Once you’ve picked your niche and got your blog set up, you’ll want to start adding content in order to boost your opt-ins and sales. Stop wasting your time guessing and try these ways to boost your opt-in or sales. Some of them are ways to add a stream of income such as paid reviews and others are ways to get more traffic which can translate into more buys and more conversions however it answers the question of how to get more opt-ins
- Share Reviews – Make a page for your website that tells people that you will create product reviews for them. You can charge directly for the blog post, and get a free product. When you do it that way you must reveal to your audience that it’s a paid review. You can also do reviews for affiliate products that you’ve purchased or even products you want people to buy from Amazon.
- Hold Contests – A contest is a great way to create more exposure and traffic for your blog. You can even get sponsorships for the contest via a vendor. If you’re already a good affiliate for anyone just ask them.
- Offer Freebies – You can do all sorts of things with freebies. You can have a freebie of the week, offer different types of freebies from courses to eBooks, and so forth. You can even have a different freebie for each category on your blog such as Tech Tuesdays. If it’s a regular thing not only will people come back but they’ll tell their friends.
- Limited-time Offers – Scarcity can often push someone over the edge when they were already considering buying your offers. You can do this in many ways, you can have daily deals, weekly specials, and even deals that go up in price the more people buy it so that those who get in early get a cheaper price. If you do it on a regular basis people will keep coming back due to the expectation of amazing deals from you.
- Behind-the-Scenes Videos – As a blogger, you live a romantic life for many of your readers. They often want to be you. They want to know more about you and how you do what you do. Show them with a “day in the life” video of your life as a blogger.
- Product Demonstrations – If you can offer demos of any product or service that you offer to your audience they’re going to love it and sales will most certainly go up. A demo can be made quickly by doing a quick video. (Hint: That video can be repurposed into a social media post, an advertisement, and more)
- Interview People – Interview an expert, interview your customers, and anyone who fits in with your niche that will offer valuable content to your audience. People love reading other people’s stories but remember, just because you’re blogging doesn’t mean it can’t be a video. Include a text transcript too.
- Answer Customer Questions – When you get a customer question in an email, as a social media question, or in-person (it really doesn’t matter) answer the question on the blog. You can get permission to use their name and link to their website or you can write it with the questioner being anonymous.
- Future-Use Coupons – This is a great way to encourage customers to buy more. Offer them a coupon that offers them extra dollars off their next purchase for every dollar they spend right now. If you’ve ever shopped at Belk’s or Kohls and some other department stores they do that very successfully and you can too on your blog. Offer samples
- Bulk Order Rewards – Depending on what you sell on your blog if you have a lot of products you can offer them a bulk order reward. This means if they buy more than a certain number of products they get a discount. This can work with services too. For example, you often see this with writers as well as virtual assistants who offer discounts on more articles purchased or more hours bought.
- Cross-Promotions – You may have heard of this referred to as cross-sells. This is a way, sometimes at checkout, where you can recommend other products. Think about how Amazon does this. They always have a portion of the checkout page visible to the buyer that says something like, “Customers who purchased this also purchased that.”
- Charity Donations – You can tie in purchases from customers to a charity by stating on your blog that 10 percent of every purchase (or 10 percent of total profits) goes to your charity of choice. Hint: Find out which charities your audience likes so that it makes it worth it for them.
- Insider Club Deals / Memberships – Did you know that you can gate some of your content only for members? You can also start a membership for your information products so that people pay a monthly fee and get access to all the info products you produce each month.
- Offer a Gift with Purchase – This is always popular. There is a store in the USA called Clair’s that sells accessories such as gloves, purses, makeup, bracelets, jewelry, and so forth. When you go to checkout they always say something like, “Buy one more of those and you pick one of these free items.” This is very doable when selling products on your blog. Even if it’s an affiliate product you can ask them to send you their receipt via a form to qualify for their gift.
- Drawings – Another way to get more traffic is to have a drawing to win something. Everyone gets an entry for their purchase, but probably by law you must let everyone enter, that’s okay because you’ll be collecting their email addresses in order that they can enter to win. That’s a win-win for you.
- Free Consultation – If you also offer services, a great way to help your audience and get more leads is to offer a free consultation. Usually, this involves about a 30-minute call. It’s suggested you use a good intake form for anyone signing up for the free consultation so that you can get them on your list, and prescreen them prior to the call to make the best use of your time. Good software for this is Acuity Scheduling.
- Add-Ons – Another way to convert is to offer add-ons if they act. In some cases, people have their affiliate programs set up so that you can easily add your offer (Amember can do this) so that even as an affiliate you can offer something else to them if they act now.
- Ask Your Audiences Opinion – When you’re getting ready to launch a new product you can ask them what the number one question is that they have about the new product. You can also ask them about what new features they’d like to see in the new product. What exactly would make them sign up or buy this new product?
- Ask for Feedback/Testimonials – Once someone has purchased make it part of your process, which you can add to your buyer autoresponder, to ask them for feedback so you can make the product better as well as ask for a testimonial.
- Respond to Comments with Knowledge – When someone comments on your blog (or anywhere else for that matter) always respond with info, resources, and knowledgeable advice that is designed to get them to make that purchase.
- Pull Feedback from Other Sources – For example, social media, Yelp reviews, and other earned media into your blog. This is a great source of additional content that you can share everywhere.
- Publish Quality Posts – Ensure that the content you’re sharing offers value to the audience. For a post to be high-quality it needs to give information from the point of view of the audience. It should encourage engagement, inform them, and motivate them.
- Popups / Overlays – These are a great way to get more attention. Your audience can always delete the popup or overlay but studies show that they really work to get your offers to the reader.
- Offer Multiple Sign-up Opportunities – Not only should you offer different offers, but they should be on different pages, at the end of posts, on your sidebar, in the footer, and anywhere that can potentially attract someone to sign up. You don’t want these to be distracting, but you do want them to be in multiple places with multiple offers.
- Share Examples – Anytime you’re describing something to your reader it always helps if you can share real-life Even if you don’t have any of your own yet, you can curate and share other people’s examples. (Hint: Always link back to the original blog and don’t cut and paste their content.)
- Share Feedback to Answer Questions — For example, if someone said they love the product but is struggling with something about it, post that feedback (without their name) and then answer their question or offer clarification in case others have the same trouble
Create a Content Calendar and Schedule
The best way to ensure that you are publishing enough content across all platforms including your blog that will bring traffic and sales is to create a content planning schedule and a content calendar. Your content calendar will be based on the products you want to promote focusing on the problems they solve for your audience. Then you can throw in trending topics to give your content a more current feel and show you're up to date and paying attention to what's happening.
For example, if you have identified an app that you know your audience will find value in starting with educating your audience about the problem before you provide the solution. By the time you’re done talking about the problem when you introduce the solution, they’ll be ready to purchase.
Always Include a Call to Action
Every post that you publish should have a reason for being, as mentioned before. When you are brainstorming the types of posts you want to include on your blog think about your goals. A goal, to be effective, needs to be able to be converted to a call to action.
Sell Stuff
Don’t be afraid to sell something on every single post that you publish within the text, in an advertisement in between paragraphs, through sidebar links, pop-ups or slides, and via content upgrades to help convert people to your email list. If your audience can easily consume the free content you’re providing, giving them more ways to buy will improve sales. Don’t be fearful of doing this. Yes, some people may get mad and go away. But they aren’t your target audience anyway.
Create Clear CTAs
When developing your CTAs, it’s important to use clear language that provokes enthusiasm, provides a reason (solves pain points) for your audience to act, limits the time they can act, and shows proof that the solution works for other people just like them. Additionally, the CTA button when one is used should be very prominent and use words that demand action rather than “buy now” say something like: “Yes! I want my Freedom Now!”
- Optimize Your SEO — There are two types of SEO. On-page SEO and off-page SEO. Both types of SEO are important.
- On-Page SEO – On-page, SEO should mean that you use keyworded titles, headers, subheadings, smart internal linking, and content that speaks directly to your audience. It’s anything that you do from graphic design, the layout of your website and blog, and the words you use on the page that encompasses on-page SEO.
- Off-Page SEO — Off-page, SEO means that anything you do to get traffic back to your website using platforms that aren’t your website, such as social media platforms, should also be optimized. Promote every single last post you publish using other platforms such as social media like Twitter, Pinterest, and Facebook creating those all-important links back to your content from other platforms.
Using these direct and indirect ways to boost sales and opt-ins will be effective if you add the new content on a regular basis, promote every piece of content you publish, and become very responsive to comments and questions.
Content ideas are literally everywhere if you are looking for them, and with care and attention will boost your sales.
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