INTRODUCTION
Lead Generation has become a very important aspect of many local businesses’ digital marketing. On one hand, it is crucial for obtaining the pertinent contact information of people who wish to buy your product or render services, and on the other hand, it is quite important for identifying the precise business that may even seek your help in regard to the products and services you are offering. Now, if you need some helpful tips that could help you generate leads for your business, take a look at the following useful guide.
Generating leads is important if you want to be successful. But if you’re a local business, then generating leads and getting new customers can be extremely difficult. The most popular methods of lead generation aren’t always effective, which results in a lot of wasted time and money spent on advertising. If this sounds familiar then read on because I’ll show you some lead generation ideas that will get you more clients today.
19 Lead Generation Ideas for Local Businesses
Either you have a small business, or you’re tasked with generating leads for small business clients.
Some companies successfully amp-up their small business leads with a bigger budget. They outspend their competitors in terms of advertising and PR.
Other companies — typically younger players with smaller income streams — are more risk adverse. They go forth with tight purse strings and strive to create leads with low-cost or no-cost tactics. They aim to outsmart, rather than outspend, the competition. Marketers across the small business spectrum succeed this way all day, every day —especially on the digital battlefield.
In any case, with a big budget, a low budget, or even no budget, every small business must abide by a universal, simple and vital formula. The quicker you wrap your head around this, the faster you will make it work:
Traffic x Conversion Rate = Leads
Reread that. Say it out loud. Commit it to memory.
Now, let’s revisit some grade-school math terms. The numbers on the left-hand side of a multiplication equation are factors. Traffic and conversion rate are the factors in this case. The number that follows the equals sign on the right-hand side is the product.
Now, let’s remind ourselves of a fundamental reality of mathematics: the multiplication property of zero. It states:
The product of any number and zero is zero.
Apply it like so: ANY traffic number times ZERO conversion rate produces ZERO leads. A ZERO traffic number times ANY conversion rate produces ZERO leads.
So, while I encourage you to read our recent posts, including the guide about how to generate leads and the list of 21 Winning Lead Generation Strategies, stay tuned now for a helpful breakdown of ideas to help you drive traffic and conversions to improve online-lead generation for your small business.
What is Small Business Lead Generation?
Small business lead generation is when a small business deploys various strategies to build interest in their product or service and attract those who are interested in the hopes that they will eventually become customers.
Here, we’ll dive into some of these strategies and tactics, and how they specifically apply to small businesses.
Lead Generation Ideas for Small Business
Small business lead generation begins by creating a presence in the path of would-be leads and giving them a reason to visit your website. Here’s a robust list of ideas to help you accomplish this.
1. Do basic local SEO
- Claim your free Google My Business directory listing and optimize it.
- Perform basic search engine optimization (SEO) across your website’s pages with descriptive title tags.
- Optimize each page with a compelling meta description to inspire click-throughs from search engine results.
- Claim local business listings on online business directories, such as Yelp, Merchant Circle, Citysearch, and other local directories.
- Encourage customers to post reviews about your business. When asked, the majority of satisfied customers do oblige.
For example, when I did a search for ‘event catering,’ as shown above, a number of local companies that have claimed pages in the Google My Business directory appeared prominently in the results.
2. Publish a blog
- A blog can feature articles, videos, podcasts, infographics, galleries, or any combination. The point is to create content that provides the answers to the questions customers search for.
- Learn and apply the SEO techniques that will improve your search rankings.
Here’s a strong example of how a small business becomes the go-to resource for answers and insights in its niche.
3. Guest post on relevant websites
- Offer your expertise, for free, to online publishers in the form of guest posts.
- Where possible, include links in your articles to useful resources on your website.
- Also apply this strategy to local print publications, remembering to include a mention of your website.
4. Get active on social media
- Identify the social media channels your customers prefer.
- Share content — be it homemade or curated — as often as possible on your profiles.
- Promote your social media channels everywhere possible.
- Interact with prospects in an informative and helpful manner.
- Follow influential people in your industry and try to build mutually beneficial relationships.
Pura Vida Bracelets consistently populates the social media networks its customers prefer with a combination of beaches, beauty and bracelets, but it also tosses in the occasional special offer, as shown here.
5. Run paid search ads
- Explore the many advertising options offered by Google Ads.
- Refine your tactics to reduce pay-per-click costs and improve ROI.
- Consider Microsoft advertising, which runs on Bing and Yahoo! Search.
6. Run social media ads
- Facebook advertising is easy, often effective and offers a very low cost for entry. You can get started for $5 per day.
- Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and YouTube all offer online advertising programs you can experiment with to generate leads.
7. Run native advertising
- Your online advertising options expand beyond the top search and social channels with native advertising and include millions of publishers.
- Learn how to run programmatic ads on discovery networks such as Taboola.
Check out how Flare Audio launched their revolutionary headphones with traffic from premium publisher sites.
- Examine the potential of collaborating with publishers to create sponsored ads and content.
8. Build a referral network
- Identify practical marketing projects (like co-hosted events, co-created content or social media partnerships) that justify reaching out to experts to make connections, build relationships and create content.
- Consider projects based on interviews, case studies and various types of collaboration.
- Invite respected authorities to guest blog on your website.
- Rather than ask for reciprocation, simply support your supporters.
9. Run events
- Host webinars.
- Speak at conferences and local events.
- Participate in expos and give attendees a reason to engage.
- Use social media to create live streams and other types of events.
Here is some smart small business marketing by Visor: free tax webinars for prospects and customers.
10. Use email marketing
- Traffic you generate with email marketing comes with a caveat: it’s bound for people that have already been there and opted-into your list (unless you built an email list offline). You can capitalize on email and generate traffic to your website by giving subscribers strong reasons to return.
- Send newsletters and meaningful emails that inform recipients of helpful content you’ve published on your site.
AllTrails fills its funnel by offering a free version of its app and then, atop its newsletter, it sends special offers to encourage upgrading to the paid pro version.
11. Do more of what’s working
- Setup a Google Analytics account and gather data from it regularly. Your goal is to identify who visits, where they came from, what pages they consume and how they behave.
- Use this information to inform your promotional and content strategies.
- Do more of what’s driving traffic and less of what isn’t. Of course, you’ll also want to factor-in what drives conversion… And so, we move on to part two.
Ideas that transform visitors to leads
A ton of traffic to your website means nothing if it doesn’t foster conversion. Your first challenge is to define what conversion means — subscribe, attend, try, buy or any other objective. Next, your challenge is to make it happen with compelling offers.
1. Offer deals
When a first-time visitor arrives at a landing page to shop for a product or a service, promoting a coupon or discount program is often the way to make a sale.
Here, Candyclub offers ‘sweet savings’ when you arrive on its e-commerce website.
2. Offer samples
In many cases, prospects arrive because they’re interested in trying or sampling your product or service.
- A free trial is often the go-to approach for the Software as a Service (SaaS) business and other software-driven categories, such as games and apps.
- Though you’ll need to give to get, you may want to ship samples of physical products to interested shoppers. The law of reciprocity suggests many will reward you with a purchase.
This home try-on program offered by Warby Parker plays a significant role in the success of this eyewear brand.
3. Offer advice
A proven tactic to build email lists — and industry authority — is to create and offer an educational lead magnet in exchange for an opt-in. Popular offers of this type include:
- eBooks/guides
- White papers
- Research reports
- Buying guides
- Courses
- Newsletters
Here, Brian Dean of Backlinko uses the lead magnet strategy to offer website visitors valuable how-to resources.
4. Offer personalized advice
While the standard content-based approaches listed above are strong general purpose offers, there are a variety of ways you can earn a higher conversion rate by personalizing the advice you’ll give via:
- Free consultation
- Online chat
- Interactive tools, such as assessments and calculators
- Demonstrations
5. Offer fun
Increase engagement on your website and excitement about your products with fun offers such as:
- Contests
- Giveaways
- Quizzes
6. Offer proof
Prospects want confirmation first and foremost. Increase the credibility of your company with:
- Reviews
- Testimonials
- Accolades
- Trust badges
- Media mentions
- Use cases
- Customer stories
- Customer showcases
- Portfolios and galleries
7. Offer one last thing
However hard you try to win a conversion on a page or via a form, your offer will often be ignored. Attempt to boost conversions with ‘one last try’ in the form of an exit intent pop-up.
Before you leave the Leesa Mattress site, for example, an attractive pop-up makes it worth your while to enter your email address.
One last — and important — idea
In the interest of improving conversion — with whatever offer you make — and whether you do so with landing pages and/or forms, I leave you with one last tip:
Reduce friction.
Here’s another mini math lesson to help make my point:
Desire – friction = Conversion rate
Look at your offer and the processes you put in place to enable a prospect to respond. Can you make it easier somehow? Maybe one less step? If there’s risk involved, can you reduce it? If there are fees involved, can you waive them? If objections could arise, can you overcome them?
Want to explore lead generation ideas further?
We’ve created articles featuring even more specific lead generation ideas and lead generation tools for the following industries:
- Financial advisors lead generation
- Insurance lead generation
- Mortgage lead generation
- B2B lead generation
- Real estate lead generation
19 Lead Generation Ideas for Small Businesses
Posted by Barry Feldman Originally Published: 24 September 2019 · Updated on: 26 March 2020
Either you have a small business, or you’re tasked with generating leads for small business clients.
Some companies successfully amp-up their small business leads with a bigger budget. They outspend their competitors in terms of advertising and PR.
Other companies — typically younger players with smaller income streams — are more risk adverse. They go forth with tight purse strings and strive to create leads with low-cost or no-cost tactics. They aim to outsmart, rather than outspend, the competition. Marketers across the small business spectrum succeed this way all day, every day —especially on the digital battlefield.
In any case, with a big budget, a low budget, or even no budget, every small business must abide by a universal, simple and vital formula. The quicker you wrap your head around this, the faster you will make it work:
Traffic x Conversion Rate = Leads
Reread that. Say it out loud. Commit it to memory.
Now, let’s revisit some grade-school math terms. The numbers on the left-hand side of a multiplication equation are factors. Traffic and conversion rate are the factors in this case. The number that follows the equals sign on the right-hand side is the product.
Now, let’s remind ourselves of a fundamental reality of mathematics: the multiplication property of zero. It states:
The product of any number and zero is zero.
Apply it like so: ANY traffic number times ZERO conversion rate produces ZERO leads. A ZERO traffic number times ANY conversion rate produces ZERO leads.
So, while I encourage you to read our recent posts, including the guide about how to generate leads and the list of 21 Winning Lead Generation Strategies, stay tuned now for a helpful breakdown of ideas to help you drive traffic and conversions to improve online-lead generation for your small business.
What is Small Business Lead Generation?
Small business lead generation is when a small business deploys various strategies to build interest in their product or service and attract those who are interested in the hopes that they will eventually become customers.
Here, we’ll dive into some of these strategies and tactics, and how they specifically apply to small businesses.
Lead Generation Ideas for Small Business
Small business lead generation begins by creating a presence in the path of would-be leads and giving them a reason to visit your website. Here’s a robust list of ideas to help you accomplish this.
1. Do basic local SEO
- Claim your free Google My Business directory listing and optimize it.
- Perform basic search engine optimization (SEO) across your website’s pages with descriptive title tags.
- Optimize each page with a compelling meta description to inspire click-throughs from search engine results.
- Claim local business listings on online business directories, such as Yelp, Merchant Circle, Citysearch, and other local directories.
- Encourage customers to post reviews about your business. When asked, the majority of satisfied customers do oblige.
For example, when I did a search for ‘event catering,’ as shown above, a number of local companies that have claimed pages in the Google My Business directory appeared prominently in the results.
2. Publish a blog
- A blog can feature articles, videos, podcasts, infographics, galleries, or any combination. The point is to create content that provides the answers to the questions customers search for.
- Learn and apply the SEO techniques that will improve your search rankings.
Here’s a strong example of how a small business becomes the go-to resource for answers and insights in its niche.
3. Guest post on relevant websites
- Offer your expertise, for free, to online publishers in the form of guest posts.
- Where possible, include links in your articles to useful resources on your website.
- Also apply this strategy to local print publications, remembering to include a mention of your website.
4. Get active on social media
- Identify the social media channels your customers prefer.
- Share content — be it homemade or curated — as often as possible on your profiles.
- Promote your social media channels everywhere possible.
- Interact with prospects in an informative and helpful manner.
- Follow influential people in your industry and try to build mutually beneficial relationships.
Pura Vida Bracelets consistently populates the social media networks its customers prefer with a combination of beaches, beauty and bracelets, but it also tosses in the occasional special offer, as shown here.
5. Run paid search ads
- Explore the many advertising options offered by Google Ads.
- Refine your tactics to reduce pay-per-click costs and improve ROI.
- Consider Microsoft advertising, which runs on Bing and Yahoo! Search.
6. Run social media ads
- Facebook advertising is easy, often effective and offers a very low cost for entry. You can get started for $5 per day.
- Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and YouTube all offer online advertising programs you can experiment with to generate leads.
7. Run native advertising
- Your online advertising options expand beyond the top search and social channels with native advertising and include millions of publishers.
- Learn how to run programmatic ads on discovery networks such as Taboola.
Check out how Flare Audio launched their revolutionary headphones with traffic from premium publisher sites.
- Examine the potential of collaborating with publishers to create sponsored ads and content.
8. Build a referral network
- Identify practical marketing projects (like co-hosted events, co-created content or social media partnerships) that justify reaching out to experts to make connections, build relationships and create content.
- Consider projects based on interviews, case studies and various types of collaboration.
- Invite respected authorities to guest blog on your website.
- Rather than ask for reciprocation, simply support your supporters.
9. Run events
- Host webinars.
- Speak at conferences and local events.
- Participate in expos and give attendees a reason to engage.
- Use social media to create live streams and other types of events.
Here is some smart small business marketing by Visor: free tax webinars for prospects and customers.
10. Use email marketing
- Traffic you generate with email marketing comes with a caveat: it’s bound for people that have already been there and opted-into your list (unless you built an email list offline). You can capitalize on email and generate traffic to your website by giving subscribers strong reasons to return.
- Send newsletters and meaningful emails that inform recipients of helpful content you’ve published on your site.
AllTrails fills its funnel by offering a free version of its app and then, atop its newsletter, it sends special offers to encourage upgrading to the paid pro version.
11. Do more of what’s working
- Setup a Google Analytics account and gather data from it regularly. Your goal is to identify who visits, where they came from, what pages they consume and how they behave.
- Use this information to inform your promotional and content strategies.
- Do more of what’s driving traffic and less of what isn’t. Of course, you’ll also want to factor-in what drives conversion… And so, we move on to part two.
Ideas that transform visitors to leads
A ton of traffic to your website means nothing if it doesn’t foster conversion. Your first challenge is to define what conversion means — subscribe, attend, try, buy or any other objective. Next, your challenge is to make it happen with compelling offers.
1. Offer deals
When a first-time visitor arrives at a landing page to shop for a product or a service, promoting a coupon or discount program is often the way to make a sale.
Here, Candyclub offers ‘sweet savings’ when you arrive on its e-commerce website.
2. Offer samples
In many cases, prospects arrive because they’re interested in trying or sampling your product or service.
- A free trial is often the go-to approach for the Software as a Service (SaaS) business and other software-driven categories, such as games and apps.
- Though you’ll need to give to get, you may want to ship samples of physical products to interested shoppers. The law of reciprocity suggests many will reward you with a purchase.
This home try-on program offered by Warby Parker plays a significant role in the success of this eyewear brand.
3. Offer advice
A proven tactic to build email lists — and industry authority — is to create and offer an educational lead magnet in exchange for an opt-in. Popular offers of this type include:
- eBooks/guides
- White papers
- Research reports
- Buying guides
- Courses
- Newsletters
Here, Brian Dean of Backlinko uses the lead magnet strategy to offer website visitors valuable how-to resources.
4. Offer personalized advice
While the standard content-based approaches listed above are strong general purpose offers, there are a variety of ways you can earn a higher conversion rate by personalizing the advice you’ll give via:
- Free consultation
- Online chat
- Interactive tools, such as assessments and calculators
- Demonstrations
5. Offer fun
Increase engagement on your website and excitement about your products with fun offers such as:
- Contests
- Giveaways
- Quizzes
6. Offer proof
Prospects want confirmation first and foremost. Increase the credibility of your company with:
- Reviews
- Testimonials
- Accolades
- Trust badges
- Media mentions
- Use cases
- Customer stories
- Customer showcases
- Portfolios and galleries
7. Offer one last thing
However hard you try to win a conversion on a page or via a form, your offer will often be ignored. Attempt to boost conversions with ‘one last try’ in the form of an exit intent pop-up.
Before you leave the Leesa Mattress site, for example, an attractive pop-up makes it worth your while to enter your email address.
One last — and important — idea
In the interest of improving conversion — with whatever offer you make — and whether you do so with landing pages and/or forms, I leave you with one last tip:
Reduce friction.
Here’s another mini math lesson to help make my point:
Desire – friction = Conversion rate
Look at your offer and the processes you put in place to enable a prospect to respond. Can you make it easier somehow? Maybe one less step? If there’s risk involved, can you reduce it? If there are fees involved, can you waive them? If objections could arise, can you overcome them?
Want to explore lead generation ideas further?
We’ve created articles featuring even more specific lead generation ideas and lead generation tools for the following industries:
- Financial advisors lead generation
- Insurance lead generation
- Mortgage lead generation
- B2B lead generation
- Real estate lead generation
How Does It Earn Money?
Lead gen sites all vary, but generally you earn money for every lead you generate for one of your client companies. It is important to note here that no sale is being made in this process. The lead has not bought anything; rather, they have merely provided some information, or they have picked up the phone and called your client business.
Some companies will only qualify someone as a lead if they fill out two forms. Others will only qualify a lead if that lead picked up the phone and had at least a 30-second conversation.
While every lead gen program differs wildly, the premise remains the same. For every qualified lead you send to the business, they will give you a finder’s fee for that lead generation.
The Pros of the Lead Gen Business Model
The lead gen business model can be lucrative, but it can also be very passive if you are using organic traffic sources, especially similar to those found with AdSense or Amazon affiliate sites.
One of the intriguing things about the lead gen business model is that, unlike other affiliate sites, the lead gen site does not need to follow the affiliate model if you don’t want it to. You could simply set up a deal with local business owners in your area or even outside of your area in other cities.
Many of these business owners will pay you either a monthly retainer fee to keep this lead gen website referring customers to them, or on a purely pay-per-lead basis.
If you do want to go the affiliate route, there are a slew of affiliate programs you can find that are all about pay per lead offers, such as:
- Quinstreet
- Campus Explorer
- Ring Partner
Quinstreet and Campus Explorer both qualify their leads by having the leads fill out forms, but Ring Partner is a bit different. Instead of the normal pay-per-lead model, Ring Partner does pay-per-call.
All three of them have dozens of different offers you can use if you decide you would rather go the affiliate route over the direct route of finding business owners who want to pay you per lead.
If you ever plan on selling your lead gen model website, the affiliate model is typically going to be an easier migration process, though, there are obvious benefits to going it on your own, as your payouts will be higher. The downside to this is that your payment system will potentially be less streamlined.
Two Other Pros of the Lead Gen Model
- Focus on geolocal keywords. These keywords are often easier to rank for than other keywords because there is less competition for the keywords themselves. (E.g. “carpet cleaning in Phoenix + Arizona,” or whatever city and state you’re targeting.)
- Can use spun content. As I write, Google still allows duplicate content on local pages and will not penalize the websites using it like they would with a website that is not targeting a local niche. This is currently a loophole, but it is a loophole that has been around for a few years now. It is safe if you “spin” the content, which is just where you put an article into spin syntax. This allows you to turn one article into potentially thousands of articles of unique content. Here is a great article describing spin syntax in more depth.
As you can tell, the lead gen model is pretty fantastic.
If you do decide to avoid affiliate networks and go direct, the lead gen model holds some more advantages over a client-based business.
In a client-based business, a client might not pay you even after all of your search engine optimization (SEO) work has been applied to their website. Compare this scenario with the same one in a lead gen business: if the client does not pay you for the leads or your monthly retainer fee, you can just switch the website over to a new tenant (usually their competition) and give them the leads instead.
Despite this being a fantastic business model, there are also some drawbacks.
The Cons of the Lead Gen Business Model
While targeted traffic is important in any business model, it is especially important for a lead gen business model. If your lead gen offer is for a carpet cleaning service in St. Louis, Missouri, but you are offering that to traffic that is looking for carpet cleaning in Anchorage, Alaska, your offer won’t convert.
This is why it is very important to target local keywords, even hyperlocal keywords where you break up a city into smaller suburbs. Your traffic will be lower, but the conversions will be much higher.
If you decide to ditch the affiliate route and go direct, you also run the real risk of clients failing to pay. This is not merely annoying. It could also be catastrophic for your website’s earnings if you can’t find anyone else to start paying for the leads in this very specific area or very specific offering.
Moreover, unlike affiliates like AdSense, which have basically unlimited offers, and Amazon, with millions of offers, there are just not that many lead gen offers out there.
This gives you fewer options, especially when targeting hyperlocal traffic with your offers.
Furthermore, if you choose to go direct and sell this site at a later point, the migration process to the new buyer could be a big hassle. Some of your clients might not like the idea of paying the new owner and might just quit the service altogether underneath new leadership.
This can make selling direct lead gen websites a bit messier than other kinds of business models.
However, it is still doable.
What Buyers Need to Know
As mentioned above, a buyer needs to be aware that the traffic coming to the site needs to be extremely targeted in order to convert on these offers. If the offer doesn’t exist in the area that the traffic is coming from, that traffic is worthless.
For this reason, many of these sites operate in a local to hyperlocal context. This means you have some extra SEO benefits that normally do not exist for other business models.
For instance, you can take advantage of getting listed in Google Maps’ 3-Pack. The Google Map’s 3-Pack appears above the main organic search results for local keywords. Often people will click on these listings before any other listings to either get directions to the business or to give the business a call to create an appointment.
If you’re unfamiliar with what the 3-Pack looks like, here is a quick example for dentists in Anchorage, Alaska:
There are several ways to get a lead gen website into the 3-Pack. I would recommend Mark Luckenbaugh’s guide on the subject over at Local Client Takeover, which you can find here.
One of the nice benefits of targeting local searches with lead gen offers is that the competition is going to be less fierce than if you were building a normal affiliate website.
It also makes every town, city, and locale a unique niche for your specific offer, which is pretty cool.
If you’re looking to purchase a lead gen business, we’re happy to offer you our guidance.
What Sellers Need to Know
One advantage sellers have with selling lead gen websites is that they are unique websites. They are not typically monetized via Google AdSense, Amazon, or mainstream affiliate networks.
For someone looking to diversify their income, lead gen websites often make a lot of sense. Their uniqueness can make lead gen websites very alluring to prospective buyers.
One thing to note here is that — as with any other business you wish to sell — you will have to give the buyer access to the proof of earnings.
If you decided to go direct and have clients renting your websites or paying you per lead, this might be an extra hassle you will have to deal with.
The buyer needs to know that the earnings are real, which means they or our vetting agents will have to log in to whatever payment processor you are using to verify the earnings.
This also comes back to the migration portion of the business. Have you laid out how you will transfer the payments over to the new buyer if your website is using direct clients instead of affiliate programs?
If not, you should come up with a good strategy whereby you can transfer the business over as smoothly as possible. We can help you with this strategy, as well as help you create a profitable exit plan for free, just schedule a call here.
What Buyer Persona Best Fits a Lead Gen Business Model?
A lead gen business can fit the style of most buyer personas, but in each case it does so for very different reasons.
Strategic Sally
This kind of buyer is more interested in how lead gen will grow her overall business. She might be the owner of an ad agency, so buying out lead gen websites or even other service companies makes sense for her to grow her own brand. It is part of her overall strategy to grow her main business even bigger.
Lifestyle Larry / Portfolio Paul
These two would be most interested in owning these kinds of websites if it were done purely through affiliate sources rather than going directly to clients. Lifestyle Larry wouldn’t want to deal with the potential client hassles and possible cancellations. He can just as easily put up an appropriate affiliate link, earn money, and never have to handle any of that.
Likewise, Portfolio Paul probably does not want to handle client interactions with a direct lead gen website. Paul is already managing several different websites, and the last thing he wants to deal with is client hassles.
It is likely both of these kinds of buyers would be interested in a lead gen site, but only if it is monetized via affiliate lead gen offers.
DIY Dave
DIY Dave would likely be very intrigued by a lead gen website. There are a lot of opportunities for them to grow, as most lead gen websites only have a few geographical locations earning revenue.
The DIY Dave might be very open to the idea of adding dozens, hundreds, or maybe even thousands of new locations that are optimized for the offer. They would likely also be open to a lead gen site that is earning money directly from clients.
Lead Generation Growth Strategies
When it comes to scaling lead gen websites, there are several different strategies you can use to grow them.
Local Paid Traffic
Similar to the uniqueness of local SEO, you have a unique opportunity here to run local paid traffic. It will often have less competition, especially in less competitive cities and smaller towns.
This can be a huge opportunity for the right buyer who is looking to master the paid traffic learning curve.
Adding New Content in New Local Areas
Since most lead gen websites are not covering every single area that the offer is available in, someone wanting to grow their lead gen site significantly just needs to find all of the locations where their specific offers are available and build those pages.
Depending on the affiliate offers or the direct partnerships, there could be literally thousands of new locations in which lead gen website owners can grow.
Some lead gen websites become so big that they convert over to becoming a directory in and of themselves. This is especially true for those who are monetizing the lead gen website with direct clients versus affiliate offers.
Expanding into Related Offers
It is unlikely a website has expanded into every local area with their offer. Even if they have, they could want to add a second offer. In any case, this is a great growth strategy for most lead gen websites.
If you can find an offer that is related to your offer or even adds value to the original offer, then you might be able to create new content around this offer in all of the local areas your website is already featuring.
Your related offer does not exactly need to be location-based, either.
For example, if you have a lead gen website that generates leads for colleges, you might also want to offer an affiliate link to online courses or other educational opportunities.
Resources to Learn More About Lead Gen
While there are many resources when it comes to learning about how to run lead generation websites, there is one that stands head and shoulders above the other trainers out there.
That resource is Local Client Takeover. While they mainly talk about building lead gen websites directly for clients who then rent those sites, their process works whether you decide to do direct partnerships with local businesses or decide to go the affiliate route.
While affiliate marketing is different than lead generation, there is still a lot of overlap between the two models. Some of the better lead gen programs that will pay you out also operate very similar to an affiliate offer or network. If you don’t know much about affiliate marketing, you can learn more by watching this video we did on the topic.
CONCLUSION
Everyone is looking for clients — no matter if they’re a freelance writer or a plumber. If you’re a local business, you know how hard it is to find leads and convert them into paying customers. In this post, we’ll provide valuable advice on how to use content marketing for getting more local clients.