Past few years have seen SMBs come a long way in their online marketing endeavors. From not having a website to frequent creation and distribution of content on their own blog and social channels, small business owners seem to have changed the way they used to perceive the power of online marketing.

However, just creating tons of content may not suffice in 2019. To stand out in the crowd of digital marketers, you need a proper plan for content creation and distribution. Every piece of content you create should have a goal. Your SEO expert should help you plan what type of content you should create and where you should distribute them for maximum exposure. Here are two powerful content distribution ideas for SMBs in 2019.

1. Guest posting

As unexciting as it may sound, guest posting is still one of the most cost-effective yet powerful content marketing strategies in 2019. You don’t have to pay them for publishing your content. All you need is to find a popular website in your niche and create high-value content that appeals to their audience. Popular websites get hundreds of guest posting requests, so they might have strict policies for selecting content from third party marketers like you. So study their content and pitch them a topic idea that they’d never want to ignore. Make sure your content has a link to your website. That’s the whole purpose of guest posting – driving highly relevant traffic to your website from a popular website in your niche.

2. Sponsored content

Guest posting is a powerful strategy, but it takes time and effort to secure a guest post in popular sites. If you don’t have the time, use the power of money. You can publish paid posts to popular sites with much less time and effort. When creating a sponsored post, make sure it doesn’t sound overly promotional. Readers will already know they are reading a paid post. They may still like the content and visit your website through your backlink, if your offer enough value in your content.

Without a constant flow of high-quality leads, your business will not survive for long, let alone growing bigger. But even if you know lead generation is important, creating high quality leads for your business is not easy.

Along with professional help from an experience SEO consultant, you’ll need to do digital marketing for effective lead generation. Here are some more tips on how to generate leads for your business.

1. Use A/B testing

In this process, you’ll use software to compare two variants of your web page. The idea is to find out which of the two is more effective in achieving your desired goal. For instance, if you want to collect visitor emails on your home page, you may want to A/B test two versions of your home page to see which one is getting you more leads. That way, you can eliminate any guesswork and employ the most effective version of your home page for your lead generation.

2. Create viral content

One way expedite your lead generation process is by creating viral content. But how will you create viral content? What is the recipe of viral content? Although there is no set formula for it, a recent study conducted by Jonah Berger and Katy Milkman found that viral content usually have three ingredients, a positive message, lots of practical advice and tips and a little dose of emotion. If you can stir all three in the right proportion, creating viral content shouldn’t be too difficult. Not to mention, a piece of viral content can get you lots of high-quality leads.

3. Use social media marketing

It is also possible to generate leads through Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. All you need is to use the right strategy on the right platform. In order to make this strategy work, you should focus on audience interaction rather than simply posting more content pieces. Ask questions to your audience and respond to their queries or feedback as quickly as possible. Keeps the conversation going and before you know it you’ll generate lots of leads from your social marketing efforts.

No matter how good your products or services, they don’t get you real results until people know about your business. Lead generation is a great way to make your business visible to the right prospects.

There are several lead generation strategies and different business need to use a combination of different tactics to successfully generate sales leads. What works for your friend’s business might not work for you. That’s why it’s always a good idea to hire an SEO expert or online marketing consultant for the job. If you are looking for some effective ways to generate leads, here are some ideas.

1. Blogging

What problem does your business solve? You can create a blog post and write how to solve that problem. Your blog posts don’t necessarily need to promote your products or services. In fact, it is always a good idea to offer value to your readers before you start pushing your products to them. So write generic blog posts, offering tips and advice to your target audience. Once you win their trust, you can ask them to submit their name and contact details.

2. Email marketing

Once you’ve collected emails from your blog or website visitors, now you can start an email marketing campaign. The idea is to send them valuable content via email, without asking anything in return. Do this for some time; and your readers will start recognizing your business as a value provider. Later, you can subtly promote your products to them. This will lower their guard and finally they may start buying from you.

3. Landing page optimization

Every page of your website plays a major role in improving your web ranking. But if you don’t have enough time and budget to optimize every page at the moment, start with your landing page. You can hire an SEO expert for the job. Make sure your landing page has an effective CTA button for lead generation.

Just because you’re short on budget doesn’t mean your digital marketing should suffer. It is actually possible to increase traffic to your website, on a budget. We posted a blog around this topic earlier, and we highly recommend you to read that before continuing with this one.

Once you’re done with the first part of this article, now you can read this part for two more ideas. Without further ado, let’s drive right in.

1. Use podcasting

Podcasting is all the rage these days. Anyone can create a podcast and start interviewing successful people in their niche. But it’s one thing to have a podcast; it’s another to actually use it to drive more traffic to your website. Your SEO consultant can help you leverage podcasting. The idea is really simple. Typically, it works in three steps – 1) Create your own podcast, 2) Interview a popular guest every week, 3) Ask your guest to share the episode with their audience.

Can you see how it works? When an influencer (in your niche) will share your podcast with their followers, some of them will notice your brand and visit your website.

2. Co-publish content with popular site owners

Again, the idea here is to leverage the popularity of an established brand. You first need to find out some popular websites/blogs in your niche. Once you have a list of popular sites, now your job is to contact the website owners via email or phone and ask them to allow you to co-publish a post onto their site. If your content is good, some of them may accept your proposal. That’s because they don’t have time to create good content. If you do it for them, they’ll happily allow you to co-publish. On the other hand, co-publishing content with them will help you drive a fraction of their followers/readers to your website.