Whether you are trying to generate leads or building a content site for adsense, affiliate products, direct eccomerce sales really traffic is the life blood. Throughout my series of Marketing material which I have been promoting Online I have tried to present a very diversified traffic plan. What I mean by that is that I don’t really think that it is a wise idea to be completely dependant on any one traffic source. I have used this qoute before Jim Cramer talks about the stock market:

“Diversification is your only free lunch.”

What that means is that at the end of the day it is just so important to have a diversified approach. I have lived through Multiple Google Slaps related to Adwords. When Adwords changes there policies I have personally lived through alot of Google Search Engine updates or typically named after hurricanes because there is so much collateral damage done. Through all of this I realized that it is highly important to have a diversified traffic plan. So that way your lead generation efforts don’t dry up to nothing if one of your traffic strategies for getting marketing leads either drys up or something changes in the market, you want to be prepared. 

The next part of our diversified traffic plan and this fits within content development and the web 2.0 series that i teach online is Blogging. 

Alot of people may say what does blogging have to do with lead generation and my comment is pretty much everything. The reason why I say that is because I have replaced the majority of my old static websites with if not completely a blog but with sites that have a blog that goes along with them on the same domain. I am going to talk about those reasons on this blog and then some ideas for developing content for blogs and ideas on how to properly promote and build traffic for blogs with the goal of generating more leads, because at the end of the day if you want to generate more leads and i believe that is why you are reading this blog post then you need to build more traffic because that is going to be force that is going to drive you to be most successful. 

Why have a Blog?

The core reason is because Search Engines love blogs. They Love blog for a few reasons:

Advantage 1:

The Love fresh Updated Content 

The Days of Old domains and Old content and completely sticking out through Google are not dead they are still their. If you take a look at the average search you will still see alot of Wikipedia and alot of crusty old domain names. Those which have been hanging around for years with lots of links. You will still see that but over the last i would say 9-12 months Google has been changing there algarythms. For a much fresher index, where they are mixing in those old crusty stand by results with lots of new fresh content. Many times that fresh content is coming from Blogs and the reason why is because that is where the action is. People are Publishing on a Daily and Hourly basis and they are writing fresh content. Google needs fast indexing and the old static pages do not give them that flexibility. 

Blogs present immediate content opportunities for Google and what I mean by this is that Google can get fresh brand new content which is highly important for Google. They have now made an entire vertical dedicated to blogging it is Google Blog Search they have a full vertical which just covers indexing and ranking of Blogs. So this is their commitment to taking in fresh blog content and indexing it on a very rapid basis. 

Advantage 2:

Blogs are also included within Universal Search 

Universal Search is Googles brand new look and feel. Many people like myself brand it as Google 2.0 because it is that big of change. It is Googles way of taking fresh content and rich media and putting it directly on the Search Engine results page. The results are that you could be doing a search and Google can list directly on the search engine results page without you going to a blog search. They can list headlines and summaries directly from blogs which they are indexing, so this shows how important blogs are for fresh and timely content. Blogs have several other advantages also:

Advantage 3:

They are Indexed very quickly 

If you have been in this industry for a few years. I am sure you can remember the blog and ping craze. This still works however not at the level it used to. The game has changed because as things are manipulated and over done by people in the marketing community the search engines have to changed and try to calm things down to reset the algorithms playing field until we find the next unfair competitive advantage. That is what this is all about us generating more leads than all of our competitors.  Blogs are still in my opinion the best indexing points for your content.

About 6 to 12 months ago, there were alot of people having issues in getting there brand new websites indexed by Google and they were calling it the Google Sandbox. I never subscribed to that term because I have never had issues with indexing because I have always really focused on using web 2.0 strategies to get my sites indexed really quickly. So i never had the same issues which over people had where they launched a new domain name set up hosting, got links to it. They would spend one month, 2months and sometimes even 6 months without Google even indexing them or paying attention. 

So blogs are fantastic indexing tools they have something very important inside of them and it is the ability to ping. This is a way to alert the search engines and the blog aggregators which I will talk about later in this post, that you have updated new content. You have sent something for them to come rushing back to your blog and to grab that new fresh content. So that is the main advantage of having a blog as far as indexing is pinging.

Another advantage for having a blog is the fact that you have an RSS feed and RSS feeds are critical for a few reasons:

You can use it for Lead generation directly when people subscribe to your RSS feed it is the same as opting in or registering for your newsletter. You can use this RSS feed directly for Lead Generation because people will subscribe to your RSS feed and as soon as you produce new content they will be notified immediately. Everytime you do a brand new post they are automatically updated in their feed reader and they can see that new post in virtual real time. So they are now not waiting for you to send an email or your auto-responder.                                               

RSS marketing is going to become a priority in the next 6 – 12 months. Lets take a look at email deliverability. This directly relates to our blog conversations. It is so difficult for us to get emails   delivered from 3rd party servers like Aweber, 1 Shopping Cart, Get Response deliverability rates still very difficult. So much of our mail winds up in the Bulk or Spam filters and this is not unsolicited emails we are not spamming people with viagra and gambling ads and all the things we see as spam. People are coming to our sites and requesting information, they give us permission and we are sending them what they are requesting and the mailing companies they are choosing what and when things should be delivered. This is content that your subscribers have requested and it is a complete mess. I spent 6 months testing it and i decided that I wasn’t getting that much of deliverability increase to justify the monthly expense versus other mail platforms. This is how important this topic is and the benefits of RSS subscribers.

Lets not even just think this is solely pertained to leads but this is the same problem with customers who have purchased from you before. This is why you MUST pay attention to RSS Marketing and the core of RSS Marketing is Blogs. When you use Blog platforms every single one of them ones with an RSS Feed. When someone subscribes to your feed they are not blocked or filtered it immediately gets sent to there inbox. Many times the RSS feeders become people’s start pages on the My Yahoo Page and on their Google IQ which is the Google version of the homepage.  People look at their news aggregators and RSS feeds on a daily basis sometimes every hour. 

RSS Marketing is going to become an essential part of your marketing over the next 6 – 12 months if you want to continue to get attention from your leads and prospects. So this is why blogs are so important because we capture leads when they subscribe to our feeds and this is the advantage over email deliverability. The best part of this also is that they don’t have to enter their email address or give there name and information to subscribe to your RSS feed so it is even more automated. 

It is however a different form of marketing because you are still doing a broadcast and sending an offer in the same way you are simply communicating with your prospects now via your RSS feed. However the one negative for RSS marketing is that you are not actually collecting email addresses. So you dont have the ability to send an email to these people. However you can insert your aweber opt in form into your blog so this irradiates that previous issue. 

So hopefully by now you are excited about Blogging and if your not blogging you need to take the steps forward to contact me of how to do it effectively. 

Summary of Why Blogs are so important for Leads & Traffic:

1) Search Engine Ranking and the fact that the content gets indexed very quickly

2) The Power of getting updated content very quickly into Google. 

3) The Importance of Pinging as far as Alerting the Search Engines that you have updated Content

4) The Power of RSS Marketing and how Important it is

I hope that you have got alot of Massive Use Value from this post and can go and implement the strategies I have discussed to get Massive Traffic to your Website as well. If you would like to know more in depth on how to not only drive traffic with Blogs but also with other Social Media Strategies like video marketing with YouTube, Myspace, Facebook, Social Bookmarking + much much more. 

Don’t hesitate to contact me directly on my platinum mentorship enrollment site. Also via:

email: support@capital-visions.co.uk

Skype ID: Capital-Visions

(UK) +447527191665