Blogging Heros
You love writing your blog. Or at the very least, you take pride in your blog content. But good, fun-to-write content alone isn’t enough to help you achieve your most pressing goals.
Even if you have excellent, properly targeted content in a valuable niche, there’s no guarantee you’re going to earn the steady stream of sales that you want.
So what steps can you take to get more sales using your blog content?
How to Generate More Sales From a Blog
These are some of the best strategies you can use to cultivate more sales from your existing blog:
1. Invest in multimedia content. For starters, consider investing in multimedia content. Written content works just fine for many applications, but users tend to be more engaged with content that includes video or audio.For example, investing in video production and embedding explanatory videos into your posts will allow you to appeal to your audience in a more relevant, modern way. You can also use your audio and video content to promote your blog across other channels, like YouTube.
2. Add at least one call to action (CTA) in every post. Make sure you include at least one call to action (CTA) in every blog post you write. At the end of the post, or somewhere near the middle, encourage readers to make a purchase or learn more about a specific product or service you offer. Without prompting, most people aren’t going to go out of their way to look for products to buy, so you have to persuade them to take action.
3. Consider using multiple CTAs in some posts. CTAs are so strong and so important that it’s often worth including multiple CTAs in the same post. You must be careful with this, because you don’t want to spam or annoy your readers; instead, find a natural way to position your products and services.
4. Write content around specific products. Think about what you want to sell before you create a new piece of content. Your topic idea should be inspired buy what you want your readers to think and feel when considering a purchase. For example, if you’re selling bicycles, and you just launched a new speed bike, you could write a post about how to improve your cycling race times by investing in new equipment.
5. Appeal to users at every stage of the customer journey. Work on understanding your customer journey. The customer journey is the path a person takes from ignorance to awareness and, eventually, to purchasing. The customer journey looks a little different for every business and every industry, but it generally follows the same flow. Ideally, you’ll have content that targets users at every stage of this journey, including when they’re only vaguely aware of the problem you’re solving and when they’re ready to make a final purchase.
6. Distribute your content further. Work on pushing your content further. Share on social media, publish offsite content with other publishers, build links, and market and advertise your best work.
7. Cultivate a community. Consider building a full community around your blog. You’re going to see more sales if your readers all share a sense of connection and community. You can start by engaging with commenters – or build your own forum where users can participate actively.
8. Track blog posts with great sales records and mimic them. Carefully measure the results of each of your blog posts. When you have a post that succeeds in capturing a significant number of sales, figure out what’s special about it and try to replicate it in future posts.
Breaking Through a Plateau
Even after using these strategies, you may find yourself experiencing a plateau – a point where your sales seem to stop growing. What can you do to breakthrough this plateau?
· Consider targeting a new niche. Depending on your circumstances, you may be limited by your target audience. If you’re focusing on a very specific niche, there may be an artificial cap to the number of people you can reach. If this is the case, consider targeting a new niche or expanding your target audience.
· Invest more heavily in marketing and advertising. If you have extra capital, consider investing more heavily in marketing and advertising. Your blog may be a perfect sales generating engine, but if only a few people are discovering it, you’re not going to earn much momentum. Work on attracting more people to your blog.
· Build a supplementary domain/website. Another option is to build a supplementary domain or a complementary website for mutual support. This is especially powerful if you have expertise in two related fields, and you have enough time and resources to foster both blogs. Cross-linking and cross-promotion will allow you to grow both websites simultaneously. Generating sales from a blog isn’t easy, even if you have awesome products and spectacular blog content. But with these strategies, you should be in a much better position to get the sales you want and keep your blog running strong.
