3 Ways to Convert Blog Readers to Leads

Research says that visitors spend about 15 seconds on your website. That’s how much time you have to grab their attention, engage them, and motivate them to sign up for your email newsletter. Collecting their email addresses is an opportunity for you to start building stronger relationships, promote your offers, and raise people’s awareness of your brand.

However, your blog readers need to have a good reason to give you their email addresses. Here are a few simple ways to deliver value to your readers and convert them into profitable leads.

1. Write Valuable Content

Content marketing is one of the most effective ways to build trust with your target audience and increase your industry credibility. Once people see the value your content provides, they will be glad to sign up for your email newsletter list and stay on top of your blog updates. Precisely because of that, you need to focus on creating high-quality content on your blog. Above all, you need to diversify your content formats to make your content more appealing to wider audiences.

For starters, focus on the quality of your articles. Make them longer and more comprehensive. Backlinko says that long-form content that exceeds 2000 words outperforms short articles in Google’s SERPs. Remove fluff from your content and pack it with fresh statistics, examples, and valuable tips. How-to articles, ultimate guides, and comprehensive lists are immensely popular among online users. To make your content more user-friendly and easily digestible, focus on its overall design. Break the text down into smaller paragraphs, write informative headings and subheadings, use bulleted lists, and insert original, quality images.

Apart from the typical textual content, you could also create visual content, such as infographics. Images, colors, and illustrations help users understand and memorize data easier. They give you the opportunity to present a bunch of stats and facts in a more engaging way. As such, infographics earn more social shares, traffic, and backlinks than other content types.

Statistics say that infographics are liked and shared 3 times more than other types of content, as well as increase organic traffic by 12%. And, the example of Domain.ME proves this true. Namely, they worked with Infostarters on creating a series of authentic infographics for their blog and, in this way, increased their website visits, shares, and backlinks.

2. Offer Lead Magnets

Many bloggers receive lots of valuable organic traffic but struggle to turn these visitors into leads. That’s exactly where lead magnets shine. If you’re unfamiliar with the term, a lead magnet is a valuable incentive you offer to a blog visitor in exchange for their email address. Now, there are many types of lead magnets you could use on your blog, depending on your niche and target audiences. Some of them are:

Ebooks are a long-form content format, packed with valuable industry statistics, trends, insights, as well as gorgeous photos, charts, and illustrations. They educate a reader, engage them, and inform them about the latest industry trends. Apart from helping you expand your email list, an ebook will also help you position yourself as an industry authority.
Case studies are perfect for the customers at the bottom of your sales funnel. They’ve already done their research and are ready to purchase from you. Your goal is to use a case study to prove your trustworthiness and show why and how you’re better than your competitors. Case studies include specific statistics, metrics, client reviews and testimonials, showing how you helped your clients solve certain problems.
Whitepapers are industry-specific content forms that discuss the latest trends and challenges in your niche.
Useful types of content like cheat sheets, templates, planners, workbooks, resource lists are also popular among your readers, as they can download them and use them right away.

Once you choose the right type of content to use, you need to make it catchy and persuasive. You could create an attention-grabbing CTA button or even add a popup that appears in front of those visitors that haven’t subscribed yet. Choose an informative header and subheader that helps users understand what your offer is, as well as the right colors that will help your CTA button stand out.

3. Provide Seamless User Experiences

In today’s hyperconnected era, users have become tech-savvy. When interacting with your blog, they use multiple devices. For example, they may open your article on their laptops and decide to continue reading it on their mobile phones. And, they expect you to provide seamless user experiences, irrespective of the device they use. Here are a few principles that will help you improve your blog design:

Optimize your grid to make your content responsive and easier to follow. This way, you will make your articles legible, provide enough white space, increase your blog consistency, and organize your page elements effectively.
Use blog cards when organizing your blog content. This makes your articles easier to notice and memorize. Keep your blog cards simple. Some of the most important elements to include are the featured image, an article title, author, category, date, and a brief description.
Insert quality featured images. Focus on original visuals and avoid stock images. Needless to say, each image should be relevant to your page content.
Keep your best articles prominent. After blogging for two, three, or four years consistently, you will notice that certain posts on your blog perform better than others. If certain articles generate lots of organic traffic, leads, backlinks, and shares, don’t let them go unnoticed on your blog. As you publish new blog posts constantly, you should keep your best-performing articles prominent. For example, you could showcase them on your blog’s main page, under the “Editor’s Picks” or “Most Popular Articles” category.
Section off your textual content with clear and informative subheadings that will help users navigate through your content easier and find the desired information faster.
Use legible typography and font sizes that look good on all devices. Above all, once you choose the right fonts, use them consistently.

Over to You

Driving lots of traffic to your website is just half the job done. The other half is building relationships with them and converting them into leads and, ultimately, customers.

For starters, focus on the quality of content. Starting to notice the value you deliver, readers will want to come back to your site for more. Above all, they will join your newsletter list to stay informed about your latest blog posts.

Second, incentivize your readers with lead magnets. By providing them with amazing infographics, whitepaper, internal studies, or cheat sheets, you will encourage them to give you their email address.

Finally, choose blog design that emphasizes your professionalism, helps you build a solid visual brand, and makes your content user-friendly and pleasant to the eye.

How do you turn blog visitors into leads? We’d like to hear from you!