Proven Ways Consultants Can Generate Leads Online. Lead generation is never an easy thing for any consultant, especially if they dwell on using online medium for generating leads.

Some years back, business owners and entrepreneurs were not interested in searching for consultants online. They would rather rely on recommendations from friends or go to the well-known consultants who had their faces or voices all over traditional media.

Things have however changed in the past few years and today consulting is a lot more competitive and almost available for everyone.

As a B2B consultancy firm, we have tried and tested many ways of generating leads over the period and we have come up with a list of the most efficient ways of generating leads as a consultant.

Now, these methods soon to be discussed are industry tested and approved methods which are hopeful to work for everyone who uses them appropriately.

This list provides you with 10 strategies. However, we can guarantee that not all of them works for everyone. Luckily, you would get at least 2 or 3 three of these strategies to work for you.

So, your responsibility here is to identify which of them works for you.

Now, before you proceed with this article, I am guessing you already have a website designed for your brand. If you are yet to do that, we at Paragon Verve are glad to assist you with a professionally-designed website that serves the need of your brand and your clients.

1. Writing for Established Media and Press.

As a consultant who is looking forward to generating leads, the belief is that you lack the reach and audience to generate leads by yourself.

One sure way to generate leads to your business is for you to write for some established press and media houses.

To do this, you have to find an established website or traditional publishing firm that operates in your niche.

For most of these companies, they may ask for a pitch from you before they allow you to write for them.

If you are lucky to pass the pitch face and land a writing gig with them, you are assured of constant hundreds of thousands of readers daily, weekly and monthly.

Aside from the monetary value that some of these websites give you in exchange for your writings, putting their logos up on your website as brands you associate with, stamps your authority in the niche you are fighting to lead as a consultant.

So, as you grow your readership on this established website and develop more followers, you are also growing your brand and this is highly likely to bring you new leads.

Note: For you to be successful here, you need to have excellent writing skills and in-depth knowledge about your field. 

2.Sponsoring Events

Sponsoring local and online events is more like the situation of killing two birds with one stone.

As a consultant, you stand the chance of networking with other consultants and businesses by sponsoring events within your niche that align with your values.

Interestingly, you also get to connect your brand with other audiences which you may not originally have through these sponsorships.

Now, mostly sponsorship sounds like money. Sponsoring events does not always have to be financial. You can sponsor an event by providing a free service and having your brand acknowledged as a partner.

The key point about this strategy however is that you need to be able to identify events within your niche which are likely to sell your brand when you sponsor them.

You don’t want to waste your effort, time and resources on partnering an event which is not valuable.

It is your homework to find a list of local events and online events from which you choose the one that resonates with your brand and objectives.

From there, you can reach out to the organizers and strike a partnership deal.

3. Running Free Email Courses

If there is one thing people love, it is free things. Giving people a free course can be a powerful magnet for leading them to your service.

Once you announce having a free email course for people, they would genuinely submit their email addresses to partake in this course.

Your job here is to deliver an interesting course which gives them a reason to push for more information.

The catch here is that when delivering the course, usually over some days or weeks, you need to strategically infuse your services and link them directly to the course you are offering.

So for example, if you are a digital marketing consultant, you can go ahead to give an overview of digital marketing and explain the various concepts throughout your free course.

Now, towards the end of every session, you can insert a link to a video course or any other course which promises to give the recipients deeper insights into Facebook Advertisement or Search Engine Optimization.

If your free course works well, this could earn you lots of leads.

Remember, content is always king. So when offering free courses, make sure to keep the content at 100. That’s the only way to win the trust of these people and convert them into your clients.

4. Speaking At A Web Conference

Now and then, industry leaders and event organisers put together online conferences where they talk about hot topics that are of interest to the industry.

Some of these events are paid events where participants have to pay to join while others are free of charge.

As a consultant seeking leads, you can get yourself to speak on topics that are within your domain at such online events.

If you perform well, you are surely getting new followers who are likely to get in touch with you after the event for more information or to book you for another event.

The trick for this strategy is that you must find a way to get noticed by the organizers of such events so you can be put on.

It can come through a referral from friends or by directly pitching your expertise and some contents or books you have written to the organizers.

If they fancy your skills and think you may be a great addition to the line-up, then you have the goal right in front of you.

When it is time for you to speak, make sure to deliver value and expertise that is worth a follow-up.

5. Writing And Giving Out a Short Ebook

Once again, the word ‘free’ pops up in this article. It is not debatable that people love free things.

So the more you give out free things, the more you are likely to attract more people.

Now, an ebook doesn’t have to be very long or broad such as covering 700 pages or more.

For this ebook, you are trying to introduce your readers to some of the solutions you can provide for their ventures by giving them a free solution to one or two of their problems.

Try to keep the book as brief and concise as possible. Usually, between 50 to 100 pages. It can even be less, provided you are giving it your best shot.

So here is the deal. Choose a topic that you think cuts across the needs of your prospective clients and write on it. Usually, this should be a guide or a list that is well-explained just as the post you are reading.

Once you can give them much value for free and they truly realize the value you’ve offered, they’ll be willing to hire your service for more complex tasks.

Don’t forget to list your contact in the free eBook!

6. Blogging

Blogging in its general form is about posting contents regularly on your website to provide value and knowledge to your readers.

As a consultant, your blogposts may come as articles, reports or research work which would be served out to your followers.

To stand out as a consultant who uses the blogging strategy, you must learn to own opinion on subjects that remain debatable.

Even though it may sound awkward, the more you tend to have opinions about topical issues in your niche and you write more opinionated articles, you create room for people to follow you genuinely.

Now, some of these readers may have opposing views about some of your opinions but that is to be expected. The remaining ones who accept your stand on the issue are likely to refer to your blog when next there is something they need to read about because they relate with your views.

With time, these people become loyal followers of your blog and once you put out an offer, they would be the first set of people to reach out to you.

Just make sure you have a unique voice and a fearless opinion on the topics you are very comfortable with.

7. Free Consulting Services

In most industries especially the production industries, there is a bit of what is to be expected on display for a prospective client to see and try. They call it samples.

These samples are for the customer to have a firsthand experience of what the product is likely to do for them and give them a reason to pay for it.

As a consultant, your product is consultation. So, to showcase what you have in stock for prospective clients, you should be able to organize free consulting services for some businesses.

You can make use of your social media platforms to announce your decision to consult for some businesses free of charge.

When you get these businesses, give forth your best and make sure you produce an excellent result for them.

The prospects are that they may hire you for a proper gig after your initial free consultation and they may also recommend you to other business owners who may, in turn, make an offer to you.

8. Search Engine Optimization

According to data available on Statista, Google receives over 40,000 search queries per second and over 3.5 billion searches per day.

Which means the average internet user searches google and other search engines for any information or service they need.

Now, if you own a blog or a website, you want your site to appear in search results when someone types a keyword in google search engine.

This does not come by chance. It requires conscious efforts both on your site off your website to enable you to show in search results.

There are four basic things you need to consider if you want to rank higher on google.

1. You need to submit your website to google search console so that google crawls all your website contents onto its search engine.
2. You need to write quality and long articles that have clear captions, good keyword density of at most 2%.
3. Learn to link your content to other contents on your website to enhance inbound linking.
4.  Find good sites within your niche which may not necessarily be competitors to your brand and get them to provide backlinks to your site.

With these four strategies done consistently over some time, you should begin to rank higher for various keywords on google. This also increases your domain authority and generates leads for you.

People tend to click on search results on the first page rather than the next pages. So the higher up the search results you are, the more likely you are to receive targeted traffic which would, in turn, convert into clients.

If you wish to have a professional body handle your Search Engine Optimization for you at an affordable rate, you can get in touch with us at Paragon Verve.

9. Google Ads

Though Search Engine Optimization (SEO) gets you to rank higher on search engines such as Google, Bing and the rest, it requires a lot of work and time.

To rank above over thousands of sites that appear in search results for certain keywords, you need to keep doing SEO for your posts daily over a very long time especially if the competition for such keywords are very high.

So, there is another way of ranking on google search results without having to go through all the stress and hustle of SEO.

By paying google to display your site above all other sites for certain keywords, your site gets to be seen by millions of people searching for the keywords you targeted in your ads.

The beautiful thing about such ads is that they are Pay per Click (PPC) which means you are charged when someone clicks on your site from the search results.

And also, you get to control how much you wish to spend on the ad and the duration of the ad as well.

However, once you stop the ad, you are taken off the top of other results shown for your keyword and then you go back to resume your position in the ranks.

However, if you combine a good Google ads campaign with SEO, by the time you finish running your ads, you could be on the top 10 search results for your keyword without paying for an extra ad.

Paragon Verve has the right expertise and experience to take care of your SEO and Google PPC ads by giving you outstanding results which reflect directly in your bank account.

10. Facebook Ads

Like Google ads, Facebook ads are also Cost per Action (CPA) adverts that make use of targeting to deliver display ads to thousands of Facebook users over a duration.

The most-used social media platform is Facebook with over 2.6 Billion users who are constantly online.

This provides a wide market for you to target and gets leads to your landing page or website.

Facebook ads are also relatively cheap. With as low as 1 USD per day, you can reach out to thousands of target audience depending on the audience definition and audience size.

Though Facebook ads may get a little bit tricky especially for first-timers, it is worth it if you are looking at bringing in leads from social media.

Compared to other social media platforms, the value you get from Facebook is the best.

Conclusion

If you found this list to be too long and so you couldn’t keep everything in mind, worry not.  We have a simplified version of everything down here for your consumption.

As a consultant, your motive is to consult for Brands and Businesses by delivering value to them and getting paid for your service.

But, to achieve this, you need to put in place some strategies which position you above the growing competition in your niche and carve a unique spot for yourself in the industry.

So, below are the tried and tested strategies listed in this article which have been proven over time to generate leads for consultants:

• Sponsoring Events
• Writing for established media and press
• Running free email courses
• Speaking at a web conference
• Writing and giving out a short eBook
• Blogging
• Free consulting services
• Search Engine Optimization
• Google ads
• Facebook ads

If you are unable to implement any of the above strategies by yourself, we at Paragon Verve are more than ready to work with you by either guiding you to do it yourself or doing it with you or even take up the whole strategy and implement it for you at an affordable cost.