In my last post, how to grow traffic to your blog, I gave you some ideas on how to up your traffic. But if you’re hoping to turn this into a sale, you might want to take some preparations into account.
Simple Call to Action
If you’re bringing people back to your blog, make sure the thing you most want them to do is obvious on your site. If you’re calling them back to a specific post, make sure that only the action you want them to take is linked. The more links in a post, the more distractions that might lead people to click something of no value to your efforts. (You’ll note that most of my posts have lots of links, even if I’m selling things. It’s because I don’t need the sale as much as I want the interactions. When I really really need someone to take the action, there’s only one obvious link.)
Brief Post With More Than One Offer Point
When I wrote the post about premium WordPress themes, I put the offer in three places. I put it at the top of the post, in graphics in the middle of the post, and at the bottom of the post. I’d say that’s fairly clear what I want you to do. The #1 thing I see wrong on sales pages all over the web (and use the word “sales” loosely) is that people put the offer way at the bottom of a mountain of text and information and then by the time people get there, they’re fatigued.
Make the offer obvious and make it often.
Use Big Graphical Buttons
If I want you to reallllllly do something, why not make it super obvious with a button?
That works pretty darned well, don’t you think? Why ignore the obvious and simplest way to draw attention to where you need it?
Take a Few Approaches
Another way to convert is to take more than one swing at getting people to buy. Maybe the first time, you write a post promoting what you’re selling. Maybe the second time, you tell a story about how someone was successful using the product. Maybe the third time, you think up an offer. If you spread these out with other content in between, it won’t frustrate your buyers (hopefully), and they’ll respond to whichever type of offer makes more sense for them.
Don’t Oversell
There are things I don’t like, even if they work. I don’t like popunders (those graphic popups that hide under your open web browser waiting for you to find them later). I don’t like lightbox overlay offers that push you down some kind of conversion (because they block the content). I don’t like anything that’s going to get in the way of the primary content of the platform. To me, it’s overselling. It’s pushy, even if it’s an electronic tool. It’s just not my way. Does it work? Probably, because people do it. What do you think of the people who use it? Not as highly as you could, I’m going to guess.
The thing is, people who use those kinds of conversion methods don’t much care what you think. They’re out for business. Factor that into your decisions on how you want to do business with them.
Comments Off
One other thing to consider: if you’re pushing for a call to action of a sale (even if that sale is a signup or a subscription, etc), then you might consider disabling comments for that post. Why let people get distracted by adding to the conversation if what you really want is for them to click buy? It’s a tactic I’d use sparingly, but definitely something that works really well for pushing people’s attention to where it should be, instead of letting them out into the comments area to get distracted.
And You?
What are you finding more successful or not? What did I miss? What did I call out that you want to defend?
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