Quick, what is the ultimate goal of your blog post? Increased traffic? More audience exposure? Brand building? Nope. While these are all valid benefits, the real purpose is something else entirely.
For any online business, any business period, the bottom line is increasing sales.
That is the essential goal around which each and every market strategy you employ rotates. That is the purpose you have to keep in mind when you are creating your content, marketing material, even a simple blog post — particularly a simple blog post.
Thing is, you have to drive your readers into action, make that conversion. It could be anything in your sales cycle, like signing up for your newsletter, requesting a quote, adding your product to a wish list.
But driving your readers to action is not the easiest thing in marketing. Your writing, blog post, even a short sales letter has to be a valuable in order for it to accomplish its purpose.
So here are 5 writing tips that you can use to maximize your call to action:
Write for your niche
This is perhaps the most important advice anyone can give you. It is easy for online marketers to drift off when blogging, by being as general as possible in order to reach a wider audience. Simply put, that’s not the right way to go about it.
Your best bet is to write as specifically as you can and create a laser targeted blog post for your desired audience. Sure you may lose out on a little traffic and SEO potential here and there, but each post will be of high quality, and any leads you generate will be of even higher quality.
Stay colloquial
Which is to say, your writing style should be conversational if you want to better connect with your audience. Use an informal tone and sprinkle it with a generous helping of personal pronouns — your readers will in turn get to know you and your business better.
And they’ll act accordingly. Writing in a familiar and everyday style leads to increased conversions, as the people reading your content will be inclined to take action on your recommendations.
Link to the conversion page
You aren’t going to get much conversions if you don’t make it a point to link to the conversion page every chance you get. You want to make sure the link you drop is relevant in the context of what you are writing, though. Artificially splattered links will only serve to drive visitors away from your blog.
Remind your readers about your product
Constantly, that is. You don’t want your blog readers or audience to read what you put up, enjoy it, but don’t know what you do, or what products you sell or market. You want to subtly remind them about the products or services that you offer them, and how they will benefit when they take action.
End with a solid call to action
You need to look and sound convincing when you readers finish your blog post. Many might wonder what steps they should be taking next — whether they should read another post, or subscribe to your site. And this is when you strike in order to elicit more conversions from your audience.
Ideally your call to action at the very end is a couple of lines maximum, relevant to the post above, and could even be a little humorous. Laugher always loosens people up, and they are more likely to take the action you want to them to.