4 Tips for Writing a Blog Post That Converts like Gangbusters
Have you ever spent hours (or even days) working on a blog post only for it to get a conversion rate of *gasp* 1 percent?
Yeah, that stings.
It becomes even less fun when you see your competitors or industry contemporaries making a killing in their blogging efforts.
You can’t help asking:
How do they do it?
What are they doing that I’m not?
What kind of human sacrifice do I need to make for my blog post to go viral?
(if the human sacrifice bit works out for you please get back to me)
Thankfully, there are steps you can take to maximize your blog post’s potential for converting readers into leads or clients.
Interested? Dive right in!
1. Identify and know your audience
If you don’t know and understand who you’re writing for, chances are your readers won’t give a damn about what you have to say (or write).
Here’s a reality check: Writing for an audience you barely — if at all — know is akin to launching a missile with the active radar homing system turned off.
Do it this way and you’re bound to miss your target.
So identify your audience. Take the time to get to know them.
For starters, you can ask yourself the following questions:
- What are they looking for?
- What are their pain points?
- What can you do to address these pain points?
Once you get all that figured out, you’ll be able to tailor your writing in a way that speaks directly to them.
When every word you write makes it clear that you’re familiar with their struggles, they are far more likely to think, Hey, this person gets it. Maybe he/she has the solution I’m looking for.
Protip: Understand your Audience Better Through Buyer Personas
Creating a buyer persona is a great first step to narrowing down your target audience.
Simply put, a buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on an approximation of real data and information acquired from market research. Think of them like baseball cards. But instead of baseball stats, you get customer demographics, behavior patterns, motivations, hobbies, and goals, just to name a few.
A study by Skytap reports that buyer personas can:
- Increase traffic by 210%
- Lead to a 55% increase in organic search traffic
- Increase leads from online marketing by 97%
- Increase in leads from all channels by 124%
- Increase online marketing opportunities by 73%
Here’s a good example of a buyer persona.
You can build your buyer personas by finding the answers to the following questions:
- What are the buyer’s role and responsibilities in the company?
- What type of company does the buyer own or work for?
- What level of education did the buyer attain?
- What does the buyer like to do in his free time?
- What’s the buyer’s definition of success in regards to her role in the company?
- What is the buyer’s age?
- How much does the buyer earn?
- What are the buyer’s most common objections when purchasing a product or service?
- And so on.
Any or all of the following methods will help you develop your buyer personas.
- Market Research. Conducting one-on-one interviews with ideal clients or using focus groups can go a long way into fleshing out your buyer persona.
- Surveys. Sending questionnaires to your prospects can yield valuable and pertinent information about their buying behavior, preferences, and telling personality traits. Offering small incentives such as discounts or free product coupons can help attract more respondents.
- Use Q&A platforms. Using platforms like Quora or Reddit can prove instrumental in adding more meat to your buyer personas. By interacting with the community and asking them specific questions, you can get a truckload of information that will inform your targeting and marketing strategy.
- Social analytics. Just like everybody else, your prospects are probably sharing their thoughts and experiences on social media all the time. The best part? Social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter offer social analytics, providing you relevant data and actionable insights that reveal a great deal about your target audience’s buying behavior.
Remember, the more detailed the buyer persona is, the better. If you’re strapped for questions to ask, Hubspot’s Free Buyer Persona template should give you great ideas.
2. Hook readers with a killer intro
You want your readers to stay on your page long enough to click your link or enter their email address?
Hook them right from the beginning.
You may have written the most in-depth and most comprehensive blog post ever, but if what you’ve written is a snoozer, all your genius thoughts and practical advice will be of benefit to no one.
If you doubt that even for one moment, here’s a fun fact (not) for you: According to a 2017 study by Hosting Facts, “the average human attention span has declined from 12 seconds in the year 2000 to 8 seconds now.”
Eight seconds. That’s one second less than the attention of a goldfish!\
So why not make your introduction engaging? Write it in a way where it would be virtually impossible for your readers to stop reading.
How do you write an introduction that will knock them dead (figuratively speaking)? Let us count the ways.
- Address your readers right away. Write your blog as if you’re talking directly to the reader. By talking to them in the second person, it’s far easier to establish a personal connection from the get-go. Do it this way and you’re far more likely to provoke an emotional connection and subsequently, a response.
- Engage their emotional triggers. People are compelled to read a piece of content that makes them feel something. Whether it’s frustration, love, uncertainty, or desire, engaging your readers’ emotions will almost always trigger a response.
- Identify your audience’s problem. You have to let your readers know that you understand their struggles right from the start.
- Promise a solution. Now that you’ve identified your readers’ struggles, you have to make it clear to them that you have the solutions they’re looking for. Let them know you’re the superhero they deserve. Make them understand that every word of your blog post will be of great use to them.
- Avoid using “fluff” words or phrases. Unnecessary words can significantly reduce the impact of your words. A blog post without focus can quickly lose its readers.
Examples? Here’s a couple of good ones.
Rob Powell of Successful Blogging:
Sarah Peterson of Blogging Wizard:
3. Structure your blog posts
Nothing scares away a reader more than a big block of text staring them in the face.
Your words may flow together like a Hemingway prose, but without a clear structure, chances are the reader won’t even make it through the first paragraph.
Remember what I said earlier about people’s shrinking attention spans?
Exactly.
If you want your readers to give your blog post the time of day, you have to structure your blog content as if you’re building your own house.
In other words, you have to break up your blog post into smaller, more palatable pieces.
Drake gets it.
Here are important guidelines in structuring your blog posts.
- Write shorter paragraphs (three to four lines maximum is ideal).
- Use bullet points or numbers to create a list of features, tips, and steps.
- Use bold texts to emphasize important words or phrases (this makes it easy for readers to find key points as they skim through your blog post).
- Use subheaders. On top of breaking up big blocks of text into more digestible pieces of content, subheaders also serve as important signposts that make it easy for Google to understand the structure of your site. This is good for your site’s SEO rankings.
- Insert images. Relevant images help emphasize the main points of your blog post, not to mention that it works wonders for boosting reader engagement. You can use free resources like Pixabay, StockSnap.io, and Pexels if you’re on a tight budget. Canva can also be a tremendous help if you want to create or design your own.
3. Do Keyword Research
Outside of social media, your blog’s readership is limited to people searching for keywords your post may rank for.
If you want your blog post to appear higher in search engine results, you have to optimize your blog post for SEO (Search Engine Optimization).
Search engines like Google and Bing, after all, are the main highways through which the majority of web traffic goes through. If the internet is one massive library, search engines serve as the electronic systems that catalog its books.
As such, the trick is to target relevant keywords/keyphrases that your ideal customers are likely to use when doing a search on Google.
So what do you need to do to find these keywords? Keyword research, of course!
When doing keyword research, here are essential considerations to keep in mind:
- Search volume
- Level of competition
- CPC (cost per click)
- Etc.
Word of warning: keyword research can be tricky. Keywords with a high search volume may have more potential in terms of traffic, but the fact that they are highly targeted also means that many are competing for that exact same word or phrase.
This is where long-tail keywords can come in handy.
Long-tail keywords are longer (three or more) keyword phrases that are more specific and unique simply by virtue of their length. Because they are longer, they have much less competition than shorter and broader keywords, and therefore have better potential in drawing attention to your blog post.
Sounds complicated? Fret not! There’s a wide range of keyword research tools that not only streamline the process for you, they also generate keyword suggestions that will inform your keyword strategy.
A free keyword research tool like Ubersuggest, for instance, can help you expand your keyword list into hundreds of long-tail variations.
The tool also provides you with valuable metrics that help you determine a keyword’s profitability, namely the monthly search volume, competition level, and CPC (cost per click).
The trick to finding profitable keywords is to find the sweet spot between search volume and competition level.
As you become more familiar with the keyword research process and learn advanced tricks along the way, you’ll find that it’s in your best interests to use more than one keyword research tool.
Here are the ones I’d recommend.
4. Craft an Effective Call to Action (CTA)
So the reader has taken the time to read the entirety of your blog post, taking something valuable from the experience.
At the very least, your visitor now gives a damn about what you have to say. He is primed and willing to learn more from you.
The problem? Your blog article doesn’t tell the reader how to take the next step. Or maybe it does but wasn’t quite clear about it.
If you want your blog post to earn a ton of conversions, you have to give your readers clues on what to do next. Also, these clues should be easy to spot and identify.
But first, to ensure that we’re on the same page, let’s define “conversion.”
Simply put, a conversion is an action your reader takes that adds value to your business. It could be a sale, a lead, a download, or an opt-in.
So how do we get a reader to take that desired action? Simple: You need to craft a strong and effective call-to-action.
As the term implies, the call-to-action is an interactive prompt (a visual or text or a combination of both) that tells a reader, customer, or prospect what to do next.
However, not all CTA’s are created equal. You have to optimize your call-to-action text or buttons to generate more conversions.
The following are the best practices in crafting high-converting CTAs:
- Write a CTA copy that speaks directly to your audience
- Use compelling action verbs like Start, Sign up now, or Click here!.
- State the benefits the reader will get from taking the desired action (good examples would be Download your FREE eBook here! or Get the FREE course!)
- Use numbers when possible (discounts, pricing, deadlines can help spring readers to action).
- Capture the reader’s attention with the right color
Below are two call-to-action examples you can’t help but click.
Final Word
Look, traffic is great. It looks good on your Analytics display and provides valuable data that will inform your blog marketing strategy. But it’s NOT the end goal of your blogging campaign.
If you want to see gains on your financial assets, you have to earn those conversions.
Easier said than done, but if you follow all the four tips mentioned above, then you’re on the right track.
Do you have any other suggestions on how to write a high-converting blog post? Let me know in the comments section below!
Originally published at lawrencearboleda.com on July 13, 2018.
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