We have discussed previously the benefits of having a business blog.  They are a great way to generate traffic and convert potential customers.  The hard part is trying to build up your readership and decrease the number of people that leave.  There are various reasons why your blog may not be a converting machine.  It could be anything from writing style to lack of marketing.

Below are 8 tips to help boost the conversion rates for your business blog.

1. Choose the right topics

Having the right title for your blog posts is very important in generating readership.  You have to give thought to what will drive someone to click on your post.  The answer is an engaging header/title.

Here are some things to keep in mind when coming up with a title: 

• It must be relevant to your target audience
• Very specific in nature
• It should show usefulness
• It should evoke positive emotions
• Keep it concise
• Try not to go very generic
• Add eye catching adjectives like powerful, amazing, brilliant etc.

2. Include More Calls to Action

CTA’s are important to have in your blog posts if you want your conversion rates to go up.  If you are putting out blogs without them, you are definitely hurting your numbers.

Here are some tips of what to consider when putting together your call to actions:

• Be direct –  Be precise with your wording so visitors know exactly what you want them to do. Use words like  ‘get started,’ ‘sign up,’ ‘submit,’ or ‘download’.
• Use actionable language – Some verbs are stronger than others.  As an example “Call us today for a quote” uses a stronger call to action than “Give us a call today for a quote”.
• Be urgent – A good approach here is to is to show a limited time offer and that the price will go up once the time passes.  Use words like “now,” or “immediately” works great for adding that sense of urgency.
• Make it simple – The process should be seamless for them to go from the CTA to the task.

Also give thought to adding additional CTA’s like pop ups and banner ads.

3. Take full advantage of social media

Maximizing your reach on social media is a definite driver of how much you see in terms of referrals and conversions.  You can do this by using social ads as well as organic approaches.

Here are some ways to help boost your organic reach:

• Research the best hashtags to use.
• Put together a content library so you can cycle through your posts several times.
• Come up with different versions of the same post so you can reach a broader audience.
• Try and get employees to discuss your brand in their social media posts.
• Try your hand at influencer marketing.

4.  Improve your loading time

Your blog’s conversion rate is directly linked to the time it takes to load. People expect for a page to load within 2 seconds, at three seconds people will start abandoning your site.  Those that are leaving represent lost business.  If your site is loading on the slow side, here are some things you can do it get it to load quicker:

• Change your hosting provider:  This plays a big role in loading time. If you are using wordpress, here is a nice list of the hosting providers that have the fastest loading times.
• Look at your images:  How many images along with the size of them will affect loading time. keep only essential images and if that is not enough, modify the size.
• Delete unnecessary plugins:  Having too many plugins will definitely slow your load time.  Try to have no more than 20 installed.

5. Add tweetables into your blog

Boosting your social share conversions is great for expanding your reach.  Make it easy for them to share bits of your content by using tweetables.  It works as a great way to remind people to post anything interesting they come across and it’s so easy.  Here is an image of one.  As you hover over some text..this will pop up for you.

5. Focus your content on resolving pain-points

Customer pain-points play a key role in garnering the attention of your target audience on social media.  For this reason, how-to blog posts are a popular search term.  If you can find out what the pain points are of your target audience and address those in your blog, your conversion numbers will go up.

Here are some things to consider when figuring out your customer pain points: 

• Go through each step of the customer journey and see what  problems you can address.
• Use customer feedback.
• Test your product yourself.

You can now use the information you generated to come up with blog post ideas. Another idea is to just ask your customers via a survey (you can use a tool like SurveyMonkey to generate this) or via an email campaign as well.

6. Add visuals to your blog

Using visuals in your blog posts helps improve the readability and people tend to retain information better when there are visuals present along with the text.

Here are some ideas on how you can use visuals in your blog: 

• Add screenshots to further explain your ideas.
• Use graphs to show statistics and trends.
• Use infographics to summarize your post.  These are highly shared on social media and worth taking the time to do.

Not everyone has a background in design so tools like Canva are helpful with adding visuals to your posts.

7. Have a comment section

Knowing what people have to say about your posts is equally as important as writing them.  Your audience’s comments give you insight into how effective your posts are as well as potential ideas for other posts. They also help build up the relationship you have with your readers.

Here are tips on ways to optimize blog post comments:

• Be sure to not only respond to each comment but make it an open-ended comment in an effort to keep the conversation going.
• Comment on other blogs and invite readers to check out yours.
• Add video to your posts. This also helps with SEO.

You will need a blog commenting tool to do this. Disqus is a popular one to use.

8. Publish your posts at a different time

Just like there are optimal times to post to your social media account, there are optimals times to publish a blog post. There are pros and cons to posting when lots of people are online and when there are less people online.

 

 

Here are some things to keep in mind depending on what your end goal is:

• If you are looking to boost traffic –  Mondays at 11am is the best time to post.
• Looking for lots of comments? The best day to publish in on a Saturday at 9 am EST.
• Looking to build up your links? Monday and Thursday at 7 am EST is best.

Conclusion

Although there is no quick fix for boosting your blog’s conversion rates, by experimenting with the above tips you will eventually figure out what works best for your website and blog.