I wanted to take some time out today to share with you some ways to convert sales from your blog or in many cases more sales if you’re probably already making some sales.
The reason for this posts stems from a conversation I had recently in one of my forums and I thought it’d be a good time to shed some light on this extremely important subject.
This post is for anyone who is getting at least some traffic to their site, but, not making many sales yet.
Here Are 14 Easy Ways For Converting Sales From Your Blog Posts
#1. Stop “Just” Promoting In Your Sidebar.
I know a lot of my readers like to use Adsense so this one is especially for you.
If you have ads on your blog and they are just in your sidebar you’re missing out out on clicks and sales.
Let me show you Adsense click through heat map briefly.
Now, notice the darker orange spots. You’ll notice the center left, focused around content is typically the best spot. Well, your sidebar can handle one of these for you but the rest need to go in your content. That can be a pain to implement without a plugin. Luckily, you can use a plugin to instantly add ads to your content area.
You can also use the above mentioned plugins to insert any type of ad, not just Adsense. This is good for people, like me, who do not use Adsense much.
#2. Don’t Just Use Adsense
One of the common mistakes is believing you’ll make fortune with Adsense. The problem is to make a lot with Adsense you’ll need to have a lot of clicks or you’ll need extremely high paying Adsense keywords.
However, one thing I like more are using affiliate programs that pay very well. Even if you’re just using ads in content it should ultimately help increase your sales.
#3. Optimize What You’re Promoting
When you get traffic to your individual posts people are coming there for a reason; they want to read what you have to say on the subject.
The problem I see with many sites is that they are driving people to their site whether through social media or the search engines and they aren’t really promoting anything to the reader based on what they are being sent there for.
Let me give you an example. Let’s say you have a post on “Preventing Joint Pain” and none of the ads on your site are based on helping solve joint pain, you’re losing sales.
This can sometimes be a problem with Adsense as well if they are not showing extremely relevant ads. Make sure your ads are in tune with what you want people to buy.
One thing that greatly helps with this is to not put ads in your content at all. However, manually placing an affiliate product that you recommend in that post is much better.
#4. Remove Ads Altogether
You might be thinking “What!?”
But, let me explain. Instead of having ads all over the place why not only promote things in individual posts based exclusively on what your post is about.
So if you’re discussing a “Anti Dandruff Dog Shampoo” in your post, offer your audience some choices to buy it, right there in your post. Don’t let an ad on the side of yur screen make the sale, show them right in the post.
#5. Use Images
I know it’s not always possible but if you want more attention to your affiliate links embed the links into an image. Images draw attention and break up text, so use them over just plain affiliate links when you can.
I’m not saying plain affiliate links are useless, they are still good, but it’s a fact that images are easier to see and you want things that are easier to see to make you money.
#6. Reduce Sidebar Clutter.
If your site looks like one big ad, you’re probably losing sales because you’re distracting your audience. Instead, select a couple of great products to ad to your sidebar site wide. This also can increase the sales for a particular product you’d like to promote above all others.
#7. Buyer Keywords
Create some of your posts around buyer keywords that help promote products. Here are some of my favorite buyer keywords:
buy xxxxx
order xxxxx
purchase xxxxx
reviews xxxxx
review xxxxx
where to find xxxxx
xxxxx Discount
Deals On xxxxx
If you put your mind to it you can probably think of even more. So when you’re doing keyword research focus on using some of these.
#8. Speaking Of Reviews….
Review products and services for your audience to help increase sales. These reviews were written to help my audience who is interested in these types of products.
Likewise, your audience might be interested in reviews in your niche. Not every post has to be a review style post but, if you give a good detailed review of something it can help make sales!
You can even build full sites based on reviews in case you were not aware of this.
#9. Build An Email List
This could be seen as a way to get more traffic as well and I highly suggest it. You should build an email list at some point. An email list allows you to market to not only help your audience, but, market things to them as well.
I also don’t want to leave out the fact that you can set much of your email marketing to auto-pilot. Not all of it but, many aspects of it. This will save you time while you work on other things.
Out of all the tweaks on the page, this one probably takes the longest as a whole because you’ll need to actually grow your email list, but it’s a worthwhile because it will pay off.
#10. White Space
I want to go back to my point about using images again. When you use images they can help break up space and of course drive the click, as I just mentioned. But, if you put a little bit of space around the image and the text that can help as well.
When you are adding an image to your site you can make this easy clicking the image once you’ve added it to your blog post and the editing to add a little bit of padding.
Optionally, you can add a buy button near the image or even a visit site button. It’s easy to do and you can also get buttons from sites like Fotolia.com for $1.
Anyway, an image, a button and some white space will draw attention and break up simple typed texted and increase sales in the process.
#11. Test What You’re Promoting
Most people never do this, but, you should. Simply test different types of ads and offers on your sites. Maybe Adsense isn’t making you much money but an affiliate program is making you a lot more? Maybe what you’re promoting is too expesive and your audience needs some cheaper stuff? You won’t know unless you test. Of course, if you have traffic and your site is producing sales you might be fine to leave it alone. If sales are slow or non existent, change.
I actually did this on a site of mine that converts very low. I noticed that not a lot of sales were coming in from this site. So I added some smaller ticket items on there as well as Adsense and then magically I was making acouple bucks per day from this site as well as now selling a few smaller ticket items per month and one big sale per month.
If you’re using Amazon as your affilite program you’ll definately want a mix between smaller tickt and high ticket items to maximize your sales %.
#12. Promote Deals
This one works extremely well when you have an email list with your site. You can promote deals to them. People love deals and will buy when things are on sale, so promote deals to them.
Optionally, once you’ve made some sales from a product you can ask the vendor for a coupon code to give to your audience.
#13. Ask For A Raise
Another thing that not many people do is ask for a raise. If you’re making a bunch of sales for a particular vedor you can as for an payout increase. Sometimes they will, other times they won’t. They may also ask for more sales before considering this.
#14. Teach Someone How To Do Something
If you’re in a niche where you can teach something, do it!
Let me give you an example. Let’s say you were running a website on “How To Lanscape The Yard” and one of your posts was titled “How To Build A Retaining Wall – Step-By-Step”.
Wouldn’t it be cool to guide people through how to build a retaining wall and at the same time make money? You better say yes to that!
Well, when you demonstrate how to do something you can recommend the products on how to do it. So for building a retaining wall a you could say first, you need a shovel and show them where to get one. Next, you need sand, here is where you get one online and so on. If they need X The may need Y and also Z.
It’s a great tactic that can help your audience, increase your sales and works in any niche.
2 Final Unumbered Tips
One thing I see happening a lot as well is people will assume they are not getting sales which may be true. But, the main reason may be lack of traffic or maybe they have no traffic at all, rather than conversions. Obviously, without traffic all the conversion tips in the world won’t help.
Make sure you are working on traffic before you even worry about conversions! It doesn’t matter if it’s social or search engine traffic, you need it to make sales. Also be sure you’re writing a good blog post. If you just take 300 words and slap it up online and don’t take the time to make sure it even makes sense fr your audience you’re simply wasting your resources.
Take everything you do day by day and implement things that will help convert those sales. Even 1-2 small tweaks mentioned above can help greatly!
What about you? Are you already implementing these are seeing improvement? Doing something different that I didn’t mention above? Have questions? Ask below.