Your Readers Are Ready

So you’ve got a blog and people are reading it. Excellent. But now it’s time to generate some profit from your hard-earned efforts. What do you do to turn readers into customers?

Let’s face it, it’s easier to close the deal with someone who knows you versus someone who doesn’t. People are reading your content which means they find it valuable and if you worked hard, they also find you creditable for solving their problems.

Get the Word Out

Every time you post a blog you should ensure your community and email members have access to it. This means dedicated social posts and emails about your blog should go out on a regular basis. Think of this as part of the blogging process, not an after-thought once you have posted each blog. A tree that false in the forest that no one hears… you get it.

Send people to the article you just posted about, not your main blog page. It’s better to encourage a read about a specific issue, not “hey come and check out my blog about the industry.” That’s too broad a message.

Make Your Outreach Count

Create engaging headlines and enticing teasers in your social and email content to get people to your site to read the blog. You can tease for further engagement but don’t be misleading or you may lose people forever. Include your first paragraph or two from the blog in your social posts and ask for the click to read more. This is an important reason to really score a home run with the intro material in your blog. Of course the other obvious reason this is important is if someone finds your blog browsing around on your site, you want the first section to really pull them into the content.

Encourage Readers to Read More

Create an “exit intent” pop up and ask your readers if they want to receive more articles like this directly in their inbox. Exit intent pop ups are less intrusive and appear when people are typically taking an action to leave the site.

One very effective way to get email opt-ins is to create a variety of articles on one subject (we discussed this in the last email) then at the bottom of the final article give the reader a link to download with even more information about the subject. This brings up another strategy…

Leave Them Wanting More

Don’t ever be deceptive or misleading but do entice your readers to learn more. Don’t create articles or downloads that are a one-stop shop for all your customers’ problems! After all you aren’t doing all this work just for the fun of it right?

Use Remarketing Ads

Send ads to people that came to your site and read your articles. Google Display ads will follow your readers around the internet, and at some point they may say, “you know I’m going back to the site to check out their offers.”

Data, Data – Did I Mention Data?

Use Google Analytics to see which articles are keeping people engaged. Consider what it is about those articles that is working and try some more based on your insights. See if your links to other articles are working too.

Make sure you are tracking your main conversion goals in analytics as well, such as a sale or a lead reaching out. Getting revenue from your blog can happen and it’s wonderful when you can see it in the data.

And don’t be intimidated by Google Analytics. An expert can set it up and show you how to use it.