You have a blog. That’s great. There’s just one problem. You don’t know what to do with it, and it shows because you’re seeing no conversions.
So what do you do if you have a fair amount of pageviews – and that’s a big if – and you find visitors bouncing out long before your call to action?
It’s actually a very common problem. According to Brafton’s 2017 CONTENT MARKETING BENCHMARK REPORT, B2C sites have an average bounce rate of 61%
So what can you do to reduce that number AND turn those visitors into paying clients?
Define your audience
This is the biggest factor when it comes to turning your blog into a proper marketing tool. Simply filling whitespace with words is not a strategy. You need to know your audience well enough to keep them interested until the end. Find out what age, gender, marital status, profession and interests your preferred blog readers are or have. Then ask yourself what challenges or problems they might encounter. Voila! You have blog post ideas that people are going to care about.
The very best blog posts that drive people to act on something are those that answer a question or help someone overcome a point of contention. These posts are great because the person is probably en route to buying something. That said, don’t answer all of the questions. Leave that to your call to action to get them to do something (such as contact you) to learn more.
Write a grabby title
You don’t necessarily want to write click bait (because people can smell desperation a mile away), but you want your posts to have attractive headlines. They’re what people are going to see first, and what they’re going to see in search results and on social media. It may very well be the one thing that convinces them to follow the link and read the article. So you need to be punchy.
There are headline analyzer tools out there, but the thing you want to do, as much as you can, is appeal to people’s emotions. Have a headline that tugs at the ol’ heart strings. That will be the key to getting people to read on.
Format articles for skimming
Your formatting will play a big part in how successful you are at getting people read to the end of your post. When people are online, they skim. And as much as it kills me as a writer, I know that most visitors aren’t going to be paying too much attention to every single word.
So you’ll want to make sure you have headings to break up the text and have short paragraphs to avoid “paragraph soup.” Also use bulleted lists where you can. Also use images to break up the text and make sure your font sizes are legible.
Optimize Your Content for SEO
While you don’t want to do this too brazenly — stuffing your article full of keywords will more than likely get you penalized on Google — you do want to keep this in mind because, after all, you want people to find your content. So use keywords (if you can) in the headings and title of your piece and sprinkling them through your content. Use synonyms where appropriate and make sure your images have proper alt-text descriptions.
Have a Crystal Clear Call to Action
Always, always, always do this. You want people to do things with your article, whether it’s sharing it or clicking on a button for more content or contacting you. It really depends on what part of the buyer’s journey the article is speaking to. If your readers are just setting out doing their research on something you offer, the last thing you want to do is hammer them over the head with a sales pitch. Similarly, if people are ready to buy from you and your piece is solving a problem that only you can offer, get them to come to your physical location to close the sale – assuming you have a physical location.
If you’re struggling with the concepts and execution behind content marketing, we can help. Just contact us and let’s have a quick chat about how you can deploy great content and use it to achieve fantastic results.
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