What is the single most important thing you need to make money from a blog?
If you’re like most other bloggers, your answer will be “traffic!”
While it’ll be difficult to determine the single most important thing needed to succeed as a blogger, it sure isn’t traffic! I’m very sure of that!
I’ve seen bloggers with tens of thousands of daily visitors that can hardly make $100 monthly from their blog and I’ve seen bloggers with less than 1,000 visitors making thousands of dollars monthly. In fact, I started a blog myself that was making thousands of dollars within 2 months with less than 1,000 monthly visitors.
What I’ve realized over 3 years of blogger is that conversion is much more important than traffic; here are 5 tweaks that can significantly improve conversions on your blog.
Your homepage is probably the most important page on your blog; on all of my blogs, my homepage is the most visited page. I’m sure it is the same for most other websites.
Your homepage is the most important real estate on your blog. Unfortunately, most blogs today only display their most recent blog posts on their homepage; in the process, they’re losing subscribers and sales.
One of the best ways to get more subscribers from your blog is by turning the homepage into a lead capture page; this is something Copyblogger does effectively.
On one of my websites, the homepage accounts for around 30% – 50% of all leads I get from the blog; this is hundreds of additional subscribers I wouldn’t have gotten without turning my homepage into a lead capture page.
You’ve probably seen this in action when you visit your favorite blog and you see any form of social proof or endorsement from others in place; it could be in the form of a testimonial, subscriber count or logos of reputable sites where they have been featured before.
Social proof is so effective to the extent that a lot of people would rather do what others are doing than save the world. This was demonstrated in a 2008 Arizona State University study by Robert Cialdini.
In the study, placards were put into various hotel rooms to encourage people to reuse towels and save the environment. These 4 messages were displayed on different placards:
Help the hotel save energyPartner with us to help the environmentAlmost 75% of guests reuse towels75% of the guests who stayed in this room reused towelsThe first message converted at 16% and the second message converted at 31%. The third message converted at 44% while the fourth message converted at 49%; in other words, the more social proof is used the more likely people are to take action based on it.
It’s our nature to mostly do what others are doing; that’s why a lot of people will want to read your blog when they find out that ten thousand other people are reading it or when they find out that you’ve been featured on Forbes. Even if you don’t have huge subscriber counts or major media coverage, you can get industry authorities to say something nice about your blog and then display it in key places.
Unless you have a form, and sometimes multiple forms, on every major page of your website you’re missing out on lots of potential new subscribers to your blog.
For most people, having an optin form is only restricted to the blog sidebar and sometimes below the posts; as a result, they’re missing out on a significant portion of optins they could be getting from their blog.
I talked earlier about turning your homepage into a lead capture page; another way to go about this is to have a form on all pages of your website. This includes your about page, your contact page, your resource page and every other key pages on your website; in most cases, you’ll notice that your about page is often the most viewed page on your blog after your homepage. By having a form on this page as well as other key pages on your website, you can potentially double the number of signups you get from your blog.
Another way you can increase the number of optins you get from your blog is by using slideins and pop ups.
Most people don’t like pop ups and whether you use it or not should depend on your niche, your audience and the results you’re getting; it doesn’t hurt to try it though. Slideins are often less intrusive but they’re high converting.
A slide in is an opt in box that automatically slides into the post, catching readers’ attention, once they scroll down or after they’ve been reading the post for a few minutes; it’s been very effective for me and introducing it on one of my blogs has doubled the number of daily opt ins I get from that blog.
One of the most effective tools that can be used to create slide-ins is Hybrid Connect.
While the above are some effective tweaks you can make to your blog to improve conversions, the only way to know what truly works and to be able to do a lot more tweaking is by split testing a lot.
By split testing, you can get more sales, more people to use your services and more signups to your newsletter by tweaking certain aspects of your blog; it could be your headline, the location of a certain form or some other aspect of your blog.
A great tool that simplifies the split testing process is Optimizely.
Joseph is an expert blogger with over 3 years of marketing experience and he helps people learn how to make a website.
No comments:
Post a Comment