon but an effective system that can change the game for your sales figures. A sales pipeline is a visual representation of opportunities in different phases of the sales process.
Sales Pipeline
It presents a clear outline of prospects, leaks, and loopholes in your sales process. A well-defined sales pipeline educates the salesperson about what step comes ahead and how to go around it. It also gives valuable insights to the managers and helps in decision making.
Sales pipelines give way to:
Insights into financial metrics.
Accurate assessment of team performance.
Preview of monthly revenue.
Now let’s look at how to build a sales pipeline for lead generation
Identify the Potential Buyers and Place Them in the Right Stage
Consolidating all your potential buyers is the first step in establishing a sales pipeline. It is important to ascertain that your prospective customers are placed in the right deal stages based on their affiliation with your product or service.
When a potential buyer has contacted you to know more about your product or service, he is in the ‘interaction phase’.
Placing your prospective customers in the right compartment helps you deal with them most effectively. You can approach them accordingly and convert the lead into business.
Segregate and Assign the Sales Activities
Knowing which phase your potential customers belong to can lay out a clear set of sales activities.
Suppose you know your possible buyer belongs to the ‘awareness’ phase where the information flow is the most important. In that case, You will send out emails, brochures, and catalogues to them or target them through infographics and interactive quizzes.
In short, you know what to do and how to take them to the next stage. This way, your salesforce also has clarity on performing the task in the best way possible. Assigning sales activities to each stage of the sales pipeline is crucial for enhancing the effectiveness of sales efforts and the efficiency of the salesforce.
Define the Sales Cycle Length
Your lead source is the biggest factor in defining the length of your sales cycle. How quickly you close the sales depends on the channel through which you approach the potential customer.
Leads generated through emails or calls will have slow sales cycles. Organic leads achieved through websites have a quicker sales cycle.
The above makes it crucial to define the sales cycle length by streamlining various lead sources. If you have a sales cycle defined, it would be easy to know which deal would convert into action and which one has become useless for the business.
Ascertain Your Pipeline Size
If one of your sales representatives targets 50 deals a month and loses 10-12 of them in the sales process, you may raise the bar and give him a target of 70 deals instead.
That’s how you decide the size of your pipeline and meet your target sales for the month. There is no doubt that not all the leads make it to the end of the pipeline. The contingency plan is simple. Start with extra deals so that any leak along the way does not hamper your sales target.
Take Out the Inactive Leads
If certain deals have gotten stagnant, there’s no point waiting for them to convert because the chances of winning such deals are very low. If a deal has gone past its sales cycle, there is no point in wasting sales efforts or campaigns on it.
It is important to know when to stop putting marketing efforts!
One of the effective ways to keep a tab on stagnant leads is to have a specialized software or AI tool that can notify you about deals that aren’t moving to the next stage. It will help you clear the space and make way for new leads.
Timely Review of Sales Pipeline Metrics
Even after establishing an efficient sales pipeline, there is no way to predict the exact outcome. Sales activities change, targets change and with that, strategy changes. A timely review will allow your team to make the necessary changes and bring in more leads to compensate for any lag in the plan.
Businesses that put effort into knowing what their customers want succeed in converting leads into purchases. From awareness to action, it’s a journey for buyers and an open opportunity for you to retain them at any given stage. Sales pipelines provide the perfect set-up for managers for ascertaining the success of sales campaigns and marketing efforts.
FAQs
What is a sales lead pipeline?
A sales lead pipeline is a representation of prospects in different phases of the sales process.
How do you build a lead pipeline?
Identify the potential buyers, assign sales activities, define sales cycle length, remove inactive leads, and constantly update your sales timeline.
What is a lead in sales?
A lead in sales is a person or a business who might become your future customer or client.
When you do a business, an X-factor needs to be present, so that it can attract the audience which will lead to them buying your products and services. Your products have to be of good quality which will bring your customer back.
Not just bloggers and writers, but companies too need quality content on their websites. It is not just because of ranking but also for user experience. Quality content is something that sparks a fire to buy your product in a prospect’s mind.
Therefore, every company website needs quality content. Also, bloggers need quality content to bring back visitors to their website. In this article, we will discover how to create quality content to increase the rank of your website along with satisfy the visitors.
Perform In-depth research before starting writing. Spy on your competitor’s content. Check what types of content can get you the most number of shares for your content. Try to create content that is trending on social media. Follow the Influencers or bloggers of your niche, take inspiration from them.
Perform Keyword Research and Optimise
Find the relevant keywords with decent search volume and less competition. Use keywords research tools to perform keyword research. Then build and optimize your content according to your target keywords, it will help you bring the perfect amount of traffic to your website.
Focus On the Length of Article
You have so much knowledge banked in you and you may also want to bring it all out in your blog, but not everyone wants to read your whole story. Therefore, you have to keep it as short as possible. It doesn’t mean that you have to remove the important lines. Include whatever you think is important and what your audience may think is important. That doesn’t mean, you should post a very short post either. The minimum number of words you should include are 450 per post. But again, don’t stretch it too much like 5000 or 6000 words in one post. Not everyone likes to read that long of content, make it sweet, short and simple. If it’s necessary, then include a page break in the post. This will make the post easy to read and will also make it attractive.
Focus On Text Formatting
Text formatting means to make it more good looking. You can make the important words bold or Italic to focus on them. If you think you wrote an amazing paragraph that no one in the world can even think of, just highlight the whole para. If needed you can also change the colours or increase the size of texts. Furthermore, you can and should change the size and colour of the heading.
Write Killer Headlines
The heading is the first thing your visitor will see. In fact, they are the silent marketer working for your website. Heading attracts the visitor to click on your link. You might somehow rank your website on a keyword, but it doesn’t matter if no one is coming to your website, through headings the visitors get attracted to your content.
Therefore, make a catchy heading, something attractive. The heading should address the problem along with the hope of a solution. However, you should go for a smaller heading, long headings are not at all attractive. Some research says that you should include numbers in the headings, the conversion rate will be much more with this.
To-The-Point
You visit a website for a particular reason if it is filled with unnecessary details, it will just waste your time. and you’ll never visit that website again. So, to be sure that it never happens with your website, don’t overload your content with wasteful information. Just come to the point and solve the problem.
Include ReIevant Images
Images and videos help you to describe your content. People can relate to your content more efficiently when there is a proper picture for it. Also, an article without any image feels empty. However, just remember that the image should be relevant.
Readability
There are many websites that tell the readability of your content with the help of some pre-defined factors. These factors were defined after a deep research on human readability. So, you can check if your content is easy to read or not. Readability is important because through it readers can understand what your content is trying to convey.
Add Links
If you are a blogger with some experience, then you must already know how important internal and external links are for your website. Internal links are the links to the web pages of your own website while external links are the links to other websites. They are the main factors Bounce Rate depends on.
Provide Value
At the end of the day, what matters the most is content quality. It is the value that you give to your readers. So, try to add some valuable and original content. Include your own thoughts about the topic, your experience, some tips, tricks, downsides that can be a great source of value.
Conclusion
The popularity of your content depends on its quality, one needs to provide quality content so that they can attract the right customers to their website or blogs. Be aware of what your audience wants in your content, that is how you’ll be able to realise what you need to better it, which will in return help you attract more traffic to your website and get it ranked higher.
FAQs
What is Web Traffic?
Web traffic is the data sent and received when people visit your website.
What is the good range of website traffic?
50% to 70% is a good range of website traffic.
What makes content high quality?
When the content is unique and is able to attract the attention of your audience, it automatically said that the content is of high quality
Webinars are everywhere these days, especially with the Covid-19 situation, the use of Webinars have increased. Every other business stands on the marketing capacity of Webinars and when it comes to selling knowledge-based products like some courses or E-books, they are the lifesavers.
According to a report, 73% of B2B marketers said webinar is the best way to generate high-quality leads and over 60% of marketers use the webinar as a part of their content marketing campaign.
The webinar will allow you to run interactive sessions among the participants in real-time. You may share information or discuss premium strategies using Webinar. In this article, we will cover how through webinars you can generate leads for your business.
Ever been to any seminar? This is the same, except, anyone can visit it from anywhere and many times, it’s free for visitors. Webinars are like Instagram live feature, except it is far more useful than Instagram live. Webinars are mostly live streaming videos to share knowledge.
Although the presenter is the main person to talk to in a webinar, it is much more interactive than a usual seminar. Anyone can comment and ask questions while the webinar is going on. Moreover, you can provide a voice chat feature in your webinar as well.
Uses of Webinar
Webinars are very useful in many ways. Through them, you can market products, explain the features of your product to your potential customers, introduce new technologies, and many more things. Some uses of webinars are listed below:
To Improve SEO The biggest importance of webinars is that they improve the SEO of the website. Many websites conduct webinars every once in a while just to improve their ranking.
To Generate Leads Webinars bring people to watch you because through it you provide value to them. While providing value you can also advertise your product to them. Even if you don’t do that, many people will check out your product themselves. This will help to generate leads.
For Launching New Products If you want to launch and generate leads for your new products but are not looking forward to spending tons of money on them, you can use webinars. You can provide the information about your new product in a webinar and with that a link to buy that product.
To Educate People Not only just normal education but you can use webinars to educate people about how to use your product.
To Identify Potential Customers Webinars attract potential customers. Only those people will watch your webinar who are interested in the niche of your product.
Features of Webinar
Some of the best features of Webinar that helps in your business are:
Live Most of the time, webinars are streamed live so that people can interact with the presenter. Moreover, by watching live, people feel a sense of relation with the company.
Interactive Most of the webinars have the feature of chat or comment. People can send messages to the presenter and the presenter can reply to them if possible.
Voice Most of the webinars contain the voice of the presenter. However, some people conduct mute webinars too. Furthermore, in some webinars, people can even do a voice chat with the presenter.
Application Interaction You can provide your app’s interface on your website and let people learn how to use the application.
Benefits of Webinars
Webinars present you as the expert in that field, you can teach and sell at the same time.
Webinars give you authority, you are in the power if you are presenting your webinar.
There is no denying the fact that you can increase your sales through webinars. You just need to make the right strategies according to which you do your webinars and you will see the results in your favour.
Webinars are the best and most effective method in budget marketing. Through webinars, you can launch your products, advertise your products, teach your audience about the features of your product and you can also interact with your customers. So many things by just one webinar, isn’t it amazing?
Webinars are a great tool for knowing where you are lagging because through a webinar you can interact with your actual customers or say your audience and they can tell you what are the points which are lagging in your product.
Benefits of Webinar
Limitations of Webinar
Dependency on Internet Speed: Not only your internet speed but also your viewer’s internet speed should be good enough to stream a webinar video online. But the crucial part is your own internet speed.
Registration: People hate to register. But for webinars, registration is important. So, some people just drop the idea of attending the webinar even they are interested in it.
Colliding Voice Overs: Although not every time, sometimes you will face the problem of collision of voice over while streaming a screen sharing webinar.
Location & Time: Webinar connects you with people all over the world. So, when you think this is the best time to do a webinar, someone might be in a deep sleep. So, location and time are the main factors to look upon in webinars.
How to Promote Your Webinar?
Although, you can always conduct a webinar on other platforms Webinars are also available directly to your website. However, if you are not a very “tech-friendly” person, then conducting a webinar on your own site can be tough for you. To make this easier, you can go for webinar services. You might have to pay some bucks, but they will be worth it only if you have a good audience and this audience will turn potential customers for your business.
Some Pro-tips for Webinars
So now you know how to create a Webinar but the major challenge you will face in promoting or market your webinar. Some of the best ways to promote your upcoming webinars are:
Email marketing If you already have an email list then you can email your subscriber to remind them about your webinar.
Facebook marketing You can advertise your webinar on Facebook. The better way is to find and pay some relevant and popular pages and ask them to promote your webinar.
Blog Tell about your upcoming webinar in your post. Ask people to pre-register for the webinar so they can directly join in.
Sponsoring other’s blog Ask other bloggers to promote your webinar in exchange for some money or shout out. Ask them to write an article explaining why your next webinar should not be missed, this works better than direct promotion.
Influencer Pay influencers to promote your webinar in their social media posts. Do some research and find the people who can influence the group of people who may get attracted to your webinar or your product.
Collaborating Collaborate in others’ webinars and promote your own webinar in their session. This way you can get their audience as well and then you can return the favour by doing the same for them whenever they need it.
Some Pro-tips For Webinars
The audio quality should be high. Make sure you use a professional microphone while conducting along with a loud audible voice. If your viewers can’t listen to what you are saying in your webinar then they will not be able to understand anything, and because of this many people might leave the webinar before it even reaches halfway.
Put emphasis on the important points to make them more memorable so that audience can recall them after your webinar ends. If something stays in the mind of your audience after the end of the webinar then it might be possible that they may talk about those points with other people in their circle. This will increase your reach without you doing anything.
A high speed and stable internet connection are necessary, throughout the run time of the webinar. If your webinar starts buffering or keeps crashing because of the internet speed, the viewers might leave the webinar.
Answer the questions that are asked during the webinars. These serve two ways, firstly you will know that people are taking an interest in the webinar. And Secondly, the viewer will feel that they are involved in the whole thing and that will make them stay connected.
Conclusion
Webinars might look like grandpa’s tech, but they are still rocking the market. Many people might not know about them, but they do attract some people. It is easy to target potential customers for your website through webinars. You might not have done any webinars till now, but it’s worth it, give it a try and you’ll know what it can do for your business. Just go for some webinar service provider and start a webinar now.
FAQs
Are webinars free of cost?
Webinars are most of the time free and they can be paid as well.
What Webinar means?
It is an online event hosted by an organisation, in here it is broadcasted in front of people through the computer with the help of internet.
Are Webinars good for marketing?
It is a good marketing tool that helps in communicating with your customers.
Generating leads and achieving consumer interest is not an easy task. According to some studies, if you generate more leads, but have an average product – you still win. This shows the importance of the best lead generation strategies for startups. 85% of expert marketers believe that generating sales leads is the most important element of the marketing arsenal.
However, only 42% of business owners have a proper plan or ways to generate leads online. Even though there are different ways to generate leads, not every marketer is clear about how to generate leads and startups need it the most. Since many people don’t know how to generate leads in sales, we have come up with 100 proven best lead generation methods and strategies for startups that every business owner and marketer must know.
Leads are potential customers who show interest in your products or services. Lead Generation is the process of attracting people from your target group to express interest in your products or services. So how to generate sales leads for your business? Leads can be generated from both online and offline sources.
There is no single method that will help you to generate sales leads. However, by using a combination of relevant methods and the best lead generation strategies for startups, you can surely ace the lead generation game.
Lead Generation Strategies
Talking about lead generation, there are mainly two types of lead generation strategies that businesses follow –
Inbound Lead Generation
Outbound Lead Generation
Inbound Lead Generation is one of the effective ways to generate leads for your business as visitors are brought to the company’s website or social media page, and then converted into leads. To attract customers or generate sales leads to a business’ website/social media page, marketers can opt for content marketing, social media marketing or search engine marketing.
Through Inbound Lead Generation strategy, companies target those customers who are already actively searching online for the products or services in which the company deals. Inbound Lead Generation is known to be one of the best lead generation strategies for startups as it holds good when you deal in products or services which have a high volume of online searches, and your brand has well established itself online.
How to generate leads for local businesses using inbound lead generation? Let’s check an example of inbound lead generation to answer that, So for example you are planning to buy an air conditioner and are Googling about ‘best air conditioners’. You found a nice article on ‘the best air conditioners to buy in 2020’. You read the article liked a particular AC and clicked on a particular link given to know more about that AC, which lead to a company’s website. Now on reaching the company’s website they prompt you to fill in your details to know more about offers. Once you fill the form, you are now a lead for the company.
The other lead generation strategy you can use is Outbound Lead Generation. Outbound Lead Generation is a lead generation process when you are blindly pushing business-related communication/messages to a target audience, irrespective of whether those persons are interested in your company/ the products your company deals in or not. Mass e-mail, cold calling, display advertising etc are some generating sales leads ideas and techniques used for outbound lead generation.
‘Outbound Lead Generation’ is the best way to get b2b leads and is also good to use when the products or services in which a company deal has very low online search volume, or a company is very new and has not established itself online.
The Lead Generation Process is not just about acquiring leads and generating b2b leads. From attracting potential customers to converting them into paying and satisfied customers there are several steps involved in the lead generation process. Generally, we can put the lead generation process into 6 steps mentioned below-
Step 1– Attracting your target audience through various ways to generate sales leads like content marketing, social media marketing, advertisements, banners, seminars, webinars etc.
Step 2 – The second step is when a potential customer expresses some interest to know about your product/services and communicates with your business by either filling any inquiry form, clicking on any CTA, through email or by calling the support team
Step 3 – This step is about qualifying the leads. This is how you generate sales leads for your business. Qualifying leads means evaluating whether a particular lead has the potential to convert into a paying customer or not. If a businessman or marketer do not qualify a lead, chances are that he may end up wasting time on a lead who is not capable enough to buy his product or service.
Step 4- After qualifying the lead, now we arrive at the customer engagement stage. In order to get free leads, businesses need to maintain positive communication with qualified leads, in terms of keeping them posted about new products, services, offers etc so as to help the prospective customers make an informed decision about purchasing the goods or services.
Step 5 – Through customer engagement, the business now brings the qualified lead to a stage where he purchases a product or service, and thus the lead gets converted to a paying customer. Many lead generation startups follow this method.
Step 6 – Once the lead is converted to a customer, a company should now take feedback from the customer and ensure customer satisfaction. And this is how you can generate sales leads for your business.
Add a Call to Action (CTA) in Your E-mail Signature
An email signature is one of the best ways to generate leads online is just a bunch of texts. Using of Call-To-Action strategy in an email signature can help to generate leads for your business and get free leads. It is always a good strategy and the best way to get b2b leads.
Put a Hello Bar on Your Website
Hello Bar is among the best way to get leads as it is a service for websites that lets you design messages for the visitors coming to your website. This will be the first thing which will attract visitors. The fact that random things cannot be written and posted on it makes it one of the ways to generate leads. It is important to take care of many things while creating a Hello Bar, and once thoughtfully created, Hello Bar can be among great ways to generate leads.
Host Webinars on Other Related Platform
Collaborating and posting webinars on other’s websites can have a fabulous effect on the business. This is the answer to how to generate sales leads for your business. Sponsoring and hosting webinars on own website can generate the required amount of buzz for the company is one of the great ways to generate leads online. It is, in fact, one of the modern steps of the lead generation process.
Pay with a Tweet
‘Pay with a Tweet’ is a company that provides the best lead generation strategies for startups and amazing tools to generate more attention to the business. People refer to their friends, family, and colleagues and they get benefits which can be in terms of discount coupons, free samples, etc. This is a great way to generate leads for your business as everything is handled by the company and you decide what is benefits are needed to be given to the customers.
Sign up form above the fold
Using the fold strategy for the website’s sign up form is much better as people will remember to sign up to the website. This is one of the main methods of how to get more leads. Above the fold is that part of the screen, which you can see without scrolling. This is one of the few lead generation strategies that will lead to more sign-ups and thus more lead generation and eventually, more sales.
Share Plugins on Thank You Page
A Thank You page is the page that visitors, customers or leads see after they fill and submit a form provided on a landing page or website; or after they make a purchase on the website. Many people ask how to generate leads online for free and this is one of the successful ways to get leads for your business.
Thank you page might be the last thing the visitor sees, but this is the stage when either the visitor have faith in the business or he starts hating it. But, if they are happy with the service they are more likely to share your website if they see a share button at the end.
Adding Share Plugins on the Thank You Page is great way for lead generation
Giving your visitor a free PDF of your post will grab their attention offline and is a popular way of generating sales leads. How to get leads for your business? Whenever a lead will read your downloaded content, they will be reminded of your website. This way, you are in their head even they are offline.
Free E-books
Offering free e-books by taking e-mail ids is the best way to generate leads. As per a study conducted in 2017 in North America, 65% of b2b businesses in North America uses e-book as an integral part of their content marketing strategy. Giving free e-books is also the topmost generating sales leads ideas will add some value to the life of your visitors, they will come to your website again and you will get free leads.
Free Online Courses
You can offer a free online course to your visitors against their contact details. This will not only add value to their life, but they will also spread positive word of mouth about your business, which will help you generate more leads. We find many edtech companies offering free trial classes, or some free courses to attract new customers and generate business leads.
Online courses as drip campaign
Creating online courses with drip marketing is the best way to get leads that will eventually increase your sales.
Periodic Newsletters
Letting people subscribe to your periodic newsletter will increase your email collection, advertise your website and in generating sales leads ideas.
Consider Adding a ‘Follower’ or ‘Like’ Calculators
If your site has a good number of followers, You can add a “visitor” calculator, “like” calculator or “follower” calculator to show how grown-up your website is, many lead generation startups you this method to get more leads. This is among the best ways to generate leads as it will increase the credibility of your website. You can find free and paid tools online which will help you design these visitor/ follower counters and generate sales leads.
Surveys and Tools
Many lead generation startups use websites like Typeform or SurveyMonkey to include surveys and other related tools to your website. So how to generate leads for it companies? After receiving the contact information from a website visitor, you can request him to fill up the survey form as well, which will help you understand your lead better. However, the survey forms should not be very long and the questions should not be too intruding.
Create and Share High-value Content on Your Social Media Pages
Create quality content and share them on your social media handles. The quality depends on the research you did for that content and how much time it can save for others if they directly see your content instead of searching it online.
Join Social Media Communities
Join some active social media communities and learn from those people as it is one of the most effective ways to generate leads for your business. In the process, talk about your business and promote it there.
Taking Feedback from those visiting your website or social media page is also a good way of lead generation
How to generate leads for local businesses? You can generate leads by using Quora, which is an amazing platform to build and grow your online business. It is one of the tried and tested ways to generate leads online, you simply have to answer questions on Quora which are related to your niche and also talk about the advantages people can get through your service.
Reddit Threads
Reddit is also an amazing platform to market your website and generate leads for your business. Once you join the Reddit community, you can post links, texts, images etc related to your business on Reddit and make people notice your business. This option is an answer to questions like “How to generate leads online?”, “How to generate sales leads for your business?”, “How to generate sales?”, etc.
LinkedIn Conversations
Connect with the people who you think can be your potential customers. Use LinkedIn messages to generate leads for your B2B business by targeting the right person. This is one of the best lead generation strategies for startups as you can create a good LinkedIn connection list.
Speaking at Events
Another great way to get free leads is to personally attend some business events and talk about your company. Public events are a great way to spread awareness about your business.
Collaborations with Co-working Spaces
Get registered for some good co-working places and try communicating and then collaborating with other people. Such collaborations will let you connect to a large number of people, who may be your prospective customers making it another best way to get b2b leads.
Search Leads through Web Portals
Use portals like Angellist to find likewise people who are easy to convince and become your investor or even customer. This is among popular lead generation strategies as there are many other portals, so find those who are relevant for your business and start connecting.
Pre-product Polls
Use polls to identify the need for the new product you want to launch in the market, making it the top generating sales leads ideas. It is better to provide what customers want instead of providing what you want them to buy.
Taking opinion from customers before launching the product is a great way to generate leads
Advertise the offers and discount on the new product before launching it, this is a good lead generation method. Announcing pre-launch offers can create a buzz about the product even before it is launched. Many real estate companies roll out pre-launch offers to generate sales leads.
Bundled Product Offers
Offer the relevant products in a bundle and give a little discount on them. This is an old yet effective ways to generate leads.
A/B Testing Everything
A/B testing is to compare two of your web pages and analyzing which one performs better and for what reason. A/B testing is one of the best effective ways to generate leads for your business. Then you can use the data to improvise the overall website. A/B testing is not only for websites but you can also use it in real-life by analyzing what people are buying more and then focusing on the same.
Crisp, digest-able, short video content
Short videos are great for marketing as they don’t eat a lot of viewer’s time and great way to generate more leads. According to Hubspot, today 81% of businesses use video as a marketing tool. While according to Insivia, Mobile video consumption increases by 100% every year.
Community-based Discount Coupons
Community-based coupons are great to target the same kind of people. There is a strong possibility that most people will like the product. It is one of the best ways to get free leads, as there are many popular communities across various social media platforms. Just search for them, connect to them and let them know about your business and generate leads for your business.
Live Chatbots
Live chatbots are the next things that will help to create leads. You can also choose to live chat with customers through your phone.
Referral Campaigns
Referral campaigns are to generate leads as they let old users bring new ones and earn from the same. This is one of the best lead generation strategies for startups.
Many people get confused with how to generate sales leads for your business, but one of the easiest ways is by updating your profile to grab people’s attention. For instance, you change the theme colour of your social media profiles. However, many times, this strategy backstabs. So, consult with strategists before making any big change.
Slide Shares
Presenting Slideshares can tell more than even advertisements, for some people. It is the best way to get b2b leads, as you can generate leads from potential customers or even investors by using SlideShare. Slides can generate many leads if you are into the B2B business.
Medium Blogs with CTAs
Just like answering on Quora, you can create a blog on Medium and use a Call-To-Action strategy while promoting your company to generate more leads.
Self-managed Community Building
Create a self-managed community that can fund itself. Then use that community to advertise your product. You can also fund them and generate some advertising leads.
Testimonial-driven Product Promos
Many lead generation startups use this method to collect some testimonial proofs about your product from your existing customers, and then show it on your website. If you have a B2B business, ask your clients to also share about their company so that new clients can check their growth.
Early Stage Feedback
How to generate leads online for free? One way is by adding some feedback funnels to your website and ask for feedback at an early stage.
Focus on Long-Tail Keywords to Generate Qualified Lead
Figure out what works for you, short tail keywords or longer ones. Short keywords generally have high competition. On the other hand, Long-tail keywords are easier to be ranked on.
Re-targeting
Re-targeting your visitors can generate more leads as you will be in front of your visitors most of the time with this strategy.
Lead Forensics is a B2B lead generation tool. It is the best way to get B2B leads as the company offers many tools for various uses. You can use the Lead Forensic tools to analyze the visitors and target them accordingly.
LinkedIn Sales Navigator
LinkedIn has many tools that will help you generate sales leads. One of its tools is LinkedIn Sales Navigator, which is a CRM tool. Use this LinkedIn’s CRM tool to build a relationship with your customers. It is one of the easy ways on how to get sales leads for free.
Use Growbots
Growbots is a company that provides a tool for B2B businesses and helps in getting outbound leads. Through Growbots one can reach hundreds of potential customers in no time. This is yet another effective way to generate leads for your business.
Hunter for Lead Generation
Use Hunter’s extension to find new emails which will help you in email marketing and is used by lead generation startups. You just have to visit any company’s website and click on Hunter’s extension.
Share Infographics
Become a guest writer for another website and share your infographics with the people on their platform. This is a cool way to get your business noticed.
Guest Blogging
One of the best ways to generate leads is by becoming a guest writer for blogs and share your experience and some valuable information. By writing guest blogs, you can reach out to a large number of people who are associated with those sites you are blogging for.
Social Interviews
Become socially active and attend interviews to tell people about your product.
Facebook Live Q&As
Go live on Facebook once in a while. It is a great way to interact with your customers.
Twitter Chats
Use Twitter’s chat feature to generate leads from your followers on Twitter. It is among the popular lead generation methods, as through Twitter chats, you can understand your customers better and can also let them know more about your products and services.
Unbounce is a company that produces landing pages for websites to get free leads. You can use Unbounce to create a landing page and test them to optimize the website, making it one of the ways to generate leads online. As reported by wsiworld.com in 2018, around 68% of B2B businesses use a landing page for generating leads.
Google Form-based Questionnaires
Create a Google form to ask questions from people and analyze their choice.
Searching Public Tweets
Search for public tweets with particular hashtags related to your company, and reach out to those who are talking about you.
Lead Generation by Joining Facebook Groups
Post in Facebook groups and let people know about you. Make it viral content so that everyone shares it. This will give you a boost in public leadership help you generate more leads.
Encourage Your Customers to Post Your Content in Their Facebook Groups
Ask other people to post your content in their Facebook groups. You can also offer some incentives for doing so.
Ask Customers to Post About Your Products on Their Whatsapp Groups
Ask and encourage your customers, friends and family to send your post to their WhatsApp groups. You can pay commission on the basis of leads generated or sales made.
Get Others Tweet About You
Ask people to tweet about your product to get offers and discounts. Many big brands follow this strategy.
You can comment about your product or website and insert a link in the blogs’ comment section and generate b2b leads. Make sure the blog is relevant to your product. People research a lot before investing in any tool or service for their company. So, they read as many blogs as they can. Hence, if you have a service-based B2B company, commenting on those kinds of blogs will attract your target audience and might convert you into a customer.
Use Instagram for Lead Generation
Post beautiful photos about your products, write a nice bio and make the most of Instagram for your business and this way you can get leads for your business. Read our article on ‘How to use Instagram for Business‘.
Free Demo and Trials
Let people access the demo or trial version of your product for free, this is the main part of any lead generation business model. Once your target audience gets a taste of your product/services the probability of conversion rises.
Facebook Events for Lead Generation
Find relevant Facebook events to attend, and leverage them to promote your business.
Product Hunt Launches
Product Hunt is a platform where users can share, find new products and generating leads. You can launch your product on Product Hunt and get yourself noticed by investors and other people.
Free Explainer Videos
Create and provide free explainer videos about your product to all the visitors. This will help them understand your products and services better.
Guest Podcasting
Invite people to create the podcast with you as it also is one of the upcoming lead generation strategies. This way, you will have more people who will listen to your podcast, thus you will achieve a higher engagement rate.
Keep an Eye on the Competitor’s Twitter Support Handle
Keep an eye on competitor’s Twitter support handle. You can generate many leads from there.
Keeping an Eye on Your Competitors Twitter Support Handle Helps You in Lead Generation
How to generate leads online for free? Try to get in touch with the followers of your competitors. You know they use your competitor’s product which means they are already your potential buyers. All you have to do is to make them try your product.
Try to scrape out the data from internet directories. Scraping can take a long time but is the best way to get leads. So, start doing it before starting your campaign. Read more on Web Scraping.
Reply to Other’s E-mail Campaigns
Reply to emails received from other people’s email campaigns.
Attending Meetups
Attend meetups held in your city or another city to meet and pitch your product to the target audience and investors. Meetups are a great place for lead generation if you are into the B2B business as they will help you generate business leads.
Check Other’s Twitter Lists
Use people’s Twitter list to find potential buyers.
Micro-Influencer Marketing
Micro-influencers are the people who have a decent fan following. Generally, the people with followers count between 1k to 50k are known as Micro-influencers. Approach micro-influencers to promote your products and the best way to get b2b leads. If you hire good and relatable influencers, it will definitely be going to generate a lot of leads for you. Read more on Micro-influencer marketing.
Get Your Business Featured in a Magazine
Get your business featured in magazines by attracting their attention towards your company. Contact the reporters if you received any achievement. You can also crack a deal with the magazine to get yourself featured.
SumoMe based CRO
Use SumoMe plugin for your website for conversion rate optimization (CRO) as it is best lead generation strategies for startups. SumoMe is a complete suite of marketing tools that will help you grow both traffic and conversions and automate your site growth.
Heavy-content FAQs
Provide a FAQ section on your website with your contact info and generate business leads. Because this clears most of the doubts of your visitors.
Publish a Chrome Extension
Create and publish your own chrome extension. Chrome extensions are one of the best generating sales leads ideas as they help to get into people’s devices and diversify your reach.
Content Re-purposing
Repurpose your old content with new data and post it on several platforms and is a good way to generate leads online. You can even give the old content a new form. For instance, if you have a research-based old article published on your blog, then you can convert it into an infographic and post it on social media.
Skype Interviews with Industry Leaders
Take an appointment and interview the leaders of your industry on Skype. Then you can post the interview video on social media platforms.
LinkedIn InMails Outreach
InMails is another LinkedIn’s product that is another way to generate sales leads. It lets you send direct messages to people you are not connected with on LinkedIn.
‘Feel Bad’ Pop-Ups
Use the “feel bad” strategy in pop-ups to get more subscribers. However, not all web visitors may like it so be careful about using this strategy.
Use of ‘feel bad’ pop-ups on websites can instigate more people to sign up.
Gift discount coupons to all the people who subscribed to your email list.
The Commitment Checkbox
Include a commitment checkbox on your website to make it easy to subscribe to your users.
Use of Commitment Checkbox in Website to generate leads
Removing Landing Page Navigation
Remove the landing page navigation to speed up the process and save the time of your visitors.
Create a Competitor Comparison Page
Create a page comparing your product with that of your biggest competitor. This way people will be able to make a better choice.
Branded Gifts
Give small gifts to your customers and brand them with your company’s logo. It is one of the effective ways to generate leads for your business as gifts are always a good way to spread positive word of mouth about your business.
Arranging Free How-to Webinars
Provide free webinars focusing on relevant “how-to”s and proving guides to the activities related to your product. Webinars have always been an important part of the lead generation process as it is the best way to get b2b leads.
Offering Incentives to Inactive User
Give free add-ons to your inactive users to get their interest back into you.
Custom GIF Publishing and Sharing
Publish custom GIF images and share them with your customers. They capture too much attention and everybody love them.
Subscription-Based VIP Memberships
Provide VIP paid membership to your users. This will help you to focus more on your target audience.
Hashtag Monitoring for New Conversations
Monitor the hashtag related to your product, on all the social media platforms to get knowledge about the new conversations that took place. You can also keep a tab on the trends and create content accordingly. Hashtag monitoring tools are available online and is the main part of any lead generation process.
Provide ‘Click-to-Tweet’ Option
Provide a “click-to-tweet” option so that people can directly share quotes from your article to their Twitter. This way your content is likely to be shared more.
IP Address based Lead Tracking
Use the IP address based tools to track the websites traffic. Then use the data to focus on the particular customers.
Use Exit popup to remind the customer when they attempt to navigate away.
exit -intent popup for lead generation
Strong Verb-based Headlines
Create headlines that have a strong density of verbs. This is a way which many tries to get the web visitors, take more actions while on the site.
Leverage LinkedIn Publisher
Repurpose the content of your blogs on the LinkedIn publisher. This will help you attract more attention to your business.
Email ID in Social Bios
Include the email address in the bios of your social media handles, so that interested people can contact you when required.
Create Co-branded Content
Ask other brands to feature you in their content and you do the same for them or pay them for it. This way you can leverage each other’s followers.
Content Shares by Influencers Using Outreach
Ask influencers to share your content on Outreach with all customers of their customer list.
Shared Google Doc Templates
Share some Google Doc templates with other people to connect with them better.
Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is a great way to generate more leads. It is one of the lead generation methods as influencers will share your product’s link with people.
Provide Free Excel Worksheets and Templates
Provide free Excel worksheets and their templates to your customers.
Create Lead Databases
Create lead databases to track and analyse the customer’s buying behaviour.
Free Consultation Sessions
Provide free consultation sessions to your customers and solve their problems.
Free Audits
Provide free audits to your clients. Many agencies offer free website audits, by taking e-mail ids from customers.
Conclusion
Connecting with more and more people and letting them know about your business is very necessary for making your business successful, and this article is intended to help in this very regard. “How to generate leads” is a crucial question for every business, and the methods mentioned above are some of the best ways for lead generation. If you are using some other ways to generate leads for your business, please let us know in the comments.
Leads are potential customers who show interest in your products or services. Lead Generation is the process of attracting people from your target group to express interest in your products or services.
What are the types of lead generation?
There are mainly two types of lead generation strategies that businesses follow –
Inbound Lead Generation and Outbound Lead Generation.
What is Lead Forensics?
Lead Forensics is a B2B lead generation tool.
What is Growbots?
Growbots is a company that provides a tool for B2B businesses and helps in getting outbound leads.
How do I generate Google leads?
To increase site traffic and generate more leads from Google Ads, keep tweaking your campaigns and trying new strategies.
Many people buy gadgets like Kindle to read eBooks. But there are even more people who have smartphones and read eBooks on it. eBooks are the most convenient way for people who are too busy to read books.
However, nothing can replace books, but knowledge knows no medium. Knowledge can be shared through books, mobiles, computers, or even our mouths. And what could be better than earning money by sharing knowledge? eBooks are an amazing opportunity for business. Not only for empires but it is also helpful for individual bloggers, and writers. This is a great source of passive income. Let’s see what it is and how to write an ebook.
What Are eBooks?
What are ebooks?
eBooks or Electronic books are the electronic versions of traditional books. There is an eBook version of almost every book in the world. Rather than going to a store and finding a book or order the book online and waiting for days to be delivered, you can directly buy an eBook and get instant access. It will save time and you can take it anywhere where you can take your phone. However, if you want, then you can buy separate e-book readers like Amazon Kindle. Many people love to spend their spare time reading a book. eBooks are the best solution for that and you can earn money by ebooks.
eBooks are much easier to write and publish than traditional physical books. You just need your computer, some knowledge about writing and willpower to write. Unlike traditional books, you don’t necessarily need strong contacts and spend tons of money on publishing the book.
Availability
As they are digital, there is no chance of showing “out of stock” to the customers on your website. Your customers will never be pissed off because of that.
Search
People can easily search for the term they want to read about in eBooks. They don’t have to highlight every other word they want to remember about. However, people have the option to highlight.
Target Customers
Only those people will download your eBook who are interested in your product or niche. Once they download your eBook, you will get an idea of who are your potential customers. You can then send them emails advertising your product.
Make Relationships
People who read your ebooks will begin trusting your brand. Moreover, they will more likely to share about you with others. So, in one or the other way, eBook is a road to marketing.
Grow Your Emails
When people will download your ebook, they will have to submit their email addresses. This will eventually help you to grow your email list.
Versatile
You can add images, texts with many fonts, color fonts, and most importantly, links. You can add links to websites in your eBook. People can easily open that link if wanted.
Amazon Kindle ebooks
Format Of eBooks
Some of the file formats of eBooks are,
PDF
EPUB
AZW
LIT
MOBI
ODF
However, if you are going to provide your eBook for free to your visitor, then it is recommended to use the PDF version. AZW is the file format for Kindle books. You can use Kindle Create to convert your doc file or PDF file into AZW.
The most important factor in writing an eBook is an idea. Write an eBook on the least covered topic or which you are specialists in. Take your time thinking about the topic you are writing your book on.
You should have a good computer which can handle your documents and research at the same time. It would be great if you get the most updated technology. However, you can also go with your computer if you think it can handle everything.
Take your time for proper research about the chosen topic. You can’t just write anything. Make sure that every fact you are writing is true.
Create outlines about your idea. Create mind maps. You need to be prepared for your topic. Use a pen and notebook to write your full imagination. Write to each and everything you want to include in your eBook, in brief.
Start writing the book. Do not waste much time to do it. You can never finish it if you don’t start it. But be sure that you are all prepared to write the book. Tip: Create a good and peaceful environment so you can think better.
Design the cover for your book. If you think you are a good designer then do it yourself. Or just hire a freelancer to get you to design for the cover of your eBook. However, they are not important, but it looks professional if you add one.
Proofread the whole book. You can use professional software for it. Also, re-read the whole book to find mistakes.
Now, share your eBook with all your family and friends and ask them to review it. If they found anything wrong, then correct it before publishing it.
Lastly, publish your eBook. You can do that on your website. If you think you don’t have many audiences on your website, then you can go to any ebook publishing platform like Kindle, Smashwords, Google Play Store, etc. There are many such platforms available.
Conclusion
These were the simple steps on how to write an eBook. You can sell your eBooks or provide them free to connect with your customers. Moreover, you can provide them like a reward to your visitors for signing up on your website. The space for eBooks on the internet is getting bigger and bigger with time. There are many more opportunities to come. With the advancement in technology, you will be introduced to more amazing and unbelievable market opportunities.
Comment below, which is your favorite eBook? What advice would you give to someone who is going to write an eBook? Share this post with all your friends.
Marketing on Quora brings a lot of traffic which converts like crazy. The Internet is a great place for brands and businesses to connect with their audience. Social networks. Bookmarking site and discussion forums have greatly helped us to keep building our brand visibility regular promote goodwill in the crowded market where our audiences live.
One site that we surely need to consider is Quora, Founded in 2010 Quora is a social question or answer community. The users can vote which answers are most helpful. Beyond ask and answer you can target your question to specific Quora users, asking them specifically to weigh in with an answer along with others in the community.
You can search for specific questions or topics related to your business and follow these to receive notifications of new questions. Overall it’s a great platform to know about your industry and connects with relevant people.
If you have been neglecting Quora for a while, go and create a profile on Quora to get the exposure to the potential audience. If you have already signed up start engaging. Quora has great untapped potential for B2B marketers. So, Let’s get started on how you can use Quora for business or Quora for marketing?
Quora is a nice place for marketing, people generally concentrate on queries only, and they search for specific solutions for their problems. If they find your link in the solutions section, That traffic is absolute and there is a high probability of conversion. Quora is a goldmine for content creation and promotion. Quora is a vibrant question-and-answer website where a community of users can pose questions and answer those they have the knowledge and expertise to answer. You can easily do Quora marketing and get traffic to your website
What makes Quora so useful is that you can ask a question (an “A2A”) on any topic imaginable and someone will surely have an answer for you. The community is stellar—you’ll find pretty much every CEO and VIP on Quora, all helping the community get the answers it needs.
Quora is probably the best source of free expert and professional opinions other than Wikipedia. You’ll be surprised to know-how more than 3 million users share their expertise and insights every month on all sorts of topics. You name it Quora has it. The best thing is all are accessible for free of cost. This is a significant audience of well-intentioned curious knowledge-seekers.
Next, you can build your expertise and authority in any particular or any topic you choose. You can also get insights and learn from users, customers, industry experts and influencers on the topic you asked or follow. You can find out the question to give a direct answer to anyone asking about your product or service. Lastly, Quora is a great platform to do market research and for competitive analysis and know what’s hot in the industry currently. Quora marketing can help your business to grow at faster rate.
The links on quora are a no-follow once there may not be many benefits in SEO however you can get very nice traffic from there.
How To Use Quora For Business?
Create The Optimal Quora Marketing Profile
Quora is a community of professionals and thinkers. Once someone liked your answer, they tend to know more about you then connect and follow you. Having a profile without much information can lead to losing that followers or the potential customer.
Try to give your profile a professional look with images, website, writing about me section, adding interest and area of expertise, location, previous companies, and others. You can also add a tagline, website URL, connect all other social media sites which will help people to connect with you in a better way.
Quora also gives you a great exposure by showing your bio (name +Tagline) on the top of your answers. However, these are restricted for 50 characters only. You can use this opportunity to get a great exposure for your brand. Just put up your brand name at the beginning of the tagline.
You can also create an appropriate tagline for each different topic. To set up a topic-specific bio, click on your profile page. In the right column, you’ll see a list of “Knows About” topics. Next to each topic is a link to “Describe your experience.” Clicking here will let you set the topic-specific bio.
One more thing: Quora has an account verification option, but similar to Twitter, the verification is passive. You cannot request it. You must wait for Quora to approach you and make the offer to get a “Verified” label.
Quora Profile
Be Active And Build Your Followings
All this helps you get found for Quora marketing and may make it easier for people to seek you out when they’re looking for Quora users to answer their questions. After you have completed your profile, search for different topics you are interested in and follow them.
You will get the latest discussion and updates on that topic in the home feed. It will also send you notifications so that you don’t miss any questions. You can read them, upvote or take part in the discussion by commenting on your views. Upvotes appear on your public profile straight away and can be a good sign that you’re active on the site. More upvotes you get means more people follow you and you can easily guide them to your business website through this Quora marketing.
Finding The Best Questions To Answer
You can answer any question and build your expertise around that. However if If you’re looking for a great way to solidify your brand answer questions strategically. It’s a great opportunity to let everyone know that your brand is knowledgeable of certain industries, making your trustworthiness “points” go up. Search for your chosen topic. This will narrow down the questions significantly.
Choose a topic that fits your business, that you’ve written about recently, or that you have meaningful stats for. Find threads with lots of upvotes. The upvotes signal that the questions are viewed a lot. A popular answer here could potentially lead to thousands of views per day (and dozens or hundreds of clicks back to your site). Find new questions. You stand a greater chance of bubbling up to the top of the answers list if your answer comes early. It gives you a great chance to scatter your links—just try not to be spammy
Build A Quora Page For Business
Much like Wikipedia, anyone can create a page on Quora about anything. This makes for a great chance to build a company page for your business. To do so, start by searching for your business’s name in Quora. From the results page, if you don’t see the name listed as a topic, you can look in the right sidebar underneath the “Add Question” box and click the link to “Create Topic”.
This gives you the option to name the topic and add a brief description. Once your topic is live, you can request for the Quora community to review the topic. This is particularly helpful for people wondering if they should invest in a subscription to a service or otherwise get involved with a company. For you, it’s a great way to add a bit of social proof and testimonials to your brand’s presence on Quora.
Perform Research On A Topic
What are people asking on Quora? These questions can lead to great blog posts. There are a couple of ways to do this. Flip through the questions-and-answers from the topic that your blog covers. Check to see the popularity of the threads. Are there lots of upvotes? Lots of conversation? These might make great blog posts. Validate your idea with Quora. If you’ve already got a seed of an idea, search for it on Quora to see what people are asking about it. You might find a particular direction to take or a new angle—or even just the validation you were looking for.
Get Quick & Easy Crowd Sourced Content
Not only can Quora help you come up with story ideas, but it can also help you come up with entire blog posts. This idea of crowd sourced content follows a bit in the mold of a roundup post. Ask people their opinion on a topic and collect all their answers into an article.
With Quora, you can ask for stories or experiences that people have had (rather than a specific, closed question with a single right answer). Some great examples of questions like these include: If it’s a general question where the value comes from any and all answers, you can leave things here. If you’ve got a question that’s quite specific to those who know their stuff in your industry, then you can go through a couple of extra steps.
First, make sure your question is unique and categorized correctly. This will help the right people find it.
Second, invite certain Quora users to answer the question. You’ll see this option after you’ve posted your question to Quora (see below).
Have many responses in the category your question resides in Good response rate
Cost – are they free to ask or will it cost you credits
If you know who the experts in your field are, you can look them up by name and ask them to answer.
Once the answers come in, you’ll have the basis for an excellent roundup post with a good variety of sources and input.
Discover New Headline Ideas
Much like you might do a bit of headline research by typing your keywords into a Google search (autocomplete is a great way to learn how people ask things), you can do the same with Quora.
Type in your keyword into a Quora search.
Filter the results to only show questions.
What you’ll see on the results page is how people ask their questions about your chosen keyword and, therefore, how you can frame your content.
The most popular questions in terms of answers and up votes can be a signal about the value of the way things are worded. And it can all help with writing headlines for your next blog post.
Help With Customer Support And Influence
One of the biggest benefits for Quora is building authority. And right behind that is this,
Use Quora to provide customer support to your users and to provide a positive influence to discussions about your product. Like all other social media channels, Quora lets you communicate directly with customers. On Quora, they may be asking questions about your product specifically, and what better feeling than to have those questions answered by an employee of that company—or even the CEO.
Analyze Your Quora Stats
Quora provides free analytics for all users, showing you a detailed breakdown of the following:
Views
Up votes
Shares
Quora Analytics
Quora has inbuilt analytics tools that let you analyze how your answers are performing. It will tell you views up votes and share your answers for a different time like last 7 days, last 30 days, last 3 months and all-time.
Displaying these stats for each of the following categories
The questions you ask
The answers you give
The blog posts you write
All the content you contribute
Crazy Egg has some helpful ways to analyze these stats to best help with your Quora marketing:
Each answer provides stats for the number of times it’s been viewed, and by which users. If you click on “# views,” you can see how readers are being led to your answers. Are they finding your content through your profile, through tagged topics, or through random browsing?
By visiting your personal views page, you can also obtain an overall assessment of who’s seen your answers. A quick glance through these stats will tell you which avenues can give you the most coverage.
Start A Quora Blog To Re-purpose Your Content
One neat way to get involved on Quora besides the standard question-and-answer format is to start blogging. At Quora, you can create a blog and publish stories. To get started, click on your profile and navigate to Blogs. You’ll be able to create a blog and customize its name, URL, and description. Then, add whatever content you choose.
Just like LinkedIn content, these posts get circulated around the Quora network, and you can share your posts on social media to attract readers and followers. We’ve recommended Quora as a possible option for repurposing your existing blog content. Bloggers like James Clear do this to great results.
Quora Hacks
Format Your Answers In An Eye-catching Way
Quora may not be known much as a visual network, which means there could be a big opportunity if you’re able to include some visuals in your Quora content.
Many of the top Quora users add images to their answers to help support their point. And these images, while first of all helpful, are also great attention-getters. See how they’re included in the Quora answer stream here.
The first photo in an answer will appear as a thumbnail beside the answer when viewed in the question stream. Beyond photos, you can also add some custom formatting to your answer, helping it be more readable and hopefully gain a few more up votes. Make your headlines Bold or italic.
Do Competitive Research
Just as you can search for your own brand, you can also search for your competitors and see what they’re doing to market themselves, as well as learn how customers are talking about them. Investigate. Listen. Learn.
You may find a common theme or reason customers choose your competitor over you, and utilize that knowledge to improve your product or service. There may also be opportunities to reiterate your unique value propositions when a user is at the critical decision-making stage of the sales funnel, and ultimately convince them to choose you. What’s more, even if you think you know your industry through and through, you may discover emerging industry trends or opportunities before your competition does by listening to your customers.
Competitor Research on Quora
Hiring
Yes, that’s true! People really do hiring on Quora. Once, someone answered a question about some bugs in a very popular online education website. The answerer was anonymous, however, the CEO of that online education website commented to send him his resume as he wants to hire him. This is just one case, there are hundreds of people who are hired on or because of Quora. Quora is a place where only those people come who want to learn something. So, one filter automatically gets applied. You don’t have to worry much about their curiosity. Hence, you can find and hire someone on Quora. And as a matter of fact, those people who want their dream job can start answering questions on your favorite topic and be consistent. However, there is a very low chance but there is still some hope.
Run Quora Ads
If your potential customers are available and engage on Quora, then you should try Quora Ads as well. Quora Ads Manager will offer you to target your audience by topic, geography and platform.
Affiliate Marketing On Quora
You knew it was coming! Affiliate marketing is the best way you can earn from Quora. All you have to do is to get some affiliate links and use them in your answers. However, Quora is very strict for their content. If you are using your affiliate link without making any sense of it in the answer, then your answer will be collapsed. So, write carefully. It should not look like all you want from viewers is to click your links.
Redirect Traffic
You can redirect the traffic to your own website. If you answer a question very efficiently and without any greed, people will go to your website. You can write your answer and at the end of the answer, put the link and ask people to visit it in order to get more deep information. However, I would suggest you to not to cheat your viewer. If you really have a good content and the topic is deeply described there, only then redirect them to your website. If people found you cheating, they will report your answer, which might result in getting your account banned. So, play it carefully and according to the terms of Quora.
Add links to bring referral traffic from Quora
Conclusion
According to the Huffington Post, most of the top brands are being discussed on Quora. In 2013, 84% of the top 100 brands had at least one discussion thread dedicated to them. Nowadays, it’s hard to find a brand with no Quora mentions.
To get the most out of Quora, make sure your account is complete and professional, read through the discussions to get a feel for popular topics in your industry, communicate with others and share your answers on other social media sites. These tricks are not only for Quora marketing but for all the similar platforms like Reddit, Medium, Stack Overflow, etc. You have to choose the best platform. Choose the best platform for your life too, do not go for fame and money only, life is much more vast than that.
Hence, in this way you can use Quora for marketing and for your business. Comment some more ways we can earn from Quora. Have you ever earned some bucks from unusual online ways? Share this post with all your friends.
