We’re almost there. The last 3 blog posts in this series have tackled the foundations of a successful business blogging strategy:

1. How to Start a Killer Business Blog

2. How to Write a Killer Business Blog

3. How to Market a Killer Business Blog

We’ve looked at the best ways to set-up your blog, the tips and tricks of successful blog writing, and the best practices in blog marketing. By now, you’re armed with all the information you need to create and curate a successful corporate blog – but so what? Why have we gone to all this effort?

To improve sales. Our business blog, as helpful and valuable as it may be, is going to be a phenomenal waste of time unless we use it to sell our products and services. The previous three posts have been designed to drive your target audience to your blog, and encourage their engagement – but this post is designed to convert them from visitors into customers. These final 5 steps explore the most crucial elements of your blog. We’ll be using CTAs, landing pages, long-tail keywords, custom meta-descriptions and email marketing to convert your blog into a money-making machine. Let’s get started!

5. Use a Call-to-Action on every blog post

‘BUY MY STUFF’

You’ve written an insightful blog post. It’s full of helpful information and resources, it tackles a recent industry development, and it’s just plain interesting. Great! You’ve marketed it through your social networks, promoted it with guest blog posts and it’s getting read by lots of people. But what happens next?

When a visitor finishes reading your blog posts, they have two choices – to continue engaging with your website, its content and potentially even its products; or to disappear off into the ether of the web, and do something else. Most of the time, your readers will choose option 2. After all, there are a wealth of distractions on the web, and holding their interest is an immense challenge.

If we want readers to continue engaging with our website, we have to make it easy for them: seriously easy. We have provide them with clear instructions, and an even clearer incentive for them to stick around – we need to provide them with a Call-to-Action.

A Call-to-Action, or CTA, is an interactive link that encourages further action from the visitor. Most commonly, it takes the form of a banner or button, and it’s designed to encourage visitors further down the sales funnel. This action will depend on your particular niche and goals, but there are a few failsafe approaches you could try:

Blog Subscription

As you’ll see in point #1, getting your visitors to opt-in to your mailing list is hugely beneficial. Outline the benefits of blog subscription, and outline what they should expect from opting-in. For a visual example, check out the end of this blog post!

Free Resource Download

If you’ve gone to the effort of making a free eBook resource, why not promote it at the end of your posts? If your visitor has benefited from your blog post, they’re likely to be open to downloading more helpful information from you!

Product Offer

You need to be careful with this type of CTA, as it can alienate new visitors that aren’t looking to buy. Reserve it for blog posts that are targeted at qualified sales leads.

Using a CTA will channel your visitor further into your website and resources, gradually increasing their product knowledge and readying them for a final sales-based CTA . Add one CTA to every post, to encourage this process as much as possible – and your blog will be kick-starting sales before you know it!

4. Combine CTAs with landing pages

Landing pages are the best way to improve the efficacy of CTAs. Once a visitor has clicked-through a CTA, there’s still no guarantee that they’ll take your suggested course of action. If it was an eBook CTA, they might not download it – or if it was a blog subscription CTA, there’s no guarantee that they’ll actually provide you with their email address. Landing pages are designed to focus all of the visitors attention on your CTA, and provides specially selected information to outline its benefits – doing everything thing it can to ensure CTA success.

Our very own eBook landing page!

Landing pages should have the following features:

Your USP (Unique Selling Proposition)

Your landing page is offering your visitor something – but what? Be sure to explain exactly what is on offer – leave nothing to the imagination!

Bullet Point List of Benefits

Make it really easy for people to see the benefits of your offer, and show-off your knowledge of the target audience. Explain exactly why they will benefit from this offer.

Illustrative Image

By providing an image of your product, eBook or email newsletter, you’re letting the visitor know what to expect from your offer. You’re trying to answer their questions and uncertainties, and providing crystal clear evidence of what clicking through your landing page will offer.

Social Proof

Including a testimonial is an excellent way of adding the weight of social proof to your argument -‘Oh, well if they liked it, I should as well!’

One Final CTA

Round it all off with a single, final CTA. Minimize the amount of information your reader has to part with, to encourage that all-important click!

3. Attract qualified leads with long-tail keywords

We briefly covered keywords in our last post, as a way of increasing awareness of your business blog. This keyword strategy is designed to increase the conversions of your business blog as well!

As we explained in our guide to in-text SEO, long-tail keywords are the longer and more specific search terms that people might use to find your website.

Despite attracting less search traffic, using these terms in your blog content will actually increase your conversion rate. Using long-tail keywords indicates that visitors have already performed their preliminary research, have been able to narrow down their search, and are at a later stage of the product lifecycle. In other words, the visitors you attract with long-tail keywords are more likely to buy from you.

2. Boost search engine conversion with custom meta-descriptions

When your website appears in a search engine results page (SERP), it’s accompanied by a small description of the page content. Normally, Google will pull a snippet from your page relevant to the search query – but by writing your own meta-descriptions, you can actually boost your blog conversion rates.

If you leave the description to Google, there’s no guarantee that it’ll pull out a persuasive piece of text. It might not be relevant to your visitor, and they might not click the link. By adding your own description, you can create relevant, persuasive sales copy that is designed specially to encourage that click-through. If you’ve optimized a webpage for ‘cheap health supplements New York’, you can be confident that it will probably rank for that term. You can then customize your description to match:

This meta-description proves relevance to the search query, instills confidence in your visitor, and will have a direct impact on conversion as a result. Those long-tail visitors you attracted earlier will now click onto your website, and enter the sales funnel!

1. Use email to boost your sales

Content and blog marketing strategy in 2014 is hugely dependent on successful email marketing. As we’ve said, the end goal of any business blog marketing strategy is conversion – turning visitors into customers, and increasing sales. Your blog alone is an incredible tool for attracting visitors, and high-quality content will help the conversion process – but email marketing will boost your sales much, much more.

Email is an incredibly personal way of communicating with prospects. By having a visitor opt-in to your mailing list, you can send personalized, targeted emails that will drive your prospects through the sales funnel. Everything from useful guide posts for new leads, to advanced product case studies for established leads – culminating eventually in sales.

The easiest way to encourage mailing list opt-ins is through a CTA on your blog (told you we’d come back to that point!). By providing valuable content on a regular basis, you can legitimately suggest that your visitors subscribe to your blog to receive regular summary emails. Not only will your visitors have access to all of your blog content, but you’ll be able to send targeted product promotions and offers.

For mailing lists less than 2000 people, MailChimp provides a free and valuable tool for adding email to your content marketing strategy. It comes with templates, intuitive design elements and tools to manage subscriptions. Simply add a CTA to your blog to encourage subscription and start sending out targeted, helpful email newsletters.

Congratulations! You’ve made it. The last 4 blog posts have explored every facet of creating a successful business blog. Setting it up, writing content for it, marketing and finally, converting visitors to customers. You’re now armed with the tools needed to kick-start your own business blogging campaign. So what are you waiting for? Get going!

Oh.. you don’t have the time? That’s understandable. Why not check out our blog management solutions? We can set-up your business blog and update it regularly with unbeatable content – from only $99 a week.

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