8 Tips To Create A High-Converting Blog Post
Content marketing is one of the most valuable ways of converting casual readers to your site into new subscribers or customers. It involves marketing principles that encourage site visitors to complete an action that you have as a goal for your blog posts. This could lead to more leads and increased sales for your business or brand.
However, there’s no fixed formula or blanket recipe to create content that can automatically convert leads, as each blog post and brand is different. But, you can apply the tried and trusted methods used by successful blog writers to improve the conversion rate of your content.
This article lists notable tips to help you create a high-converting blog post. Continue reading below to learn more.
1. Know Your Target Audience
One of the most crucial steps in crafting high-converting blogs is to understand the audience your content is intended for. Without a focused analysis or discovery process to find out who your target market is, your content could have a large bounce rate percentage even if web traffic is high. This means your readers might look at your content but will leave without completing any actions. And for that reason, a target audience strategy is necessary to tailor your messaging to people who could be interested in the content you’re creating.
Constructing audience personas has been helpful in discerning who your readers are. These are fictional profiles that represent your audience’s character, lifestyle, motivations, values, and behaviour. Knowing this can assist you in finding ways to appeal to and resonate with them and create valuable content that they can relate to and benefit from.
You can also use this information to improve your existing website’s ease of use. If perhaps, you suspect that your blog site might be too complex for your target audience to navigate, you can view this list post to find solutions to streamline your reader's journey.
2. Create Content That Is Timely
Knowing what your audience is looking for in a blog post is just as important as knowing when to post your content. This is especially true since timeliness can be a critical factor in determining whether your target audience interprets your post as relevant to them.
For instance, if your content topic is about weekend activities with the aim of converting visitors to book for a restaurant, posting on a Monday could yield low conversions. The same could be said about calendar events.
That said, make sure that you post your blog posts timely, possibly close to when your content is suitable for your audience to take action. This can also give you the advantage of creating urgency with your call-to-action (CTA) by making it timebound.
3. Conduct Keyword Research
The keyword research process involves optimizing your content for search engines. Doing this makes the content on your blog more visible and easier to discover, allowing you to reach more audiences. However, these keywords should be used sparingly and distributed evenly throughout your blog post so that you don’t engage in keyword stuffing. This can cause the search engine to penalize your content and lower its ranking.
To find the most commonly used keywords for your content, you can create a list of words related or relevant to the content you create. You can also look into how your competitors rank with the keywords you’ve identified. To do this, you can use a keyword research tool that’ll show you how many times the keywords were used in a blog post.
You can analyse the data to look for related and outlier keywords that are unique but still have a high search frequency. These are the keywords or phrases you can use to include in your blog post. Doing this allows you to draw your target audience to your blog quicker without having to use the same keywords as your competitors.
4. Write For Readability
How you format your content in your blog post is also essential to retain readers' attention. Positioning your content in a layout that’s easy to scan and read through seamlessly has a higher chance of audiences staying to read the whole post. Readability also concerns the writing copy that can be understood by your target market using common words they’re familiar with and doesn’t go beyond their difficulty level.
As such, high-converting blog posts have content made from short sentences that are easy to follow and contain a single subject. Most often, five sentences at maximum can be used to make a paragraph. Then the large white spaces are used to break up each paragraph section sorted into secondary headlines.
In addition, to increase your copy’s readability even further, you can add listicles and bullet points to summarize your ideas. This especially applies to long-form content that needs to hold a reader's attention for an extended time.
5. Use An Attention-Grabbing Headline
Your blog headline is generally the first glimpse or exposure your target audience will have to your content. This can either be on the web search engine page, a landing page, or shared with them as a link. That said, aim for a headline that’s compelling and intriguing enough. It should be something that can spark your reader’s curiosity and interest. Also, note that your headline could be a factor in whether your readers will continue reading your blog post or bounce from it.
There are several approaches to creating attention-grabbing headlines. For instance, you can add and use ‘trigger’ or emotive words to establish a personal connection with your audience. Words such as ‘free’ and ‘online’ also tend to appeal to readers looking for information and reviews about tools or products they need at a bargain for instance. More so, readers looking for universal experiences to relate to or personal development respond well to words such as ‘improve’ and ‘better’.
The general rule for crafting unique headlines is to keep them brief. Also, keep in mind not to give too much away in your headline. Otherwise, your audience could lose interest in reading further.
6. Include Visual Media
Several studies have shown that web users are more attracted to eye-catching visual media than written text and are more likely to engage with it too. This is due to pictures, videos, and infographics being interesting and conveying a single idea in a shorter period successfully. And more so, viewing them doesn't take as much mental ability as reading.
As such, keep in mind that most readers prefer consuming information that’s concise and easily digestible. This doesn't mean that you should skip writing content. Rather, utilize visual media to complement your writing.
Additionally, high-quality visual media can also boost your blog site's credibility, particularly in the case of the infographic to organize statistics and information. These visual aids can make it simpler to interpret and remember data. And once this trust has been established, more of your audience will likely be willing to convert to consumers and subscribers.
A tip to note, it’s ideal that you use two types of visual mediums at the most per post. However, try not to embed too many in one post, or it could distract your reader by taking attention away from your written work.
7. Make A Call To Action
Ultimately, the key to creating a converting blog post is the call to action itself. This is the vehicle that can drive browsing readers and site visitors to become consumers and potential leads. And as such, your call to action should be simple but can prompt users to go through with the goal you want them to take.
It’s advised that your call to action be placed at the end of your post so that it can guide your audience to their next steps. They can be simple and direct phrases such as ‘buy now’, ‘learn more’, or ‘subscribe to our newsletter’ if your CTA goal is lead generation. Furthermore, if your CTA includes phrases such as ‘hurry while stocks last’ for instance, it tends to create a sense of urgency and may even help increase conversions at a faster rate.
Additionally, an important consideration for retaining purchasing conversions is your landing page. Once visitors click on your CTA button, the land page should ideally have simplified information on how to proceed and complete the action. Otherwise, you might find that many visitors fail to make a payment or click the exit button, decreasing your conversion rate in the process.
8. Boost Blog Post Credibility
Getting readers to complete a prompted call to action will need them to trust that you and your blog are reputable. This is particularly the case wherein your conversion goal is a signup or site visitors completing a purchase. Your target audience needs to feel safe that you won't spam them, misuse their information or that your website is secure enough to enter their payment information.
Thus, to boost your blog's reputation, you can refine some of the profile features that best display your brand identity. For instance, you can create a recognizable and fantastic logo or a personal image visible on your blog post. You can also include personal information such as an about us section, email address, social media handles, and a business address.
Wrapping Up
A highly converting blog post aims to increase customer leads and acquisition using content marketing. Your blog post can achieve this by focusing on what your target audience can gain from your blog and using ways to get them to complete your call to action. And in terms of visibility, using keywords and optimizing your content for search engines can ensure users find your posts easier.
And ultimately, all of the elements listed above can be used together as part of a strategy to turn your casual readers into new consumers.