11 ways to convert blog readers into customers

 

Introduction 

Imagine this – You’ve spent days researching for suitable keywords and wrote an awesome blog. You’ve done everything to make them rank, including praying to search engine gods like Google and Bing to smile at you. 

It’s been more than 2 months since you wrote that blog. It ranks in the first page of Google and easily brings in droves of unique visitors to your page every month.  

But, now you wonder, “I like this traffic to my blog, but how can I convert it into customers for my business?” 

If this sounds like you, then you’re in the right place. In this blog, we will explore 11 tips and tricks to convert blog visitors into loyal customers for your business. 

Let us dive into it. 

How to write a blog post that converts? 

Before we get into the tips and tricks, let’s get the fundamentals right. These tips won’t be useful if your blog post does not follow these fundamentals. These tips will make sure that your blog posts are primed to convert your visitors. 

Here are the steps you need to follow to write a blog post that converts: 

1. Understand your audience 

2. Choose the right topic 

1. Choose topics that will solve a problem for your audience 

2. Choose topics that will educate or entertain your target audience 

3. Choose topics for each stage of the buying cycle 

3. Use lots of images (better show than tell) 

4. Use short paragraphs and bullet points 

5. Choose a font that’s easy to read on all platforms 

6. Make sure you have an enticing title 

7. Do a deep keyword research for your blog post 

1. Understand if your keyword is informational, navigational, or transactional 

2. Match your content to your keyword’s intent 

8. Create a story or a narrative for your blog 

9. Add testimonials and stories from your existing customers 

10. Have an On-page SEO strategy/ checklist 

11. Use data to prove your points  

12. Add links to external resources to prove your points 

13. Add a proper hook at the start of your blog post 

14. Add a introduction that invokes the curiosity of your readers 

15. Analyze your competitor’s content and make yours 10X better 

16. Add previews that appear when shared on social media channels 

17. Work on your technical SEO 

18. Add subheadings 

19. Add high-intent CTAs (we’ll explore this more in this blog) 

While this is not an exhaustive list, following these 19 items will help you increase your conversions and rankings. Now let’s take a look at the 11 tips to increase your sales and conversions. 

11 content marketing tips to increase your conversions and sales 

1. CTA at the start of each blog post 

HubSpot uses this strategy to drive conversions to their eBook downloads. To enable them to download your eBook, a visitor needs to provide his/her email ID and name. When you enter your email address and name, you’re automatically added to their email list. Based on the lead magnet you have downloaded, you will receive a set of pre-written automated emails.  

By downloading the eBook, you become part of an email nurture series and also a subscriber of HubSpot’s weekly newsletter. 

The core principles behind placing the CTA at the start of the blog is simple.  

• One rule is to make sure that your offer is relevant to the blog: 

You don’t want to offer a guide to infographics in a blog that talks about how to sell feet pics. Make sure that your offer is relevant and it encourages more people to download the eBook. 

• The second rule is to make sure that it’s easy to fulfill your CTA 

Don’t add hundreds of forms or steps before downloading your eBook. The process must be simple enough for your website visitors. If it’s too complex, they’ll not fulfill your core CTA. 

2. Add exit intent pop-ups 

Exit intent pop-ups are another solid way to capture the people who are leaving your blog posts. For example, this exit intent pop-up was generated on OptinMonster’s website as we were about to close the tab.  

These pop-ups appear only when you are about to close your tab or switch windows. Whilst, there are arguments that exit intent pop-ups affect user experience, it is a persuasive technique to nudge the reader to complete an action.  

They also make sure that you can display different offers than the ones displayed on your other CTAs. 

For example, one of OptinMonster’s customers used exit intent pop-ups to increase their conversion rates by 600%. This huge conversion spike resulted after adding just one pop-up to the mix. 

With the right offer and a solid stream of traffic, you too can increase your conversion rates with an exit intent pop-up. 

3. Repurpose content for other platforms 

This is not exactly a CTA hack, but comes in handy to increase conversions. Imagine you’ve written an in-depth blog. You have optimized it for the right keywords and worked on the formatting perfectly. 

But in today’s age, creating great content alone doesn’t cut it. You have to distribute this content across several platforms in different formats. 

For example, the folks at Ahrefs convert most of their blog posts into long form videos.Creating a video as well as a detailed blog post is what helps them rank for so many keywords. 

A video is easy to consume and adding it to their blog post  increases the user experience. When user experience increases, users tend to stick on your page for longer. When users stick on your page for longer, that sends a positive sign to Google and other search engines. 

Wistia conducted a survey between two types of blog posts, one with a video and one without a video. They found that people spent 2.6x more time on a page with video than on one without a video. 

If video is a far shot for you, here are some other ways in which you can repurpose content 

1. Create an Instagram post and embed it on your blog 

2. Create an Instagram carousel and embed it on your blog 

3. Create an Infographic and add it to your blog post 

4. Create a tweet and embed it on your blog post 

5. Create a twitter thread and embed it on your blog post 

6. Create a post on Linkedin and embed it onto your blog post 

7. Repurpose your content and add it to Pinterest 

If you want to repurpose content, the options are just endless. You should look at blog posts as part of a content marketing strategy. With this small shift in your mindset, repurposing your content becomes a whole lot easier. 

4. Add custom banners 

In our blogs, we add custom banners in each blog post. This helps us convert visitors back into users of our free online graphic design software – Picmaker. We make sure that these custom banners fit the topic of each blog post.  

For example, this custom banner states “Design YouTube banners without a degree in design”. So this can only be relevant if it’s added in a blog post that talks about YouTube banners. 

You can use any software design tool to create custom banners like this for yourself. All you need to do is add them to your blog post and link them to your service or product pages. In our example, we linked this image to one of our landing pages. This way, we are able to get website visitors from our blog posts to our products at scale. 

5. Add CTAs at the end of each blog post 

Another fantastic way to increase conversions from your blog post is to add CTAs at the end of the blog post. By adding a CTA at the end of each blog post you tap “hot readers” for each blog post. 

What do we mean by ‘hot readers’? 

Not every website visitor will read your blog post till the end. Some will read the first few lines and jump off. Some will read till the middle of the blog post and skip to another site. And there are some who will read till the end of your blog post. 

Let’s give a nickname to each visitor based on the percentage of content they consume in the blog post. 

0 – 30% => Cold readers 

30 – 70% => Warm readers 

> 70% => Hot readers 

Hot readers are visitors who find your blog post to be most informative, actionable, or entertaining. They scroll till the end of the blog post to understand more about the topic and they find your content helpful. This means that they have similar pain points to your target audience and have a high chance at converting into a customer. 

Adding CTAs can help you to convert these ‘hot readers’ into your customers. 

6. Add scroll boxes 

This category is much similar to the Sidebar CTAs we will discuss below. But there’s one major difference between them – this CTA is dynamic. It is located in the same position as a sidebar CTA, but it moves along with the visitor. 

While visitors might miss your normal sidebar CTAs at the start of the blog, they won’t miss this. It will slide along with the user and will be visible as long as the visitor is on your blog. 

7. Add a welcome mat 

Welcome mats push down your website and appear above it as an individual landing page. They essentially provide your user with one primary CTA and no distractions. Depending upon your offer and context, welcome mats can also vary in their efficiency. 

It makes sure that you visitors don’t get distracted by navigational buttons, icons or other CTAs on your homepage. This is much similar to the full page exit pop-ups you might see on some websites. 

Here’s an example of a welcome mat from Maid N Houston’s website. This welcome pushes down their main website as soon as it completely loads up. We’ve got to admit – this is a good CTA variant to test on your website. 

8. CTA at the bottom of each blog post 

This CTA variant must be dealt with caution, because it may hamper user experience. Since it is present at the bottom of the page, it can affect the reader’s experience. But you should always test these CTA bars on your website. 

Let’s take this CTA example on Neil Patel’s blog. Towards the end of all his blog posts, you notice a CTA bar along with his picture as an overlay. 

9. Add sidebar CTAs 

Sidebar CTAs can increase conversions on your blog post. Let’s take a look at our first example – AppSumo. The company sells SaaS softwares on their online marketplace. These guys have included a CTA box with a discount code.  

Notice the simplicity of the offer. It says “Get 10% off” in the heading. It then explains “For a limited time, subscribe to get 10% off the best software deals” in the subheading. Below that you have a distinct CTA button with the text “Claim my code”.  

This CTA allows the visitor to grasp the information in an instant. The same principle applies to all your sidebar CTAs. The offer must be relevant and easy to understand. The last thing you need to do is confuse your audience with your sidebar CTA. 

Here’s another sidebar CTA example from OptinMonster. They also have a sidebar CTA that asks visitors to try out their products. They also have an email list subscription box below their primary CTA. 

For our final example, we have 4 sidebar CTA boxes from Later. All these boxes are constant on every single page of Later’s blog. Later’s examples are quite different from the rest we’ve seen till now. They use 4 different CTAs pointing to 4 different features. Although each one points to a different feature, they stand out thanks to its unique colour differentiation.  

10. CTA bars at the top of each post 

Here’s another example from OptinMonster’s website. They have a CTA bar on top of every blog post. This bar is dynamic and moves along with the user as he scrolls through the page You can use bars like this to drive visitors to your product page or to a product demo. You can also use this space to increase your email list. 

But make sure that you don’t have more than one line in that text. You shouldn’t have more than one or two buttons as it may confuse your visitors and hamper user experience. 

11. Full screen pop-ups 

Full screen pop-ups are another unconventional way to increase your conversion rates from your blog posts.  Here’s an example from OptinMOnster on a full screen pop-up. These full screen pop-ups can be triggered by a specific event or a timer.  

In this particular example, this pop-up was triggered when we were about to switch tabs. This was perfectly timed and did not affect our user experience. 

However these full screen pop-ups can sometimes spoil the on-page experience of your user. It can lead to more bounce rates and lower conversions on your blog post. So a good rule of thumb is to always test your pop-up for a week or two. If you see a considerable increase in your bounce rate after implementing the pop-up, take it out. 

If you don’t want to remove it, you can try changing the timer or it’s intent. You can also try changing your copy and the original offer. Your best bet is to run tests and verify if something else works for your blog post. If you see your bounce rate increasing, it’s time to ditch that pop-up. 

Summarising it up 

There is no one size fits all approach to increase your blog readers into customers. We cannot promise you a 600% spike in your conversions, just by adding a pop-up. There are multiple factors at play while optimizing your conversions. Your offer should be enticing and it should be related to the topic of the blog post. 

Adding a CTA is just a step above your basic foundations. There are some businesses that get sales without doing any of these tricks in their blog posts.  CTAs can help you increase your conversions, but it will not work if you don’t have the basic fundamentals right. 

We hope you enjoyed reading this blog.