Capture readers’ interest with a content upgrade
Sumo captures leads by offering free downloads of bonus content. In the marketing world, we call this a ‘content upgrade.’ This can be a worksheet, template, checklist, and so on.
But note that you can’t just attach any bonus content. Look carefully and you’ll see that Sumo always offers a content upgrade that is relevant to the article the reader just consumed. In the “how to write a newsletter” post, Sumo offers a swipe file of newsletter ideas—perfectly suited.
Of course, you could give away something much simpler like a PDF version of the post—but this is rarely a compelling offer. Ideally you want to give away something so valuable that signing up is a no-brainer.
As my friend Nathan Collier writes:
The workload like this whatsapp number list allows both the vendor and the affiliate to focus on. Clicks are the number of clicks coming to your website’s URL from organic search results.
2. Guest blogging for leads
Guest blogging is where you write a blog post for another website.
If you’re wondering why you should do this when you could publish the post on your own site, the answer is simple: you can piggyback off a big site’s ‘authority’ to rank for competitive and high-volume topics that you’d struggle to rank for on your site. You can then turn that traffic into leads by linking to a content upgrade from the guest post.
For example, Sarah Cy wrote a guest post for SmartBlogger and linked back to her free checklist:
With the post generating an estimated ~3,100 monthly search visits, Sarah is almost certainly getting a decent number of leads each month.
How to do it
To get started, find authoritative sites you can write for. This should be relatively easy if you’re familiar with your niche.
If not, go to Ahrefs’ Content Explorer and enter a broad topic like “weight loss” or “dieting”. Content Explorer is a mini search engine within Ahrefs. It’s powered by our database of five billion pages and you can use it to find mentions of anything on the web.
Set your search to “in title”. Add a “Domain Rating” filter to see only authoritative websites.