In any business, marketing is critical for generating leads on a consistent basis. Lead generation helps you to gain business not only through your sales efforts, but also while you are sitting back, sleeping or on vacation. The key to marketing is to understand that the best kind of marketing does not provide you with immediate returns. You need to make consistent investment in medium to long-term marketing that generates leads for you in 3 to 24 months.

Secret #1: Have a simple but very professional website.

A website is a critical part of your business and it’s important that your website is extremely professional, but also very simple. An elaborate website with fancy features, graphics and moving parts does nothing but take away from the professionalism of your business. A simple website designed to capture attention, deliver a message and collect leads is exactly what you need. Find a professional web development agency to create a simple design for you so you appear as professional online as you are in person.

Secret #2: Have a blog.

Having a blog is a critical component to professional marketing. It not only helps your website in search engine rankings, but it also allows those who know about your work to follow you on a consistent basis and remain connected to you. Most business owners are afraid of a blog because they think they are going to have to write several times a week. In reality you can have a blog where you personally write something once a month that is less than a page long. You can hire a content writing service to create a weekly blog for you, based on topics and bullet points that you provide. This results in fresh weekly, and monthly, content directly from you.

Secret #3: Educational marketing.

The days of television and radio adverts, flyers and fancy ads in newspapers and magazines is essentially over for most industries. The way to earn business today is by educating your potential client first. Educational marketing is simple to do and revolves around you producing pieces including articles, podcasts, videos, audio and even images that educate people on something related to your business. When you have these educational pieces out there in large numbers, you will slowly establish yourself as an expert within your industry and clients will come seeking you, instead of the other way around.

Secret #4: Embrace social media.

You have a thousand excuses about why Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Google Plus and other types of social media are just not “your thing”, or that you feel social media is for personal use only. Either way, it’s critical for you to understand that doing business today requires you to embrace social media. Your articles, blogs and the other content you create can easily be distributed on Facebook and other social media channels in order to create a following for you and establish you — once again — as the expert in your industry. Once potential clients know you as the expert, the leads will flow in automatically.

Secret #5: Use paid advertisement for quick results.

There are a variety of choices to achieve quick marketing results, as long as you are embracing the medium to long-range efforts first. Pay-per-click is a great way to supplement your efforts on the web in order to generate traffic to your website immediately. The concept is quite simple and allows you to pay each time someone clicks an ad on Google, Bing or other websites, which then bring the user to your site. Keep in mind you are simply paying for a click (a visitor) and not a conversation, so there are no guarantees that this click will result in a lead. Nevertheless, if your website is set up properly, you can maximize your conversion rates and convert clicks into leads, and eventually into clients.

Secret #6: Search engine optimization.

Now that you have a professional website, a consistent blog and you are doing educational marketing backed up by social media, you are ready to hire a firm to do search engine optimization, commonly known as SEO. This is a process where a company will help your rankings on Google, Bing, and other websites. Keep in mind that SEO efforts will not reach full potential if you’re not doing your part by creating pieces for your blog, educational marketing and social media.

Embrace these six secrets and watch your business flourish as number of leads you generate spike tremendously in the next three to six months. Once the wave of leads start, it’s very easy to keep them coming and even increase them. Of course, the next step is learning to convert these leads into clients, but that is a topic for another day.

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