Calls-To-Action are important on blog posts too.
If you’re writing a business blog, good job!
Business blogs start conversations that drive more leads to your company. They grow your traffic and trust. They establish your credibility, help audiences get to know your culture, and contribute to your “online visibility”. (This means they help you pop-up more often in search engines.)
But where some go wrong is with the calls-to-action on their business blog posts.
So, how can you get the most action out of your business blog? Here are some suggestions:
1. Keep It Happy
Happiness attracts. The copy in your blog tells the world what it’s like doing business with you. Language and words matter. Even though certain terms may not seem insidious, they can strike readers the wrong way. Weed out any terms that sound negative or would make you sound unpleasant to work with. Keep the phrasing happy, cooperative, and pleasant.
2. Test Link Colors
Trying to get visitors to go from your blog post to your purchase pages in the goal. To accomplish this, try different link colors. This internal link color really can have a huge impact on the number of visitors that enter other pages of your site. Beamax, for example, increased link click-through-rate (CTR) by 53.13% when they changed their link color to red from the standard blue. (The web copy stayed the same.)
Your website needs to have two colors types, passive colors and active colors. Make sure that your call-to-actions on your blog are always standing out in active colors. Principle: if it stands out, people will click it.
3. Improve Call-to-Action Copy
One easy way to get more conversions from your business blog posts is to optimize your call-to-action copy. CTAs are a crucial part of your web writing copy. The more value you can convey in your CTA, the better. Words like “buy”, “order”, “click”, and “sign-up” inherently focus on what a user has to part with. Words like “get” and “receive”, on the other hand, focus on what a user will gain.
Or course, A/B test to find out what works best for you.
4. Write an Evergreen Post
Tutorials and how-to posts that can be referenced for a long time are assets to your business blog. These posts generate traffic long after they’re written—if they’re on topics that stay relevant. Consider taking time to make a tutorial that will be valuable to your readers. This is not a press release or a blog post about a hot news item. It’s something readers will always need to know because of its continual relevance.
Consider targeting beginners, since experts are less likely to be searching for information. Yes, be thorough. But be careful not to go over the heads of your audience; avoid technical language and complicated terminology.This is an investment in your long-term search traffic and increasing the leads coming to your site.
5. Try Video or Slideshows
Video copy can be a pain to create, so the preference is generally with text-based copy. But you might be missing out on potential conversions by avoiding it. You can also try slideshow type posts, and brief screencasts. Studies show a consumer who views a product video is 144% more likely to add it to a cart.
6. Reformat Content into Offers
If you have tutorials or evergreen blog posts you’ve written in the past, go back and make sure they have a current offer featured on them. Or you can even reformat them to promote an offer.
For example, if you wrote a successful how-to post on solving a security issue or on packing light for a vacation, take that post and explain how a current product or service can help to solve the issue. Include a current link with your most relevant offers in the post, or rewrite the CTA on the post.
7. Focus on Content, Not Self-Promotion
Your readers do not want to hear you talk about yourself or your company constantly, and that’s a-okay. This is a place to go after less branded keywords. Write about the best practices in your industry, answer customer questions about your product, describe new technology related to your services. This content is highly relevant, and it will increase your visitor traffic. Afraid you won’t get people searching for your specific keywords? Au contraire, you’ll actually increase traffic, and the quality of the prospects will be better.
Business blogging really is a gift that keeps on giving. Well written posts will generate leads for your business while you sleep. People want to buy from someone they know and trust, and blogging will put you on the radar of your readers. So keep posting relevant content regularly.
Image: Boris Lechaftois
