“How can I generate more leads with my website?”

“When does this thing (website) start making me money?” is one of the most commonly asked questions we hear from advisors and a really good one and one many of us struggle to answer. One of the greatest challenges in business has always been to ensure that your marketing activities somehow relate back to revenue. After all, you’re truly in business for one very key reason, money.

So, how can your website make you, the advisor, money? Quite simplistically, it comes down to one thing and one thing only, Content. Content is the lifeblood of the web. It’s effectively what makes the web literally exist. Without content, we would have nothing to find when we search for things we need. Having a website is important and is a critical step in legitimizing your business and telling the world you exist, but a website with little to no active content can stifle its ability to help you generate leads.

Why? Well, it’s pretty straightforward. Content that exists on your website needs to address questions that people are asking through search. Practically speaking, it’s how prospects find you. The most common way to produce content and subsequently generate traffic to your website is through. “Blogging”. This is likely a term you’ve heard at some point but what does it really mean. What is “blogging”? Well, to be frank, blogging is really just website content. Nothing about “blogging” makes your web content any more special, than if you were to write an article and publish it to your website. It’s really more of a practice than it is an actual tangible thing that magically generates more traffic.

Ultimately what it comes down to are the practices you follow when writing your blog. The one key to remember about blogging is that you’re always better off with any blog content than none. Avoid getting into a trap that many businesses fall into by over analyzing what you’re going to write about. But, before you go off and start a blog, there are a number of things to keep in mind:

• Who, within our advisor practice, can write?
• What are some key topics we often talk about with our customers?
• How often should we post our blogs?
• How will we notify our clients and prospects that we’ve updated our blog?
• Does our current website management tool have an integrated blog?
• What do our clients want to read about?
• How will we measure the success of our blog?

This is just a snapshot of some key questions you can ask yourself prior to starting a blog and, shortly after you’ve started your blog, you’ll start to see an increase in the amount of traffic to your website. Once you’ve accomplished this very important goal the next critical step is to “convert” that traffic into a lead and then subsequently into a client and revenue.

Looking for more advice on blogging and how you can turn your website into a revenue generating business asset? Start a conversation with us and fill out the form below.