By Marco Cirillo 

Are you generating leads for your business? Are they high quality leads that have the potential to turn into customers? If your answers are yes and no, then you are not alone, 61% of b2b marketers said generating quality lead is their number one challenge.

For most businesses, generating leads is not a big deal, the issue is getting targeted high quality leads.

So, how do you scale this hurdle?

One of the ways you can generate quality leads is by using content marketing. It is a tried and tested strategy. This is why 89% of b2b marketers are using content marketing for their business.

So, why should you use content marketing to generate quality leads?

One, it is a cost-effective way of generating quality leads and you can get three times as many leads per dollar spent.

Again, 20% of internet users’ online time is spent on reading content and 68% of people spend time reading about brands that interest them. Creating valuable content for your prospective clients will draw their attention to your business. As you do that, they will connect more with your brand and they will be willing to take relevant actions.

In this article, you will learn how to use content marketing to generate targeted and high quality leads for your business using three strategies.

Let’s get started!

1.Blog post on your niche sector

Blogging is one of the top ways you can generate quality leads for your business. Many businesses are creating content daily on the internet. In fact, Hostingfacts revealed that about 2 million blog posts are published daily on the internet.

Again, a report stated that 62% of marketers have blogs.

The question is, are all the blog posts created generating leads?

Of course No!

So, how do you create blog posts that generate quality leads for your business?


Create contagious viral content.

Creating viral blog posts and promoting it heavily will position it in front of your targeted audience. They will help you to share it and boost its conversions. This will lead to generating more of high quality leads.

An example of a company that did this is River pools – a pool selling company. When they were just starting out, it was difficult for the company to generate leads. So, they started creating content that adds value to their audience.

They wrote blog posts that generated over $2,000,000 in sales. This catapulted the company to a multi-million dollar success story.

So, how do you create such content?

  1. Create valuable content: Create content that adds value to your audience. No one will share a post that is devoid of useful information.
  2. Evoke emotions: Humans are emotional beings. Creating content that triggers emotions will enable people to read and share your posts. Examples of such emotions include joy and laughter.
  3. Use catchy headlines: Blog posts with catchy and interesting headlines makes it easy for people to click, read and share.
  4. Use relevant content upgrades such as checklists, cheat sheet, etc. When you create useful content that evokes emotions, readers will be interested to read more about it. This is where the use of content upgrades come in. You can easily package the posts into a downloadable format and add it to the content as upgrades. Readers can read and also share.

2.Guest blogging on niche blogs

The second way to generate high quality and targeted leads for your business is by guest blogging on relevant and popular blogs in your niche.

Guest blogging is an effective lead generation strategy because you are leveraging on the success of other websites that have captured your target audience’s attention.

To generate considerable success from your guest blogging campaign, follow the steps below:

a.Create an audience persona

Knowing the type of audience you want to reach will help you to succeed in your guest blogging campaigns. This will enable you to reach out to the right niche blogs that have the attention of your audience. But, how do you get these blogs?

b.Find them on search engines

One way you can find top and popular niche blogs in your niche is by searching for them on search engines, such as Google. You can use queries such as:

“your niche” + “write for us”

“your niche” + “guest post”

“your niche” + “contribute to”

“Your niche” here represents your business E.g. “real estate” + “Write for us”.

A large number of websites that accepts guest posts in that niche will be displayed as shown below:

When you find relevant and popular niche blogs you want to use, find out the number of daily visitors, comments on blog posts and domain rating of the websites. This is to prevent you from guest blogging on spamming websites that will affect your rankings on search engines.

Once you find good websites that meet the criteria above, research for popular, most shared topics on the websites using the Buzzsumo tool. Then, create similar topics and pitch your content ideas to them.

c.Add a lead magnet connected to your email marketing

A lot of people stop at writing and publishing guest posts. They missed the most important aspect of generating quality leads from their content. One way you can get more out of your guest posting effort is by creating a lead magnet. This can be a checklist, a cheat sheet or an ebook, like in the example below:

The black book of lead generation:

Any resource that is valuable and relevant to the topic of your guest post will do. You can share a link to it in your guest writer’s bio, in the introduction or within the content.Content upgrade link in the introduction

Content upgrade link within the content

A good example of a company that leveraged guest posting to generate scores of leads and customers is Bufferapp. They wrote 150 guest posts within the space of 9 months to generate 10,000 customers for the business.

3.Answer selected question on groups and communities

Online groups and communities are great places to get targeted traffic, leads and customers for your business. This is because they are places where your audience hangs out. Two of the best groups and communities you can use to generate quality leads for your business are Quora and Reddit.


Quora is a question and answer community with over 190 monthly users and 200 million visitors per month. It works for lead generation because it gives you the opportunity to connect with your prospective customers when they ask questions. On Quora, prospects start the questions and you provide the answers.

Below are steps you can take to leverage Quora for lead generation:

1.Follow relevant topics in your niche.

Follow topics you that is of interest to your target audience. Quora will constantly update you when there is a fresh question that needs an answer.

2.Provide valuable answers to questions with expertise.

When you see relevant questions to answer, do it professionally. Write long form answers and include images in it. Carefully add your content links or links to your free resource within the content. When you offer thoughtful answers, users will click to download your resources.

3.Create content around popular Quora questions on your website.

You can write valuable posts on popular Quora questions. Search for popular questions in your niche, change the titles a bit and write on them.

4.Connect with your followers

Quora allows you to connect with followers. You can do that by sending a direct message to them to interact and engage with them.

5Track your success

You can view your success on Quora through the analytic dashboard. It will show you the number of upvotes, views and shares on your answers. This will enable you to create a solid strategy for your business.


Reddit is another great community for lead generation. It has over 1.58 billion users all over the world. It is a social platform where you can share your content and have lots of views and clicks to your website.

Below are three hacks that will help you to generate highly targeted leads from Reddit:

  1. Publish your content on the right subreddit

The success of your lead generation efforts depends on the quality of your content and posting it in the right subreddit. There are different subreddits for every niche.

So, how will you know where to publish your content?

Simple! Follow the steps below:

  1. Select a website that has the same audience as you. For example, if you are in the inbound marketing niche, you can use Hubspot’s website. Simply type – into your browser. See the result below:

  1. Choose the post with the highest engagement (i.e. lots of comments) and check the subreddit they were posted to. Then submit your article to the same subreddit.
  2. Post your content to trending subreddit

There are content that are trending at one point or the other on Reddit. When a subreddit is trending, it means it is getting lots of traffic. That is where you need to post your content.

So, how do you know a trending subreddit?

Use redditmetrics. Type the URL into your address bar and check out the list of currently trending subreddits. However, ensure your content is relevant to the subreddit.

  1. Use the AMA strategy

AMA means Ask me anything. It is a strategy that became popular on Reddit. It is a thread of questions within Reddit hosted by a person. It gives you the opportunity to generate high quality leads and traffic. Below is are samples of an AMA threads:

So, how do you start your own AMA?

  1. Type into your web browser
  2. Click on submit an AMA (as shown below)

3. Fill in the required details and submit

4.Ensure that you create an AMA on a topic you know so well. As Redditors ask you questions, respond to them and include leads to further reading or resources on your website.


If you are struggling to generate quality leads for your business, use the three content marketing strategies mentioned above. With them, you will boost your lead generation efforts and acquire quality leads that can turn into customers.

By Marco Cirillo 

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