How to Use Your White Paper for Lead Gen

OK, now you've completed your white paper and done the first routine things most companies do -- send it to your sales team, post it on your website, and maybe email it to your prospect list.

All of those are important to do. However, if that's all you do, you might be missing the boat. Get a much bigger bang (and better ROI) by turning your white paper into a potent high quality, cost-effective lead generation tool. As a lead gen tool, you can promote the paper in at least these eight low-to-no cost ways:

• Leveraging content into an article for an industry publication (electronic or print)
• Getting a press release out to industry media -- many industry pubs publish a "What's New" or "New Whitepapers" section
• Secondary release of the paper to low cost "free" press release distribution -- results in 60 or more backlinks to your site and improves SEO. Depending on the particular key words or phrases, one of these releases may even hit the top 10 in organic search results.
• Convert the white paper to a catchy PowerPoint presentation and post on the multiple presentation sharing sites
• Convert the PPT to a video and add voice over. Post on over 20 video sites (all of which help your SEO -- where your company appears in organic search results)
• Conduct a small-scale Adwords campaign to support the white paper -- small budget, focused key words, supports SEO
• Create an optimized custom landing page for the white paper so you can monitor results, leads generated, etc.
• Post a note about the paper on your social media links, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.

Once you've launched your campaign, make sure you've got a process in place to track your leads, respond, qualify them, weed out the "time wasters" and forward to your sales team. Be sure to monitor and track the responses on the paper's download page and readership on any syndicated sites where you've posted the paper.