You can blog for many reasons: Because you have something to tell the world, because you want to share your hobby or expertise, because you want to make money - or even all of that.
But whatever the reason, there will always be a moment when you realize you would want to achieve more with your blog. That's when you may want to generate more leads through your blogging efforts to increase your income, connect to important people or drive more clients to your business. Here are nine things you can do to increase your blog conversions:
1. Make Your Blog Faster
According to Kiss Metrics, 40% of people abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load. Slow websites may scare away many potential leads!
With the variety of plugins and available media to use in your articles, WordPress blogs may become slow very easily. Here's the basic list of making your blog faster:
- Delete (not just disable) all the plugins you don't really need. Plugins have the ability to pile up. And they may be slowing your blog down. Delete everything you are not using: Keep only the necessary stuff.
- Compress images before uploading them to your blog. This tool is just awesome (and free!) for that.
Most people will also recommend using WordPress caching plugin - I've never seen much difference with them and they usually only cause headache. But you may try: You may be luckier!
2. Pick a Responsive WordPress Theme
Most blogs are impossible to read and most forms are impossible to complete on my iPhone. And mobile web userbase is growing day by day!
Here's a good list of free responsive WordPress themes to choose from.
3. Design a Good Sign-up Form
Most lead generation tools come with beautiful forms and easy WordPress integration. But don't stop there!
Test a lot. Who knows maybe removing the sidebar and keeping just ONE "Subscribe" form will boost your leads!
Or maybe you'll have more luck with the fixed "Sign up" widget which will follow the users while they are scrolling.
Or try a well-designed pop-up call-to-action (I've seen them being implemented very softly without scaring readers away!)
There's also a plugin that will help you create great landing pages for your call-to-action.
4. Opt-in People Who Post Comments
I've been using this plugin forever: It gives readers who decide to comment an ability to easily subscribe to my newsletter.
5. Create Digital Books and Give Them Away
Giving your readers something to take home accomplishes two goals:
- More subscribers (You can ask them to subscribe in order to download!)
- More return visitors (Whenever they are reading your eBook on their iPad, they will be reminded to check your site again!)
Here's a good guide from DirJournal on increasing leads by using freebies.
6. Pick Your Calls to Action
That's a very widespread problem with blogs (and something I am guilty of myself!): There are so many calls-to-action that it becomes confusing!
Subscribe, share, follow, download, login, etc
Pick your most important one and focus on it: Make it obvious and clean without distracting your readers!
7. Blog Consistently
Creating content regularly builds up readers' expectation: They are more willing to interact and subscribe.
This doesn't mean blogging every day: Even once a month is good enough! Writing one awesome article a month will accomplish more than adding lots of mediocre content on a daily basis.
8. Don't Write a Lot: Promote a Lot!
I've seen this a lot: Bloggers are stressing out themselves with writing a lot and most of their content goes unnoticed.
It should be the other way around: Don't write a new article until you are sure you spent a considerable amount of time and effort on promoting your previous one.
Here's a step by step cheatsheet for you:
9. Test a Lot
More often than not, understanding your audience comes more from testing than the theory. You can read others' case studies on how some tactic helped someone in boosting their leads, do exactly the same and never see similar results
Here are some easy A/B testing plugins for WordPress. And here's a detailed report on how set up A/B test on WordPress using Google Analytics.
Do you have any more lead generation ideas? Please share them in the comments!