You already know that running a blog is a great way to convert website visitors into paying customers, but building an active readership of people who’ll stay engaged, and give you business, is a harder task.
In fact, as SocialTriggers discovered in their recent survey, most blog subscribers leave within the first three months, and these subscribers represent the loss you incur by failing to convert hard-earned blog traffic.
There are many reasons why blogs fail to convert, varying from ineffective writing style to lapses in marketing and page design.
In this post, I’ll outline seven tips and tools you can use to increase your blog’s conversion rate.
1. Select the right blog topics
To survive the competition on blog marketing channels, you first have to create click-worthy titles.
Your web audience is unlikely to click on your posts unless they engaging headers – so how do you create interesting and click-worthy titles?
Engaging titles are:
- Relevant to the target audience
- Ultra-specific in terms of takeaways
- Useful and have a definite use-case
- Urgent in tone
- Positive in terms of emotions
- Concise without unnecessary words
Click-worthy titles are also unique. Avoid choosing a generic title that seems overdone – if your topic is generic, using powerful adjectives like ‘amazing’, ‘surprising’ and ‘stunning’ can help spice it up.
The more positive the emotion is, the better your post is likely to perform.
To help with this, there’s a neat little tool called the Emotional Headline Analyzer which can give you an idea of how much emotional value your headline has.
The tool is free to use – check it out when composing your blog post headlines.
2. Craft a compelling email capture form
Before your blog visitors convert to customers, they usually have to go through the “email subscription phase”.
Email capture forms and tripwires are an important part of the blog to customer conversion journey – while email capture forms play a passive, indirect role, tripwires can directly convert your blog visitors to paying customers.
An effective email capture form is:
- Unintrusive
- Compelling
An effective website tripwire is:
- A lead magnet
- Simple and affordable
- Valuable
It’s always best to work with an email capture or tripwire creation tool which allows basic A/B testing so you can decide which the best version of the form to use on your website is.
Sumo offers a website analysis and email capture tool that allows for A/B testing.
3. Maximize your social media outreach
The effectiveness of your social media marketing effort depends on your reach and social media engagement.
You can increase social media referrals and conversions by maximizing your reach on social media platforms – one way to maximize reach is by using social ads, but you’ll find that organic tactics can be just as good, and often even more effective.
Ways to increase organic social media reach:
- Use only the right hashtags and keywords, and no other hashtags and keywords
- Save posts in content libraries and repeat schedule them from time to time
- Create multiple versions of social media posts so you can reach a wider audience
- Build an engaged community who share your posts
- Work with employees, social media influencers and micro-influencers
To make the most of your social media content, you can save posts on libraries of a social media marketing tool such as DrumUp, and repeat schedule posts from time to time.
You can also use the tool’s employee advocacy platform to help boost the organic reach of your posts.
4. Use in-content testimonials
What’s the point of increasing social media referrals when you can’t increase your conversion rate?
Your conversion rate is what will ultimately contribute to business goals – one way to increase in-content testimonials is by placing customer testimonials within your blog content. Several brands do this to convert the referrals that land on their blog pages.
How to use in-content testimonials on your blog:
- Within your blog content, strategically place HTML boxes that contain conversion-focused CTAs
- Use free giveaways or discounts to compel people to convert
- Use visual testimonials (photographs with quotes or videos with quotes to promote more conversions)
You can source testimonials from anywhere – a blurb on your website, a handwritten note, or a comment on social media. You simply need to take a screenshot or photograph of the testimonials and present it in the right place on your blog posts.
5. Focus your content on resolving pain-points
Pain-points play an important role in attracting the attention of your target audience on social media and search engines.
Questions that address customer pain-points are usually highly searched for on search engines – that’s why “How to” blog posts are very popular on the internet. The more relevant your content is to customer pain-points, the closer you’ll be to conversion, via content marketing.
How to identify customer pain-points:
- Ask yourself what problems you’re aiming to solve at every step along the customer journey
- Use feedback from customers to identify pressing problems
- Test your product yourself before you sell it to customers
Use the information that you collect from the above activities to create the right titles and ideas for your blog posts.
One sure-fire way of identifying pain-points is by actually asking your audience. You could create Google Forms or use a tool like SurveyMonkey to collect information about customer pain-points that you can later incorporate in your content.
6. Use powerful visuals
Visuals are virtually essential in blogging because they improve the readability of blog posts.
Blogs posts with interspersed visuals are more likely to be read than those that don’t have any visuals – and further, important information is more likely to be retained in memory when it’s presented in visual form.
How to use visuals within blog posts:
- Use visual screenshots to demonstrate your ideas on blog posts
- Use visual indicators such as graphs to depict numbers and trends on blog posts
- Summarize entire blog posts on infographics to increase exposure for your content
When you create blog posts at a high frequency, you need to keep creating visuals to keep up with the demand.
If you don’t have a background in design, creating visuals daily can be time-consuming – using a graphic design tool such as Canva can save you a lot of time and effort.
7. Install a comments section
Blogging isn’t only about one-sided communication – your audience’s response is a critically important part of the blogging process.
You can use audience comments to judge the effectiveness of your blog posts, while comments can also be used to inspire upcoming blogging projects and to build a relationship with your readers.
How you can use commenting to boost blog engagement:
- Respond to everyone who comments on your blog with an open-ended comment – open-ended comments are more likely to keep the conversation going
- Invite blog readers to share their opinions in your comments section.
- Participate in the comments section of other blogs, and invite readers to check out your opinions on yours
To ensure that all of these actions happen, you need a tool that enables blog commenting.
One of the most common blog commenting or community tools is Disqus, which also doubles as a social media platform where you can stay connected with your blog community.
Wrapping Up
Your blog can be a rich source of conversions – all you need to improve your conversion rate is the right blogging strategies and conversion tactics. This post outlines some of the easiest ways to get you started.