Now let me break it to you that massive traffic doesn’t necessarily equate to great income in blogging. No one ever said you won’t earn but you might just have to halt your traffic hunting for a while. I’m going to share 4 steps in this post to make a profit on your blog with no hassle over traffic. By the time you are done putting these steps into practice, you should have an effective spike in traffic that earns income.
Step 1: Build your blog sales funnel
You need a blog sales funnel if your blog is ever going to fetch you any income.
Basic Blogging Sales Funnel
Eye-catching content – It’s all about dishing out over the top content. You are already on track with that. What you should do is simply let your content align with the arrangement of your blog sales funnel.
Lead magnet – You can make this to be a sample of your own product or service. It also doesn’t have to be yours but a product that elevates another. It comes in handy for creating a mailing list.
Initial offer – At first, this product or service is priced lesser than its value but the income should at least take care of expenses. Your main objective here is to bring in people.
Follow-up – Here, you have to cater to your potential customers to make them staying customers. You dish out more of what they need to lead them to the next stage. You can choose to send helpful emails as guides or a way of checking up on them.
Next sell – Here you go the extra mile. What you offer here is the peak of all. This means that the value is higher and the price high. Your product and service here should be intensive and top-rated so it’s worth the price. Offers of intensive coaching and live classes can do the trick here.
After putting the blog sales funnel in place, your traffic is on the rise plus the results make your efforts count.
How to approach your blog sales funnel
Firstly, you should draw your blog sales plan. What will be at the top is your highest selling offer. Every stage in your plan should correlate with the next one such that it reasonably leads your customers or visitors to another.
In the alternative, you could make things really easy with just the introduction of an initial offer and the next sell. It is easier when you have similar products in these two stages. Your profit from the initial offer might come through commissions before your big break in the next sell of a product or service.
There are several tools that will make the process of your blog sales a success. To start out, you should have a diagram tool to sketch out the A-Z of your plans. This enables you to note the necessary pages needed as well the content to put on them.
Email marketing provider – The easy-to-use tool recommended for this is ConvertKit. A lot of other options are also available.
Landing page builder – OptimizePress 3.0 is the 2 in 1 choice recommended with both funnel and checkout builders.
Payment gateway & product delivery – Whatever you are selling determines the tool you use here. Gumroad is recommended but you might want to check out other options that let you sell more one product with just one platform.
Step 2: Remove unnecessary distractions
People will flock into your sales funnel solely because of your blog. One works for the other and vice versa. For you to achieve this, you should declutter your blog. You should do this so as to avoid overwhelming your audience. Too many choices eventually lead to no choice. Be intentional about everything you put on your blog. When any element on your blog doesn’t work for you or your audience, then it’s simply to be removed.
Now, I will go through a list of elements to consider removing. It’s not a whole list but it sets you on the path.
Ineffective ads- You have to decide between your earning from the ads and a guest audience leaving for good.
Social media streams – Make sure it’s working to gain you more audience and not the opposite.
Search boxes – Use analytics to find out how often your search box is used. Think about moving it to an unobvious part of your blog like the footer.
Blog rolls – You should remove this when a higher percentage of guest audience don’t come back to your own blog.
The sidebar – In a case where only your content is the main deal. It would not hurt to do away with your sidebar so that your content gets the whole attention.
Badges– For your blog, you only require the moderately exclusive badges that enhance your social proof. Anything otherwise should be removed.
It’s highly important that you make visitors impressed with your blog in a span of minutes or even seconds. You have social proof to aid you with this in all aspects of your blog. Social proof stems from the psychology of humans in letting other people’s decisions influence yours. When people accept it as A, you also do the same.
There are different ways to use this social proof to your blogging advantage. One of such is to include relevant logos and hint at top websites you have worked with but just in case you have not been involved with any top websites yet. Something can still be done about that. You can become a guest blogger so as to get featured on websites.
OR
Make use of HARO (HelpAReporterOut) to become a source to journalists at no cost. Also available to you are similar blogs to yours to contribute to. They might be less popular but in the long run important to your audience.
Put up share counts on your blog posts
This is another way of using social proof. Majority of your audience is influenced by any tell-tale sign they see. You are the real deal to them when they glean a high number of social sharing count on your blog. They join the league and share too. You can do this with one of the numerous social sharing plugins but I recommend Social Snap.
The downside of using social sharing count comes when it is relatively low. Your audience gets reluctant to share the content. So you might as well not use it if it can be helped.
Use the power of testimonials on important pages.
Testimonials have proven to be well-known evidence of social proof. Plugins are available to put up testimonials. Perhaps you are a user of WordPress, it’s simple to include it with a page builder.
Boost important metrics with quizzes and contests
Note that this still has to do with giving your audience a good first impression. You are to put up these well-known metrics: newsletter subscribers, followers, traffic, and social sharing counts. Do not raise an alarm if you lack any of these in abundance. The two ways of increasing the metrics are by using social media competition and viral quizzes. Use social media competition to improve metrics. You can spend less for the prize when you join hands with a bigger brand. Just make sure your content is worth it.
You can follow suit with viral quizzes just like some big sites do. Most people are prone to sharing them plus they get compiled in no time. The use of competitions and quizzes, however, must match your lead magnet and first offer so you can get exactly what you need.
Step 4: Optimize your blog for conversions
If you are here, what you should do is make your blog as best as it can be. You should do this with the inclusion of call-to-actions to the important aspects of your blog.
Important knowledge about CTA
- It can be made with the use of widgets, forms, and buttons.
- It has to be eye-catching enough for your audience such that a color that totally stands out from your blog design should be used.
- A CTA has three units at its simplest which are; the headline to arrest the audience’s attention, the description to reveal the worth of content, and the button which leads to where to get the content.
Key areas of your blog to optimize
The forefront of making sales in blogging is your blog. You can improve it in a lot of ways. You need to start the improvement of your blog to specifically publicize your lead magnet. Let’s see how you can begin the improvement of your blog.
Put a CTA on your homepage
Since it’s the initial point of contact that most visitors have with your blog, you can as well prompt them to get your leading content from there.
Include CTA’s within your content
This is for visitors who discover your site through the media and search engines. They should find your CTA in any content that leads them to your site.
Include a CTA after your content
This is specifically for visitors who are endeared to your content till the end. Let them see a CTA at the end.
Use exit intent popovers on your blog
You should use this mostly when visitors are leaving. This will reduce the disturbance of your visitors’ to the barest minimum.
Make better use of your blog’s navigation menu
Let your top and useful pages be clearly defined in your navigation menu. The less important pages can go to the footer or any other unobvious part of your blog.
Conclusion
I know it’s going to require a great deal of time and dedication to implement the aforementioned steps. The outcome however is worthwhile. You should improve further in each step for optimum results.
Want to know how to get more traffic on your blog? Read this.