10 Effective Strategies for Converting Your Blog Readers Into Customers
Sarah
Your blog is an important extension of your website for several reasons. Most importantly, you can use it to better optimize your site as a whole. With frequently updated content, you can add trending keywords, increase your page rank, improve your advertising ROI, and generally bring in more targeted traffic. However, your ultimate goal should be converting blog readers into customers.
The only question is this: How do you get from point A (readers) to point B (customers)? Here are 10 effective strategies you may want to implement.
1. Streamline Layout and Design
Both your website and your blog need to provide visitors with a simple, streamlined, and inviting layout.
You should pay attention to white space, ensuring that your blog isn’t dominated by blocks of text that could intimidate visitors. And it’s a good idea to select a limited color palette and a dedicated font to use across all of your online platforms.
You want consumers to recognize the look of your brand, and color choice is the easiest way — think McDonald’s red-and-gold or T-Mobile pink.
2. Embrace Your Inner Captain Obvious
To make it easy for readers to take the next step, you need to provide the tools that put purchasing power in their hands.
A link back to your homepage in the header is a good start. But if you do product reviews, for example, you should include a link to the product page or even a Buy Now button. These tactics provide a clear sales message and make ordering as easy as clicking a button.
3. Funnel Sales
The sales process doesn’t begin with placing products in your online store; instead, that is where the process ends for consumers. You need to create sales funnels elsewhere that lead them to a purchase page.
Your blog is an important link in that chain. When properly optimized, your blog will bring in a lot more visitors than your website. And why not? Your blog isn’t a hard sell — it’s offering free value.
You can use that to your advantage. When visitors land on your pages, they should be greeted by compelling copy, images, or videos featuring your latest products or services.
These can be in the header or the sidebar, but they should be at the top of the page. They needn’t be intrusive, but if they’re not there, you’re wasting an opportunity to create a simple and immediate sales funnel. A call to action should also be placed somewhere in the text or at the end of your articles.
4. Offer Product Reviews and Tutorials
One of the best ways to promote products and services via your blog is by telling readers what you have to sell and giving them compelling reasons to buy.
Reviews alert readers to new products, services, and advances in your industry that they might otherwise be unaware of. Oh, and did we mention that 99% of consumers read reviews?
Once you draw readers in with reviews, seal the deal with some great tutorials. Tutorials (especially video tutorials) help them connect the dots between the products you’re offering and the value these goods can bring to their lives.
5. Break Up Text with Videos and Images
Breaking up blocks of text on your blog is important for both visual and informational variety. You can, of course, add graphics, infographics, and other static imagery. But providing video content is a great way to break up the tedium of text and catch the interest of readers.
Video is a powerful medium, and with a little planning and creativity, you can use it to spice up your blog and convert readers. You can create your own videos with your smartphone and some basic editing software. Or if you really want to generate buzz among your target audience, you can invest in professional videography services.
6. Offer Live Chat
Offer myriad means for customers to connect with you, such as providing real-world contact information and adding a link to an email contact form.
But in a virtual world that thrives on instant gratification, adding a live chat option for readers to contact you immediately with questions and concerns could increase conversions.
7. Add a Membership Form
Pop-ups that encourage visitors to sign up for membership should be placed so that they appear as your visitors are on their way out the door. Once you’ve shown readers what you have to offer, they may be more willing to sign up for membership.
You will be surprised just how many readers gladly provide their contact information after they have just finished taking in some great content.
8. Use Gated Content
While the average person may close a window that asks them to sign up for membership, interested parties are more likely to offer you their contact information when you provide them with something valuable in exchange.
Gated content could include more in-depth articles, e-books, infographics, or videos like tutorials and webinars. This content needs to go beyond what you might provide in a regular blog post so that targeted consumers are more likely to seek out the added value you’re offering.
You could lose some of your less-devoted audience when you gate a portion of your content, but you will build a network of contacts who are much more likely to convert to paying customers.
9. Integrate Social Media
Once you have social media profiles in place, call on readers to become social media followers for ease of use. As followers, they can receive notifications about new blog posts, products, promotions, sales, and more.
You should also add buttons to blog posts for likes, shares, and reposts. Making it easy for readers to share your content increases your prospects for traffic and conversions.
10. Promote Your Business
If you’re not using your blog to promote your business, you’ve missed the point of having it in the first place.
Your blog should be more than just a veiled sales pitch, but it should inform readers about your business and your products or services. And you can also run a variety of promotions, such as discounts, contests, surveys, giveaways, and more, through your blog.
Converting your blog readers into customers is no easy feat; it takes time, effort, and the right amount of trial and error. But when you create a virtual environment that readers find inviting and compelling — and make it easy for them to buy — conversions should increase as a result.
Make Converting Blog Readers into Customers Easier
Any of these strategies for converting blog readers into customers can help you boost sales and grow your business. But it is easy to fall prey to information overload. You can’t possibly implement every effective tactic at once, especially if you are already struggling to keep pace with consumers’ never-ending thirst for new content.
Remember that tip about embracing your inner Captain Obvious? It applies to this dilemma, too. If you are serious about supporting your sales funnel through blogging, why not partner with a top copywriting agency?
Write Collective’s SEO-friendly content writing services for businesses focus on providing you with content that converts. From eye-catching taglines to compelling calls to action (CTAs), the Write Collective team knows how to craft masterful copy.
Order your content marketing package today and let us help you shatter your growth goals.