There is no question that if you own a blog you have repeatedly been told about the benefits and necessity for quality content. While this is an essential tool, the importance that is put on it may overshadow the effective things that can be done to help your blog succeed. Building a successful blog is not just about creating quality content, and if this is all that you are focusing on you are most definitely not using your blog to its full potential.
This refers to blog optimization, however not in terms of search, but rather referring to how you can use your blog to move potential customers through the all-powerful marketing funnel.
So, now the question is posed of how do you actually optimize your blog for each stage of the marketing funnel? How do you turn those individuals that are subscribers to your blog into actual leads for your business? The following information will provide you with some contextual and effective ways that you can optimize your blog in order to nurture these “in betweeners” into actual valuable business leads.
Use a Welcome Email
You should never begin a lead conversion opportunity by shoving your brand down your new subscriber’s throats right away. You should instead warm up your newest subscribers with a welcome email. This can even be automated if you wish! This email can be used to show your recipients how valuable they are to you and that you appreciate the subscribing.
This email should also remind these people exactly what they signed up for. For example, let subscribers know how to change their email preferences to suit their particular needs. You can also take this opportunity to encourage your new subscribers to follow you on social media for even more content updates, which is also a great way to increase your actual social reach. Be sure to add some personalized touches to the email with the personal information that is located in the contacts database.
Provide Options for Subscriber Frequency
If you have blogging software that allows you to offer a variety of email options, you should ensure that your subscribers are aware of these options. The quickest way that you can turn off subscribers to your blog is by bombarding their inbox with emails each time you create a new post. While there are some subscribers that will choose to have instant notifications for each post, there are others who may only want to receive emails on a daily, weekly or even monthly basis.
As a result you need to ensure that all of your subscribers understand how to change their frequency preferences and that they can do so whenever they wish. It is also a good idea to create a specific landing page for this purpose. Be sure to link it in the welcome email as well.
Use Smart CTAs (Call to Action)
If you are working to create effective ways to optimize your actual blog for visitors at various lifecycle states, you can use dynamic CTAs. This gives you the ability to segment the offers that are displayed to visitors on your blog, which creates a much more relevant and contextual user experience. For those visitors to your blog that are not yet considered leads, you need to ensure that you display material that is considered “top of the marketing funnel.” These offers are characterized by education offers that require very little commitment. Examples of these include ebooks, checklists, templates, webinars and tip sheets.
Place CTAs on Other Blog Real Estate
The individual blog posts are not the only places to locate your CTAs. You can also take advantage of other areas of blog real estate, such as the sidebar and top of your blog, to display your CTAs.
Place CTAs in Subscriber Notification Emails
If you have completed control over the design of your notification emails that are sent to your subscribers, you should consider inserting your CTAs here, as well. Remember that the actual point of your notification emails is to drive the subscribers back to your actual blog, and when you include you’re the CTA you may actually sacrifice the blog traffic you receive for landing page traffic. You will have to evaluate your particular situation to determine if this is a good tactic for you.
Turing blog subscribers into actual leads can take time and effort, but they will definitely be worth the effort in the long run. Using the tips here, you will be able to effectively turn your subscribers into actual paying customers.
