Whether you call them White Papers, Reports, Requested Articles, or Checklists, “something written” is a great way to generate sales leads, educate your prospects about the problems you solve, and to start the frame the solution in your prospect’s mind.

White Papers are especially good at being the first point of introduction and starting the education process with your prospects. That means you generally are better off promoting the fact that you have a White Paper but requiring your prospects’ to leave some personal information such as name, email and phone.

The Biggest Mistake

The biggest mistakes many marketers or small businesses make with White Papers is to either not focus on the title of the White Paper so that it sells itself or to fail to have a marketing campaign of “small ads,” such as Google Pay-Per-Click Ads, running to promote the White Paper. Some of these create leads each and every week and can run for years.

Keys To Success

Keys to success with White Paper and Article Marketing include:

- Market the White Paper itself (rather than just publishing it as an article) but require some personal information of your prospects on a web landing page to download the report, 

- Use a snappy report title which gets your prospect’s attention – it can promise the big benefit or solve a problem and ideally use the rules of a good headline (think of the title as an Ad for your report),

- Generally no need to be more than 10 pages long, but if you can cover a topic in 500 to 730 words that is ok,

- Remember, your White Paper topics cannot be all things to all people. Most will target prospects that are earlier in the buying process. The content is educational in nature or focuses on positioning your organization in the prospect’s mind to make sure you “get in the game” from a sales perspective, instead of reading like a sales letter. Your lead follow-up sequence will start to help nurture these new leads into sales opportunities.

- Consider your Point-of-View when writing the report content itself. Answer questions like this: What is your organization’s unique perspective on the problem you solve and how you solve it.

Obviously we should have the White Paper on White Papers here but while that is being developed…

Click here for one of our sample White Papers which is sponsored by Citrix, Top Trends in Business Lead Generation.