The benefits of a blog, for content marketing and SEO, have long been understood and appreciated by online marketers. The extra word count gives you lots of room for keyword development and creating useful content generates organic links. Another crucial way you can use your blog is to drive conversions themselves.
Using a blog as a sales tool is a tricky business. If readers sense the intent is not for their benefit, they’re likely to disregard the blog as an authority entirely. However, if you manage to strike the right balance, it’s a great way of getting engaged readers to make sales and do your promoting for you.
Use subtle but visible calls to action.
A visual call to action is always a balancing act between being visible enough for your readers to notice and subtle enough that they aren’t turned away. Unless you are using your blog very aggressively for marketing, pop-ups are not recommended. For those who want to make a genuinely pleasant blog user experience, a great compromise are slide-in calls to action. These have the content of a pop-up, but they slide in from the right of the screen as the user scrolls down. This means that you aren’t immediately pushing an advert into their view as soon as they click the page and shows that they have some interest in what you’re talking about. Slide-ins are subtle and don’t overshadow the text but because they’re a new object appearing, readers will still take notice.
Make sure keywords match calls to action.
If people are finding your blog posts via looking up a specific keyword on the search engine, that keyword is what they want to get from your posts. Having a call to action for a completely different service, product or deal isn’t going to impact the majority of your search traffic. Spend time finding what keywords your blog posts are showing up for and then change the calls to action to match these specifically.
Optimise old content.
Most blogs will have a huge backlog of content that isn’t necessarily optimised for conversions. However, often, your old posts will be the ones people find through searches and links. Even on posts written the previous year, or further back, make sure they are all written and structured to assist in dring more sales and enquiries.
The 300 Spartans.
It is widely believed to have worked at the battle of Thermopylae, in ancient Greece, but to get the best results in today’s Google you ideally want articles longer than 300 words. Google is rewarding higher quality content and it’s difficult to do that with just 300 words. In fact, the “300 Spartans holding back thousands of enemies” story is a Hollywood myth. They actually had over 4,000 allies. So, if you have the time and resource available, it’s worthwhile regularly creating signature content pieces that more deeply explore a topic, and add a lot of value, to fully engage the target audience.
Ensuring your blog converts as many visitors as possible is the best way to take advantage of the traffic you’ll be naturally generating through link-building, content marketing and keyword optimisations.
Author: Mark Rocket
Courtesy: www.avatar.co.nz