Blogging is a free-flowing source of information and people read lots of rich and valuable research. More than three fourths of the digital marketers in the world blog frequently. Content Marketing has become the main source of attracting people to your website and by presenting useful information that help your readers it converts your readers into your subscribers.
Most marketers know that blogs have insane potential to turn your visitors into your customers. But, conversions through blogging thus depends on various other factors other than the content you write.
To convert your blog into a lead magnet there are many components that need to fix for optimizing your blog for better lead generation or conversion.
Create a proper blog structure
First and foremost, you need to create a proper blog structure, which is easy to navigate and provide all the option to subscribe any piece of information. Conversions through blogging depends heavily on your blog structure. The structure of a blog, in turn, is affected by various blog elements like:
Sticky Header: A sticky header will consist of all necessary information about the company services and products, culture, and working methodology. No matter how much you scroll down it will remain with the webpage on the top place. This makes users to find any service related information easily.
Blog Categories: The list of blog categories must be placed right below the header with a subscription on the right side. Giving an easy option for readers to navigate through different category section on your blog will make them to consider the content. That’s how they will subscribe it to get updates on regular basis.
Subscription Option: An easy subscription will always add new contacts to your lead generation sheet. Thus, providing an easy subscription box on the top of your blog post or at the right-side column of your blog homepage is considered most effective. However, you can pull more contacts by showing pop-ups on your blog on different time intervals.
Search Bar: The search bar should be placed just below the category section for the users to look up other pieces of content if they want to.
A blog structure defines the extent of good user experience (UX) and easy navigation and thus must be designed strategically.
Place Call-to-Action (CTA) to boost conversion
A Call-to-Action (CTA) if placed strategically have the potential to turn your blog into a lead generating machine.
Basically, a CTA is the box through which your users can join the readers community and that’s how you’ll be able to collect leads on your blog.
However, the placement of a CTA is based on user behavior. And a personalized CTA works 42% better than an untargeted one since that is created based on user behavior.
By analyzing the different behavior of users on your webpage or blog you can place a CTA in three different styles on your blog, which are as follow:
The Inline CTA is used correctly only if it is placed after ample information that has been given related to the CTA in the blog.
The Sidebar CTA is placed on the side of the blog, which is mainly for gated content subscription or other important events in the industry.
The Bottom CTA is placed after the entire blog post. Once a reader gets finished with post reading then it is a smart way to show him a way to subscribe the information on regular basis.
Isn’t it clever? To analyze different user behavior on your blog you can take help of Hotjar. The heatmap tool will show you different user actions on the different section on your blog. This will help you place CTA strategically on your blog homepage and posts.
Empower engagement on your blog post
Engagement on your blog shows the level of involvement, thus it is always good to interact with your audience. By letting your readers get in touch with your blog post through social network is a popular yet most effective way to engage people with the content. But, to achieve higher engagement level on your blog you need to place social sharing plugins at the right place.
Only 45% of marketers think that their Facebook efforts are effective. This is due to wrong placement of social sharing buttons and social engagement counter. The social sharing buttons can be placed on the sidebar and below the post.
The sidebar social sharing counter should be sticky so that the user gets the opportunity to share the content whenever he feels like without having to search for it.
You can also give an option to share your post on their social networks by placing a social sharing counter at the end of your post.
However, using the Click to Tweet plugin will increase the chances of the article being shared by providing a stat or fact within the post for the user to directly tweet it.
Integrate Optin Forms to collect more leads
Optin forms are the most efficient way to pull readers into your customer’s list.
The optin form needs to be integrated to the blog in a way that it doesn’t pop up before enough information has been provided to the reader.
An optin form must no doubt include the mandatory fields, but it also needs to be as short as possible. The optin form can be integrated in various sections in different styles.
An exit overlay pop up comes up when the user shows an intent to quit the blog page. The time intent pop up turns up after the user has spent certain amount of time on the blog page. The scroll intent CTA pops up after a certain extent of scrolling has been done by the reader. The sticky header and footer CTA pops up are placed in the header and footer respectively.
Optimize the loading speed of your blog
The content and the design of an entire blog page will go down the drain if the blog page doesn’t load fast. More than 40% of people abandon a webpage if it takes more than 3 seconds to load thus, a webpage must load within or less than 3 seconds.
Google introduced Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) to optimize webpages for mobile devices with quick loading speed. Google AMP has been introduced keeping both speed and mobile first approach in mind. Integrating Google AMP to your website will not only push your page up the SERP but will also make sure than it comes up in a carousel, on top, that only accommodates AMP pages.
Wrapping up
To create a conversion oriented blog, you must fix your blog with above mentioned inbound marketing tips.
These elements and tips must be used keeping your audience in mind. The blog structure, the placement of CTAs, optin forms and social sharing buttons play a huge role in giving the user a good experience on your blog page which in turns boosts ROI easily.