Freelance Writing and Blogging Series

Why Lead Generation And Email Marketing Are Important

Almost all successful businesses have a database of customers and prospects. This is because lead generation is one of the easiest ways to increase profits. It is often better to retain a customer than it is to create a new one. A loyal customer comes back again and again, and this naturally increases profits. 

In the case of online freelance writing, you typically can't do much with that when you are writing articles for a different website. But when you are publishing your articles on your own blog, lead generation and email marketing become important.

This is the typical process that you need to be setting up and why it is important:

1. You write articles for your blog (we will show you how to set up a blog and post articles later in this series).

2. The articles get indexed in the search engines. Surfers find your articles and read them.

Without lead generation, you now lose that surfer once he leaves your site. He MIGHT bookmark your site, but unless you are a Google or Facebook, it's unlikely that that person is coming back unless you find a way to get him back.

These are the additional steps you need to take to get repeat traffic from your search-engine-derived visitors:

3. You get an autoresponder service like Email Aces. This allows you to build a list and engage that list through email marketing.

4. You put an opt-in form on your blog. The surfer who lands on your page from the search engines will sometimes enter their name and email address to subscribe to your list. This person is now one of your leads. The autoresponder service maintains your database of leads and also has group email capabilities.

5. You send out an email to your leads using the autoresponder service. This is essentially a reminder to come back to your site. It would be like you bought something on TV or in a store and then they send you extra offers or sale notices in the mail. It's the same thing. But as a freelance writer and blogger, you are getting people to come back to your site to read more articles. 

Of course, this is naturally going to increase your profits. People don't usually come back to a site unless they have a reason. Once you get them on your email leads list, your job is to continue to write quality content for both the search engines and your list of email marketing leads generated from those search engines. 

Quality content is the reason your leads will have to come back to your site, so don't underestimate the quality of good articles and content. If you entertain or educate or help your blog readers, some of them will become loyal readers. Email marketing facilitates that process. Otherwise, many people will just simply forget to come back no matter how good your articles are.

OK. Those are the five steps. Once you get it set up, online lead generation for your blog is automatic with the exception of logging into your autoresponder account and sending out messages to your list. And that is about as simple as sending an email.

We are customers and affiliates of the Email Aces autoresponder service. This is a quality service in our experience at a reduced price compared to many competitors. You can get a risk-free trial of Email Aces to see if you like it. They also provide the opt-in subscription forms for you, so you do not need programming skills to use Email Aces for lead generation and email marketing.