Another way to generate leads is to comment in blogs, forums, and online communities. By being active and relevant online communities and leaving comments on blogs and forums, you can create a network of links back to your site. While many of these incoming links are discounted by search engines, they do create hundreds of pathways for potential clients to find your website.

One thing people ask me a lot is “Should I use SEO and pay per click advertising, even if I’m already doing well in search engine rankings?” I have to answer yes to this; there are a number of reasons why.

First, if you’re using pay per click advertising while you are already doing well in the search engine rankings, your site receives extra space on those results pages. By taking up more space on these pages, you get more traffic – and of course, more conversions. It’s simple enough – while you do have to pay for it, it more than pays for itself. The second reason to use pay per click ads and SEO is that search engine optimization lets you rank highly for certain keywords and key phrases. However, it’s hard to get a good ranking for several different keywords or phrases at once. Pay per click advertising allows you to specify the phrases which will be used. You have a lot more flexibility and can generate more traffic and profits.

Blogs, as you know, are a little bit like online journals that list all the post in reverse chronological order. One of the key benefits to having a blog on your website is to establish pre-eminence in your market or become a thought leader. A lot of blogs have become prominent in their market and many people in related areas or unrelated areas actually start linking into your blog and feeding off your information. It’s like a pyramid with people underneath you, all looking to your for guidance and thought leadership in a market. It could be extremely powerful, but it does require effort, a strategy and a long term vision.

Another good tactic is to use your blog for Long Tail SEO, which is SEO based on a larger number of specific search terms which are heavily used. Something a lot of website owners are unaware of is that very few searches using Google are performed using what they may think are the biggest keywords for their market.

Suppose you have a plumbing business in Melbourne. There are a lot of people searching Google for “plumbers Melbourne” and I would also concentrate on this keyword first. However, a lot of these people are looking for “cheap plumbers Toorak” , “fix broken tap” and other terms. With a blog, you can post regularly using different keywords depending on your subject.
What does this all mean? It means that your site will begin to climb up the search engine rankings for many different search terms, giving you a lot of added traffic. Over time this traffic can really add up. Assuming you have a blog, how do you create all of this content you’ll need? There are a few ways to do this:

1. Get Someone To Write It For You. You can find writers on Guru.com or Elance.com and you could also find freelance writers to write blog post on topics that you either specify or instruct them to look up for you. If you’re looking to become a thought leader, the problem with this might be that the actual content that they’re developing is not the peak content that you need to put out there in order to be considered a thought leader. So, you might need to put in your own time to do that, or you might have to edit the post of other people in order to produce the content

2. Recycle content. Content like articles from newsletters, brochures and other sources can be reworked and used on your website. This content can then be leveraged for greater exposure.

Blogging can provide website owners with a great means of traffic generation, as long as they have a plan for the future of their website or business and are willing to stick with it. You can learn more about using blogging effectively at becomeablogger.com, which offers a series of how-to videos. Another good resource to use is entrepreneurs-journey.com by Yaro Starak, and Yaro is one of Australia’s, if not the world’s, most famous experts on blogging as a business tool.