Blogging for Customers
Posted on 07. Jul, 2009 by Kaleidico in Blog
Internet lead generation, once the sole purview of mortgage lead providers has become a core competency of many mortgage brokers and lenders. The secret? Learning to blog for customers.
I am going to assume in this article that you know the basics of setting up a blog—moving straight to blogging strategy. Let me share with you some of the best practices that are yielding many of our lead management software clients a steady flow of leads.
Start with the Basics
Each of you is an expert in mortgages. When you start blogging try to put most of what you know on the back burner. Your prospective customer, 90 percent of the time doesn’t know the most basic tenets of a mortgage. Talking about the bond market’s effect on mortgage rates or what the Fed thinks is unlikely to yield you many mortgage leads.
New homebuyers and even existing homeowners are typically searching the Web for the most basic of concepts. Here are some very popular search concepts:
- How do I get a mortgage?
- Can I qualify for a mortgage?
- What is the mortgage loan process like?
- How to find a mortgage broker?
- What are mortgage rates?
- Should I refinance?
Add a local flavor to your blog and you can capture a lot of these basic searches, while the big boys fight over mortgage rate tables and mortgage calculators.
Promote Your Posts on Social Networks
Filling your blog with regular posts on the most basic of mortgage concepts will yield a reasonable amount of “organic” search engine traffic. However, the mortgage niche is very competitive—you will need more.
Driving traffic is the key component to generating leads. And, traffic never comes without effort. The trick is to make that traffic as natural and targeted as possible.
Social media and networks is one of the fastest growing ways to generate large audiences that will visit, refer, and inquire. Unlike paid traffic or even search engine traffic social networks leverage the multiplicative effect of a “passed link.”
Like email, social networks allow for the very simple flow of Web links. That means one referral to your network potentially yields multiple referrals to their networks, and so on. Very quickly, assuming you have produced attractive and compelling content, you have hundreds of folks referring prospective customers to your website.
The key is adding value with your content as well as reciprocating with other referrals and expert conversation.
Leverage Other Related Audiences
Above I mentioned how to use social networks to leverage other audiences, but don’t discount the opportunity to land the big Kahuna—leveraging other blogs’ traffic. Seek out blogs that have relevant content and audiences. These blogs are likely to have a need for quality content and are willing to showcase your articles to their audience.
Often, with a well-researched and pitched article proposal you can land regular guest posts on other blogs. This approach will quickly introduce hundreds and even thousands of new prospects to your blog—adding them to your lead generation sales funnel.
Give lead management a try—free for 30 days—and watch your sales production climb. Kaleidico’s Sales Manager is the pioneer of pull-based, high velocity sales lead management, giving your sales team a competitive advantage. Lead management will pull more deals through any sales pipeline.
