Blogging remains the leading content marketing tactic businesses use to talk about their products, services and overall brand. Despite this statistic, only a few actually generate leads from their blog. I’ll share five steps on how you can generate interested prospects from your blogging efforts.

1. Produce Interesting Content

You’ve heard it before and it’s still true. The highest performing blog posts are ones that are edgy, interesting and something that you’d genuinely share with your friends (or at least peers) without shame. The best practice is to educate others about your industry and focus on the mindset of the buyer by addressing what they need to learn and their desires. Chris Brogan has 100 blog ideas that are interesting to kick things off.

2. Don’t Talk About Yourself

When you don’t talk about yourself, people tend to listen to you more. Maybe it’s just me, but when I go to a conference and I hear a speaker go on about how great they are – I tend to tune out. Blogs are no different. We’re all competing for an online user’s attention – don’t squander it through self-promotion. Instead, talk about your industry, competitors, customers and most importantly… be useful.

3. Make the Ask

Some purists believe that it’s not appropriate to ‘sell’ or ‘promote’ on social media. It’s all about timing and as a marketer, you need to balance your altruistic and business motives and be able to provide meaningful value to readers while leaving an opportunity for them to learn more about your business. A few simple ways to make the ask could include a link to your landing page, a targeted web form in your blog post or inviting people to subscribe to your blog.

4. Track Your Leads

Many bloggers, even great ones, aren’t great about tracking the success of their blog. Whether they know it or not –they might already be generating leads from their blog. One of the best ways to track leads is to have the blog’s web forms automatically tracking the visitor when they sign up into your marketing database. This is lead source tracking and you can more intelligently track where your leads come from. If you’re savvy with code, you can dynamically assign the URL of the blog post into your web form code and be able to know which specific blog post generated leads. (Infusionsoft users can learn how to assign lead sources to prospects within Web Forms in this training video.)

5. Publish Frequently

Blogging is easy; blogging for business and achieving results is the challenge. It takes patience to attract the right audience and to show up throughout search engines. One of the best ways to attract traffic and to realize success is to publish frequently. Publishing a few times weekly is a good level of frequency – but you might want to raise the bar higher depending on resources and competitive nature of your industry.

 When you take action on these five steps, you’ll notice that the leads you attract tend to be more educated about your offering, more interested and ready to hear more from you.  If your content is up to snuff, you’ll earn a lot more mentions and traffic from social media.

Keep in mind that people on the web who often land on your blog posts are looking for answers. It doesn’t always mean your product is the answer, but if they trust your content, a few will raise their hand to learn more. Your blog is a magazine out to the world – what will they see when they pick it up? A million self-promotional inserts for renewals or killer content? You decide.

Image credit: Anonymous

This month, we updated our visual identity and corporate vision and we’ve received great feedback from customers on the changes. We’d like to share a couple desktop backgrounds that you can use this month. 

Did you know that Infusionsoft users are rewarded for sharing the love about our sales and marketing software? Simply tell us some details about a like-minded entrepreneur (so we can reach out to him or her) and you get to claim some killer prizes including $500 gift cards, a couple free months of Infusionsoft, an additional user, and free attendance to InfusionCon and more. It’s easy to refer friends to Infusionsoft, so try it today!

We have two wallpapers featuring our updated brand. One has a calendar and the other is a universal Infusionsoft wallpaper. Our long-time supporters will love these new desktops, so we hope to see them in the crowd at InfusionCon!

Download the February Wallpaper with a calendar:
1680 x 1050 (larger size)
1440 x 900 (smaller size)

Download the Infusionsoft Wallpaper:
1680 x 1050 (larger size)
1440 x 900 (smaller size)

Brogan, Slim and Vaynerchuk do a stellar job utilizing social media to generate leads, grow their brands and serve an engaged online audience. In addition, they will also speak at InfusionCon 2012 in April. They also adopt a few common tactics to generate leads and business value from social media – and you should be doing it, too!

1. Provide meaningful content to their audience on a regular basis.

These three marketing thought leaders hustle around the clock creating content. Whether if it’s from an airplane, a coffee shop, a conference or at peace in their home-office. They find their groove and they stay in touch with their audience. The virtual umbilical cord to their fans is filled with great ideas, personality and humanity.

Examples:
Gary Vaynerchuk shooting a video from 30,000 feet in the air
Chris Brogan dropping helpful tips exclusively on Google Plus
Pam Slim sharing small business advice others aren’t talking about on her blog.

2. They capture leads on their website, 24/7.

If these speakers had to manually enter every single business card into their database, they would need to have a full-time person just to do that. They chose an alternative – collecting leads from their website, growing their loyal audience. When people opt-in, they are giving permission to hear from them, including blog posts, learning more about their businesses, booking speaking engagements and more.

Examples:

Gary Vaynerchuk asks his audience to be Vee-I-P's with email addresses.

Pam Slim Uses Infusionsoft to Collect Leads from her Website

Chris Brogan makes the ask right on his homepage.

3. They go where the people (and new opportunities) are.

Today, online users don’t stick to only one medium for news and information. They are found on many different social networks and digest information differently – on their terms. Brogan, Slim and Vaynerchuk do a great job of being accessible, sharing killer content and being personable across many social networks at the same time. One thing is clear – while they publish and interact on many social networks, they build value in securing their own email list.

Examples: YouTube, Google Plus, Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr.

These tactics to generate business value from social media are no secret. You don’t need to be an expert to truly implement them and do great. It boils down to this: provide quality content, a relevant offer and great timing. To make all that really function smoothly and give you the ability to scale, it’s ideal to have an all-in-one sales and marketing system that collects all the leads, warms them up, keeps them happy and so you can generate revenue. When that system in place firing on all eight cylinders, they can dedicate time to interact with their contacts on a personalized, focus basis without breaking a sweat.

Want to meet them in person? Attend InfusionCon during April 2-4! They’d love to hear how you’re crushing it and growing your business. Register now to lock in a great deal!

Creating the perfect landing page may be the least of your worries as a small business. Your business greatly depends on your ability to get new customers. You might rely heavily on outbound marketing tactics like trade shows or direct mail. With a well-crafted landing page, it will help you make the most of your prospect’s time and drive them to take action utilizing inbound marketing techniques.

Today at 11AM PST, we’ll have a free webinar designed to help make your next landing page rock!

Your website can be become a breeding ground for new customers, drawing in potential buyers with great content that has a specific message and a call to action. This is where landing pages come in to play.

No matter what kind of business you are in, building a landing page where you direct targeted traffic is essential to attract new business. Once that traffic has arrived at the page, you can use compelling headlines and interesting copy to lure them in and get them interested in your message. Then, you can ask them to give you their information so you can email them a few coupons or call them about a complementary consultation.

You work hard on your site and not only do you just want people consuming your content, you want them to feel essentially obligated to say yes to offering up their info. There is a reason why marketers have fallen in love with landing pages – it’s because they convert traffic into leads.

For lead generation to work, you have to make sure you are following the proper steps to build an effective landing page that gets conversions. Don’t let potential customers who find you online slip through the cracks.

This Thursday, Amy Rushia, Infusionsoft’s Lead Generation Manager, will be presenting a webinar that will show you several actionable steps you can do now to create a landing page that converts.

During this webinar, Amy will talk about:

• Seven ingredients you need to create the perfect landing page
• A few examples of good, bad and ugly landing pages
• Online resources you can use when creating your landing page

Register for this webinar now and join Amy on February 9 at 11AM PST for her live presentation.

Also, check out this new infographic we created on landing pages: 7 Ingredients to Create the Perfect Landing Page

You may have noticed our new look this week. We have a new logo and a new color palette representing the Infusionsoft brand. We’re excited to have a fresh new face representing our brand identity. Here’s a look at our process and thinking behind the logo and brand image change.

The previous Infusionsoft logo served us well for the last five years. The red, black and gray showed our serious side and gave some credibility to a fast-growing little startup that made innovative web-based software to help small businesses automate their sales and marketing.

This is the Infusionsoft logo we used for the past five years:

(2007 - 2012)

We’re still growing fast, but Infusionsoft isn’t a little startup any more. Now we’re growing into a bigger industry leader with our popular all-in-one sales and marketing software. Our products, services, partner community are all maturing quickly. A far cry from five guys in a small office, we now have over 200 employees and we serve an increasingly diverse market of small businesses from around the world.

Our brand image needed to reflect these changes and better represent who we are and where we are going.

Several months ago when we decided to make the logo change, we didn’t just jump in by exploring new design ideas and trying out colors. The visual change was the last part of a strategic process where we clarified our market positioning focus, brand personality and our business vision, including our purpose, core values and mission. This was not an easy or quick process, but it has been absolutely key to our own success and continued growth.

What remains unchanged is our focus on helping small businesses succeed as they grow up to our all-in-one sales and marketing system, from the hodgepodge of individual tools they’re currently using to manage their marketing, sales and ecommerce. We’re redefining small business CRM with a unified approach to sales in marketing software that helps small businesses get more customers, grow their sales and save time.

Once we had the strategic foundation, we worked with an experienced design agency to express our strategy, personality and vision in a logo mark and brand identity. This is always a fun process and it took a while to find the right logo mark, color scheme and overall brand look that fit us the best.

I’m proud to introduce the new Infusionsoft logo:

The new logo mark is simple, strong and modern. We have created some separation between “Infusion” and “soft” to make it easier to understand and digest, since our name is a longer word with a mouthful of letters and can sometimes be difficult to take in at first glance.

The new green color reflects the growth and energy that our solution brings to our customers. It’s a distinctive color in our industry that will help set us apart and create a unique, recognizable visual brand. Compared to our black, red and gray colors resembling old, we love the new bright green color and new palette of complementary colors reflecting new.

We hope you like it, too. If you used our old logo previously, you can download our updated brand kit here so you can use the latest version of our logo.

We didn’t only update the logo and colors, we have a revised corporate vision including our strategic mission, core values and more. Our CEO and Co-founder, Clate Mask, shares that update in his blog post.