Just because you pop up a corporate blog and generate traffic doesn’t mean you will actually generate any sales.
I learned this the hard way with KISSmetrics. When we first started our blog, we were quickly able to get it to over 100,000 visitors a month, but we weren’t generating any extra sales from that traffic. In fact, we weren’t generating any sales at all.
Because of blogging costs, I had no choice but to figure out how to make it a profitable channel. I did the same for a handful of other corporate blogs and learned a few tricks that can help any blog convert visitors into customers.
Here are 9 ways you can get your first online sale from your corporate blog:
Assuming you are blogging on topics related to your business, it shouldn’t be very hard for you to convert your readers into customers. The quickest way to drive sales is to send traffic from your blog to either a landing page or your homepage.
Through Hellobar, which is free, you can direct blog traffic to your corporate site.
Hellobar is a bar that allows you to show a welcome message to your blog readers. It stays on the screen as your readers scroll. You can adjust the color of the bar, and you can also control the message and call to action within the bar.
If you look at the image above, you’ll see that I’ve driven over 14,000 visitors to a landing page on Quick Sprout through Hellobar. And it lead to conversions as well – 441 to be exact.
Chances are you have a sidebar on your blog. And there is probably a lot of empty space within it.
A simple way to drive more traffic to a landing page or your homepage is to throw up an ad. The only issue is very few people will click on your banner ad, no matter how attractive the design or messaging may be.
So, one trick you should try is a scrolling ad, similar to my ad of Michael Arrington that scrolls with you as you continue to read Quick Sprout.
By making the ad scroll, I was able to increase the click-throughs by 385%.
The number one way I drive sales from my corporate blogs is through in-content ads.
If you look at the blog homepage on Quick Sprout, you’ll notice ad text between the first blog post and the second one that encourages people to click through.
You can also insert an offer between the end of your blog post and the beginning of your comment section.
The offer above accounts for 6% of all of my sales, which may not seem like a lot, but every bit adds up.
From my sidebar opt-in to my offer before each comment section, I have a handful of ways in which I collect emails on Quick Sprout. Once I collect an email, I then add you to an email drip sequence that pitches you my products and services.
This method is so effective, we do the same thing on the KISSmetrics’ blog. Through marketing automation, we then entice you to buy products from us.
If you are looking to drive sales through this approach, there are a few things you need to know:
It’s typically hard to collect emails unless you offer something for free such as an ebook or a course. That’s why I offer free ebooks and courses in exchange for your email.Pop-ups collect more emails than anything else other than tactic. Your readers may hate it, so you’ll have to test how often to show the pop-ups to them, or else they may leave in frustration.You’ll want to create an email drip sequence in order to convert email subscribers into buyers. If you aren’t sure how to do this, read this article.You’ll need to use an email service provider to send out your emails. I use Get Response as it has some marketing automation built into its platform, and it’s affordable. If you are working with a small budget, Mailchimp has a free plan.You can thank New York Times for making sliders popular on blogs…
If you have a WordPress blog, you can download the upPrev plugin, which creates the slider effect that New York Times has. As someone continues to read your content, a message of your choice will slide up from the bottom right corner of the page.
If you know some basic PHP, you can modify the slider to have a custom message. The message could be a pitch for the product or service that will drive your visitors to a specific landing page, designed to seal the deal.
If you are in the lead generation business or if you have a sales team that closes leads for you, you can quickly double or triple the number of leads you are collecting if you leverage your blog traffic.
Through services like Bounce Exchange, you can capture leads as they exit your page like I do on NeilPatel.com. Bounce Exchange accounts for roughly 60% to 67% of the leads I collect on NeilPatel.com.
You can also create landing pages to which you can drive traffic, similarly to how I Will Teach You to Be Rich does it.
If you use this approach, make sure your landing pages are simple, without any navigational elements. Your goal is to get as many people to convert as possible, so the fewer options you offer them, the better off you are.
Typically, 20% to 30% of the people that land on your landing page will convert into leads, assuming you have good copy.
Or if you want to get a bit more aggressive, you can take a page out of Hubspot’s book and block your premium content.
We recently tested this strategy on KISSmetrics and found it to work well. If you are writing detailed guides and ebooks, people won’t have any issue giving you their information in exchange for an ebook. On the other hand, if you try to block your blog posts from being read, you will get a lot of complaints.
Once you collect a few leads, your sales reps can then call them to close the sale.
This tactic requires a bit more effort, but it works extremely well. If you create a sales letter that breaks down your product or service and you let people buy directly on your blog, you can convert anywhere from 1% to 5% of the traffic that hits the sales page.
I do this on Quick Sprout with the Traffic U, and I sell people video subscriptions.
I don’t generate as many sales as I used to due to the fact that my sales copy isn’t as aggressive as it used to be, but during my peak, I was generating around $65,000 in new monthly income. Not too bad for one sales letter.
If you are wondering how to create a sales letter, this article should give you a quick rundown. Or if you have a bit more time, check out the Copy Hackers blog.
Most companies do this totally wrong. They either blog about their business too much, or they don’t blog about it at all. You need to find a balance. That means you should be blogging about your company and your offerings, but not too often.
Generally, if you are blogging about your business more than 5% of the time, you are being too self-promotional. If you don’t blog about your offerings at all, you need to start doing it.
I don’t recommend you write a blog post saying “check out my company and buy from me” as it won’t be very effective. But with some creativity, you can encourage your readers to buy.
One tactic worth leveraging is using infographics. Through an infographic, you can explain your business in a fun way and encourage new sales.
We did this on our KISSmetrics blog, and it worked extremely well.
You’ve been seeing us do a ton more webinars on KISSmetrics lately because they do well. Not only do they help drive sales, but they drive a ton of traffic to our corporate site.
Typically, if you are looking to do a webinar, it has to be on a topic that benefits your readers. You can’t expect them to attend a webinar that’s just a sales pitch without any benefit to them. Instead, you have to educate them on a topic related to your product or service.
Within the webinar, you can mention your product or give them an exclusive offer if they buy within the next 24 hours.
If you want to learn the exact steps we take to generate $30,000 to $100,000 from every webinar, just read this blog post as we lay out exactly what we do.
Driving your first sale from your blog shouldn’t be hard. If you don’t have the time to leverage all of the tactics above, you can start with the simple ones such as installing Hellobar on your blog.
You’ll notice that the methods above won’t just drive you one-off type of sales. They’ll continually bring you sales, which is why it is worth your time to use each of the tactics above.
If you don’t think it is worth it, consider this: KISSmetrics is able to generate thousands of leads every month due to our blog.
So, how else can you generate sales from your blog?
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