If you’re an inbound marketer, you know that in order to close more deals with content, you need to generate more leads. In order to generate more leads, you need to:

1. Convert and nurture more of your existing visitors, or
2. Generate more visitors

Unless you’ve been blogging and creating content offers for a long time and have a large, loyal following, you’re probably more focused on building up a critical mass of site visitors.

But how many site visitors do you really need?

If you’re not sure how many visitors you should strive for each month, use conversion benchmarks to estimate how many visitors and leads you’ll need to reach your desired number of new customers.

For example, if we want to capture 10 new customers every month, a hypothetical conversion benchmark of 10% suggests we’re going to need 100 leads.

To get 100 leads, we know we need at least 1,000 site visitors (assuming 10% of visitors become leads). Since we (and most other inbound marketers) generate the majority of site visits via our blog (70%), we know we’re going to need 700 blog visitors in order to reach our goal of gaining ten new customers.

Once you do the math and figure out how many blog visits you need to generate in order to reach your goals, you might be wondering where to get started.

If you’re already blogging regularly about topics your buyer personas care about and not seeing the number of visitors you’d like, you may need to try a few tactics or “hacks” to boost your numbers.

Here are some ideas you can implement for a quick boost in blog traffic:

1. Monthly “Roundups”

If you’re not already following an RSS feed of your favorite industry-related blogs and news publications, now is the time to start. Once you have a feed in place, you can save articles you found especially interesting or helpful and highlight them in a list of best posts at the beginning or end of each month.

• Include 1-2 from your blog
• Share your “roundup” on social media and be sure to tag each of the blogs/publications featured - you never know whether they’d be willing to share
• Tweet at each individual author letting them know they were featured

2. Collaborative Blog Posts

One of the best ways to get new eyes on your content is to tap into the audiences of industry partners and/or influencers. An easy way to do this is to develop a monthly blog post with a collaborator. Ideally, this collaborator would:

• Have similar goals and personas, yet not be competing with you for sales
• Have a large, well-established social network — the bigger the better

Collaborating can be as in-depth as working together to create an opinion piece on a hot topic or as easy as asking smart influencers in your industry to weigh in on an issue and publishing their remarks. I recommend starting by identifying potential collaborators and selecting one who you think would be willing to do a short interview. Then, simply record their answers and publish as you see fit.

3. Embedded Content

If you’re having difficulty generating a large volume of content, a great way to maintain a regular presence on the web is to create easy blog posts using embeddable content. Each month, spend a few hours looking for infographics, videos, and/or SlideShares you think will resonate with your personas. Then, on busy days when you don’t have time to write a full-blown blog post, you can quickly embed the content in a post, write a brief introduction, give credit to the original creator, and share with your social networks.

These tactics will help you leverage your social network and others to generate more quick traffic for your blog.

If you want to ensure your blog posts generate the maximum amount of traffic for months and years to come (who doesn't?), I would urge you to optimize your posts with long-tail keywords.

Long-tail keywords are key to long-term traffic generation. Here's why & how to optimize for them:

As you probably already know, the keywords you use are critical for helping people find you via search. When thinking through their blog search engine optimization (SEO) strategy, most marketers focus on short, 1-2 word phrases.

For example, if you’re a photography studio trying to establish SEO presence, you might write blog posts focused on short keywords like:

• Wedding Photography

• Bridal Photography

• Newborn Photos

• Baby Photos

• Engagement Session

• Senior Photos

• Photography Studio in Minneapolis

Though these do demonstrate what your business does, it’s going to be very difficult to outrank larger, more established companies and get found with these.

Your better bet is to figure out how you’re different from the average photography studio and write blog posts featuring more illustrative long-tail keywords. This way, you may not rank in searches for photography in general, but you can work your way to the top of the list in searches for the specific things you do really well.

To do this, you need to get very clear about your mission and your niche in the larger market. A lot of business owners and marketers are resistant to this because they don’t want to exclude potential clients, but in this crowded economy, very few small-medium businesses can make it as generalists. You’ve got to be specific.

For example, let’s say you decide to focus your business on the emerging number of gay couples searching for photographers.

Effective long-tail keywords might look like this:

• LGBT Wedding Photographers in Minneapolis

• Gay Wedding Photographer in Twin Cities

• Gay Engagement Photos Minneapolis

• Wedding Photography Studio for Gay Marriage

Once you identify your niche area, figure out what long keyword phrases represent both what you do and what people are searching for. Then, look for ways to integrate those phrases into your blog posts (and your site’s page titles and subtitles). The more places you can place these phrases, the more likely you’ll rank and get found.

By finding and adding these long-tail keywords, you’ll not only outrank the competition and drive more site traffic, but you’ll also attract more qualified visitors and close more deals.

Still looking for more ideas? Download our blog optimization tool kit — it’s full of resources you can use to make sure your blog is SEO optimized and ready to generate leads.

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