15 content tactics to grow your organic leads for free

Content, if used right and marketed well, is a powerful tool for business owners. If you are looking to increase your reach and queries, why not first try these 15 content tactics to grow your organic leads for free.

These are good times for DIY entrepreneurship.

An inexhaustible array of free online tools, information and learning resources are enabling entrepreneurs to accomplish myriad aspects of their business at an unprecedented scale. Whether it is for lead generation, building websites, design and branding, content creation or even bookkeeping, most can DIY just about anything they have an aptitude for.

But then inevitably, it all boils down to effective marketing. Your awesome product or service lies around, waiting to be discovered by the larger world. Without a constant stream of leads heading towards a business, 75% of all startups fail. For businesses with limited marketing budgets, this is where we get creative.

While potential prospects can be acquired by advertising on digital channels, organic leads occur naturally – when your audience finds you through search engines, social media references or even links on other sites.

How do you get and increase organic traffic for free?

Check out these 15 content tactics to grow your organic leads for free

These creative and cost-effective ways to sure to drive organic leads, brand visibility, traffic and ultimately business growth.

1. Optimize your website

Before you even optimize for SEO, focus on user experience. Your entire site needs to be welcoming and easy for visitors to use and navigate. Make a great first impression and keep visitors on your website longer by having a design that is user friendly and loads quickly.

Your website isn’t about your product. It’s about solving your customers’ needs. Design principles used effectively, hook your audience, help them embrace your brand, and initiate them into action.

2. Create lead magnets to build your email list

A great way of sharing a preview of your product or service is by offering Digital Freebies as lead magnets!

We believe that so strongly, that we even wrote a post about it- Why your business needs to offer a free digital product! Gated lead magnets aka opt-ins that inspire a website visitor to part with their email in exchange for value are important lead generation tools.

One smart way to do this is to offer content upgrades on your best content as a lead magnet too.

We took our popular blog post on best practices for lead magnets and within that post, offered an additional gated printable checklist to create strong lead magnets.

Even better are digital freebies that serve as content upgrades. Specific to a blog post, they are extensions of the content your reader is already engaging with. We took our extremely popular blog post on 5 essential steps to choose your perfect blog niche and included a content upgrade to a free, detailed step by step Blog Niche Toolkit.

Pro Tip: Lead Magnets with a dedicated landing page ensure that your viewers focus on completing one task and not get distracted by anything else. 

Need inspiration? Explore over 100+ Digital Products and Freebies from Women Entrepreneurs and subject matter experts!
100+ Business Tools and Freebies - Find the best products on the Marketplace!

3. Get yourself in the right places

Let’s say you want to build backlinks to your website. One way to do this is to get included in a round-up on topics of your expertise. Use free search tools like Pinterest, BuzzSumo or Ubersuggest to find out the top shared articles. Or look for bloggers writing about that particular topic and contact them with a request to get included.

You can also check out these 23 best sites to list your business for free to get more online leads from top platforms!

4. Consider long-form content to attract prospects

Search engines rank long-form content (>3,000 words), a big forecasted trend in content marketing, much higher than short-form. It generates more business leads and social shares for a greater period of time, because it’s likely that the article will attract backlinks and gain organic traffic from Google. Whatever length of content you decide to write, make it valuable, skimmable, and easily digestible by adding great visuals and breaking it into smaller paragraphs with subheadings for faster takeaways.

Stuck for ideas? Read our popular blog on How to generate awesome content!

5. Repurpose and recycle content

Take any one of your good performing content that resonated with your audience and modify the ways to convey your message as per the channel and audience. This not only gives you multiple ways to convey your message, you also show up in different types of search results, like images and videos.

Repurpose your content across all your distribution channels and don’t limit yourself. You can use the same article for making a video for Youtube, a lead magnet for capturing emails, an infographic for Pinterest, a gif for your website sidebar, socially shareable images, shorter video clips, etc. We used the blog How to start your Virtual Assistant Business in 15 easy steps to create this video below on the same topic.

How to start your Virtual Assistant Business in 15 easy steps

6. Focus on guest blogging/podcasting

Writing a guest blog or appearing as a podcast guest gives you access to a brand new audience and important backlinks to your website. To leverage these interactions to maximum potential, don’t make the buck stop there. Invest in thoughtful promotions before and after the experience, tagging those involved in the process.

Looking for guest bloggers? Want to guest blog? Browse and share Opportunities for free!

Pro Tip: Make it a priority to respond to, and engage with the comments and audience on the website and social media too.

Guest bloggers share expertise and earn backlinks!

7. Stay away from internal keyword cannibalization

Simply put, multiple pages on your website should not have similar content, competing for the same keywords. It makes Google weigh your pages against each other and choose which ones it thinks suits the matching keywords best. Instead, one authoritative page would probably rank higher and convert better.

Also read : How to Write Website Content That Generates Organic Traffic

8. Harness the power of good photography, imagery and icons

How well are you marketing your visual content? Good, relevant images increase connect better with your audience, allowing them to get a feel of your product or service. Unfortunately, low resolution, non contextual and sub quality images have the reverse effect. Trim copy and instead add high quality visuals or icons. This helps your audience quickly get an idea of your business proposition, especially when they are skimming.

Also check our free guide below – The Ultimate guide to the best free stock photos

guide - 21 best free stock photo sites

9. Get creative with Newsletters

Newsletters that surprise and delight are a constant, iterative process. The question to ask is – does my content serve the customer or only the company?

Focus on making the larger part of your emails about providing value.

Include great visuals, GiFs, Videos, and importantly, take inspiration rather than reinventing the wheel. Really Good Emails is one such place that curates emails sent by other companies for you to see what works. In fact, you can even submit your own awesome email for consideration and ultimately more brand visibility.

Want more ideas to grow your email list? Check out these 31 amazing content ideas for your newsletter.

10. Invest in a Keyword strategy

Think keywords before creating any piece of content. Think with buyer intent – what would you search for if you were the customer?

The more specific your keywords (i.e search phrases), the warmer the audience will be. Include relevant keywords and use them in subheadings, page copy, meta description, url, and image alt tags. Do not overstuff, instead follow a natural writing style.

Before you deep dive into Keyword Analytics, even a basic Google search can be your first level advisor.

Question-based keywords can be used for many different mediums, including blog posts, videos and FAQ sections on ecommerce product pages. Not to mention, they are the most common types of queries that trigger featured snippet and get you to rank on top of search results. Begin your answers with terms like, “Start by”, “The first step is” etc. The reason – Google tends to prefer featured snippet content that begin logically as an answer would. In fact, that’s exactly how we started the pointers in this blog. ‘Start with these creative……’

Balancing content with keywords paid off in this example in the image below. Not only has this article ranked first, but it has also featured as a Rich Snippet.

Use content and keywords to rank higher in searches.

11. Magnetize your Headlines

You will spend lots of time and effort in generating the body of your content, but don’t overlook the headline and post titles. While 8 out of 10 people will read your headline, only 2 out of 10 people will read the rest of your post.

An exceptional post title can get your article shared on social media, even before its read. Invest time in writing compelling, magnetic, persuasive copy.

In this video the title offers a fresh twist to what Moms do, with both humor and curiosity. It got great engagement on Facebook and Youtube.

12. Do expert (or product) roundups

Roundups are curated answers on a particular topic, offered by influencers or experts in that niche. Whether you seek the answers on social media, via platforms like HARO, or through direct email outreach, not only does it provide you with free content, but also free promotion and increased visibility. The featured entrepreneurs happily share and promote your content, exposing it to new audiences, and boosting engagement and traffic.

With this blog post, not only did we answer the frequently asked questions from our members on the best business books to read, but we sought the recommendations from the experts themselves, who even shared the final blog with their audience.

13. Reuse your lives, how-tos, insta videos on YouTube

It’s great that you’re investing your efforts into Facebook lives and Instagram videos, but don’t forget the other channels too. Start with downloading your Facebook Live video and then upload on Youtube, Vimeo, embed in a blog, and even share via your newsletter. With the same video, each new channel is a source of new leads.

14. Write Actionable CTAs  

Compel your users to take action – frame your Calls to Action for visual impact and it’s sense of urgency. E.g: Instead of Sign up now, how about get 40% off now. A good idea to decide copy for your CTA is to ask yourself, does the CTA end the story of your content with a ‘What to do now?’

15. Newsjack your way to visibility

Newsjacking is a way to join or use an online conversation in your content, while it’s still hot & trending. In other words, it’s using current news stories to expand your overall brand visibility.

You can create content that piggybacks on breaking news or capitalizes on the flavor of the season. Either way, newsjacking can be used in your content marketing mix to drive interest and leads.

Anything from a well-timed social media post to a blog can be effective as long as it stays on brand.

Check out this video (below) that we made for International Women’s Day, using content from our members.

Maroon Oak's success video for International Women's Day!

Conclusion

Getting organic leads for free requires a multi-pronged approach. While it all starts with good content that offers value, there’s plenty a lean business can DIY to boost organic traffic and leads to their website.

You can also check out our tips on 11 marketing strategies to nurture your leads effectively

Contributor-Aditi Tandon
Aditi Tandon

You can’t use up creativity. The more you create, the more you have.

A Designer and Entrepreneur, Aditi graduated from a top design school and subsequently started her own design and merchandising business. Co-founder at Maroon Oak, she has over 17 years of business experience with Two Dotts, her design consulting company and an Etsy store which serves as an outlet for her gifts and patented product designs.

A mother to a teen and a tween, she enjoys running, dancing and raising her newest baby, a Bichon named Miltie.

Maroon Oak on LinkedIn

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19 Comments
  1. Latraila Tolbert 3 years ago

    Thank you for these tips, I’ve been doing some of it and have to work on some. I didn’t think of repurposing my contents as I don’t want to be redundant on my posts but I’ll reconsider it now! Thank you so much!

  2. Natalie 3 years ago

    These are really useful. Thanks so much for sharing. Keywords and everything to do with them has and still is baffling to me at most times!

  3. Claudia 3 years ago

    my posts are about 2000 words long! I hope it’s enough to help the blog rank on google!

  4. Atheeth Belagode 3 years ago

    Thank you for all the insights. I found it really useful for my first campaign.

  5. JOHN MULINDI 5 years ago

    I have implemented Call To Action on my blog, and it really bring in results. Your tips are on point. Thanks for sharing with us.

  6. Kristine Nicole Alessandra 5 years ago

    I have not been minding my blog for a week now, as I have been busy with family matters. Soon as things settle down, I will apply your tips.

  7. Jana 5 years ago

    These are great tips to organic traffic! I am saving your page, so I can come back and review them later!

  8. corey 5 years ago

    What an insightful blog to help me understand and implement when creating my blogs and newsletters. Starting my e-mail newsletters for 2019 and I’m so excited!

  9. Audrey Ko 5 years ago

    Really great ideas! Hopefully I can implement a few of these in the new year!

  10. Julie 5 years ago

    This article on growing organic leads is great! Thanks so much for sharing these tips!

  11. Clare Aaker 5 years ago

    so helpful! thank you!

  12. Aarika 5 years ago

    This article contains really helpful info. Thank you! I need to work on checking my internal keyword cannibalization. =) Great tips!

  13. Bridget 5 years ago

    These are great tips! One of my goals for the new year is to write more guest posts, they’re such an awesome way to get in front of a new audience!

  14. Candace Moczarski 5 years ago

    Im so doing this I always need more traffic thanks for sharing

  15. Kara 5 years ago

    Great info, I realize I have so much to learn.

  16. Leanne 5 years ago

    This was an incredibly in-depth and comprehensive article! Absolutely agree with point 2 on creating awesome lead magnets and good copy for conversions.

    • Pooja Krishna Author
      Pooja Krishna 5 years ago

      Thanks Leanne. Copy that reflects your brand and solves the customers problems always wins!
      Have you checked out our awesome marketplace where women entrepreneurs are sharing their lead magnets and digital tools?

  17. Liz Bayardelle 5 years ago

    This was an absolutely fabulous article! So many good tips! I definitely bookmarked it to come back to as I made progress!

    • Pooja Krishna Author
      Pooja Krishna 5 years ago

      Thanks Liz and I’m glad you bookmarked it!
      It is our mission at Maroon Oak to build the best resource library for women business owners looking for answers to entrepreneurship. We hope you check out the other articles in our Blog and our new Business Tools Marketplace where we are curating digital tools offered by women entrepreneurs and subject matter experts on everything business.

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