Lead Generation: Give Away Your Best Ideas for Free

In an effort to participate in the delightful LaVonneEllis' #customerlove challenge, I'd like to take a break from SEO to talk about a more personal kind of lead generation.

While blogging, twitter and SEO can be great tools for marketing, sometimes it pays to take a break from mass content syndication and find a much smaller - and more qualified - pool of potential leads. Industry forums, niche social networking sites and LinkedIn groups can be all be fantastic places to hunt down people who are interested in the products or services you offer. Even better, many of these people are actively asking questions that YOU KNOW THE ANSWER TO.

"How much should I pay for SEO?"

"How do I find a way to tell my brand's story?" (Cottage Copy, I'm looking at you)

"Why am I loosing money on my Google AdWords campaigns?"

What better way to get your customers to love you (as a consultant/writer) or your product (as a retailer) than to step in and provide valuable, expert insight?

It's not quite as easy as it sounds, however. As it turns out, people really don't like having sales pitches shoved under their noses - especially when they're in spheres which are designed to protect them from in-your-face advertising. The idea is to answer peoples' questions in a way which draws them to you rather than alienating them.

So how do you put your brilliant, genius skills (or products) on display without coming off as a door-to-door salesperson?

Simple. Write answers which are 100% relevant and valuable.

If you're within 500 miles of the web marketing industry, you hear the term "valuable content" a LOT. How do you engage customers on social media? Engage in discussions with valuable content. How do you build qualified traffic with a blogging campaign? Blog valuable content. How do you make your article marketing strategy successful? Write and syndicate valuable content.

You get the idea.

So how do you turn your would-be sales pitch into a relevant, valuable answer? You pull out the stops. Don't just give enough information so that leads need to contact you to find out the rest of the answer - give the WHOLE answer, including the "secret" tricks you've been cloistering away.

For lack of a better example, let's look at a forum response I posted which helped me snag a new client. I provide social media management services/consultation to a lot of automotive repair shops, and one of my clients was kind enough to invite me to participate in a nationwide forum of auto repair shop owners. As a twentysomething (blonde) web marketer, I could potentially be on very treacherous ground with this crew. But I chose which conversations to engage in very carefully, and I try my best to make my contributions genuinely valuable to the audience. No one's booted me out yet, which I take as a good sign. Here's a thread I posted on:

Original thread:

I wrote a 2800 word article on How to Market Your Automotive Business Online that I think folks here would like. Let me know - edits or feedback on it would be appreciated! - D. Anonymous

Reply:

Loved the article, Dave. A very thorough summary of solid SEO
strategies. I can't emphasize the importance of thorough keyword
research and analysis enough. Finding high volume keywords isn't
enough; those keywords need to be 100% relevant to the web page (or blog post, if you use a blogging strategy like the one I manage here:
www.keepthecar.com). Increasing traffic is worthless if your visitors
are looking for something other than what you're selling.

Also, segmenting services into multiple sub-pages is a great way to
gather traffic for specific niche services, like "corvette repair" or
"computer automotive diagnostics".

If you're feeling confused, my web marketing
blog (www.creativewebbusiness.blogspot.com) has plenty of down-to-earth SEO tips for DIY business owners. - M. Steele

My answer was very specific, and I gave up many of my "secret tricks", but I also took full advantage of any opportunity to provide access to my portfolio. Less than 24 hours after I posted the reply, I had an email in my inbox from a new lead asking for a phone interview. Within a week, I had myself a new client. At 1 lead per post and a 100% conversion rate, I'd say the 45 minutes it took me to post a thoughtful answer to D. Anonymous was well worth it.

Here's another great example of creating #customerlove by giving away your great ideas for free.

While this post mostly addresses business-to-business lead generation, this concept could just as easily be applied to business-to-consumer and retail industries. The interweb hosts forums for just about every industry and product under the sun, and search tools like Google Social Search, Google Alerts and Twitter Search are fantastic ways to listen to questions your customer base is asking.