How to Turn Blog Content Into Lead Magnets

Blogs, blogs, blogs. Everyone’s putting them out there. And everybody’s talking about how important it is to get them out there. But you could be pumping out blog post after blog post and finding that they don't result in immediate prospects coming in the door. Blogging is an SEO long game.

So, how can you use your blogging efforts more effectively?

It turns out that your blogs are a powerful resource in ways you might not have considered: all those posts can be re-used in high-value lead magnet content. By recycling content you already have, you can put together powerful lead-generating material at a minimum of expense.

Here’s how.

1) The Ebook

The more you blog, the more you might find yourself covering the same territory again and again. And that’s normal; building up a good amount of content that circles around the same topic provides for continual opportunities to engage and re-engage your readership, especially regarding the content they’re most interested in. But the more you’ve got….the more you can leverage.

The opportunity here is to take that content, put it all together, and turn it into an ebook covering that topic. If you have a bunch of content about, for example, workforce management, you could take blog posts about building a sales team, managing remote staff, workplace organization, and office efficiency and make them into a single ebook.

What you’re doing here is both making it easy for your prospects to get the information they’re after and providing a clear conversion path for people who might have only read your blogs and never converted on any other existing content. By making richer content easy to access, you encourage conversions.

2) The Extra

It’s a truism that blog posts should have calls-to-action included. But sometimes it’s hard to think of a great tie-in, and when the messages don’t really match, the clicks just don’t happen. Which is why you can (and should) generate quick-and-easy content offers that are designed to piggyback off your blogs – by putting a little of that blog content behind a conversion form.

Think of it like this. You can publish “Five Ways to Get More Leads,” and hope people are interested in the marketing guide you’ve attached at the bottom, or you can publish “Four Ways to Get More Leads” – and offer them one more if they give you their email address.

There are all kinds of ways to do this. You can offer a slightly richer version of the blog post as a PDF download – maybe it's bundled in with some other existing resources, or maybe it’s a little longer. Whatever you do, you’re making the content they’re already interested in more valuable; the first taste is free, but if they want the whole meal they have to pony up their contact information.

3) The Webinar

Your blog post doesn't have to be a passive experience; it can be an active, media-rich webinar. By creating an audio or video webinar, reading the blog post out loud with accompanying graphics and illustrations expanding on the content, you can turn that blog post into a rich, evergreen content piece that generates leads long-term.

And what’s more, doing this allows you (the expert) to expand on and develop the content out further, taking an already high-value content piece and making it even higher value.

Webinars are super powerful. They feel like one-on-one encounters with a skilled teacher, can be endlessly re-run and re-promoted, and because of their personal nature, can be treated as especially high-value, exclusive content. And webinars can be time sensitive, meaning that you can develop a sense of urgency around the event, increasing your overall conversion rate with remarkably little extra labor.

4) The PowerPoint

This one’s so simple you may have overlooked it entirely: turn the blog into a PowerPoint presentation. And while it's nice if it's a highly designed, beautiful presentation, even a simple PowerPoint can offer long-term lead generation potential.

In short, the people who are looking for blogs aren’t always the people who are looking for PowerPoints, which tend to be more solution-focused. A PowerPoint presentation is all about condensed information that’s easy to digest and easy to demonstrate, which means it’s a great way to expand the effective ambit of how-to’s, as well as to provide ready-made thought-leadership presentations for dissemination throughout a company’s leadership team.

In other words, the content you’ve spent so much time putting together has so much more value than you might be aware of, and with relatively simple repurposing efforts, can be used to reach new audiences in unanticipated ways.