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The Things Successful Bloggers Do to Build Their Blogs Into Businesses In today’s lesson, I want to talk about some of the things that successful bloggers are doing to increase the conversions of their website. This episode is inspired by a post we had on the ProBlogger blog this week from John Stevens who shared 9 conversion habits of the world’s most successful bloggers. I want to pick up, highlight and expand upon 3 of the points John mentions but also want to share something I’ve noticed about many of the social media marketing bloggers that I follow that fascinates me. Resources for 3 Key Things Bloggers Do to Grow Their Blogs into Businesses Join the ProBlogger Group for goal planning, a new live streaming tool, SEO, affiliate marketing, video and more! The 9 Conversion Habits of the World’s Most Successful Bloggers How to increase the signups to your email list How to create an optin to increase signups to your email list How to create a start here page for your blog Michael Hyatt Smart Passive Income Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Good day there! My name is Darren Rowse and I’m the blogger behind problogger.com, a blog, podcast, event, job board and a series of ebooks, all designed to help you to start an amazing blog, to create content that will change people’s lives and to hopefully make some money from your blog as well. Learn more about ProBlogger over at problogger.com. Today is episode 192. In today’s lesson, I want to talk about some of the things that successful bloggers are doing to increase the conversions on their website and to guarantee their success not only as bloggers to build an audience but also to help them to build a business and to make money from their blogs. This episode is actually inspired by a post we had on ProBlogger, the blog this week, it was a post from John Stevens who shared Nine Conversion Habits of the World’s Most Successful Bloggers. It’s a post that I’m going to link to in today’s show notes because it’s essential reading for anyone who does want to monetize their blog and to learn this stuff. In today’s episode, I want to pick up on three of the nine points that John mentioned. I want to highlight them, expand upon them a little bit, and talk about why I think they are so important. At the end of this episode, I also want to share something that I’ve noticed about many of the social media marketing bloggers that I follow, these people who are experts in their fields, who are doing something a little different to what John says in his post. By no means am I saying John’s wrong, but there’s also something else that I’ve noticed about these other bloggers and I want to highlight that at the end of today’s show as well. You can see John’s post over in today’s show notes, there’s a full transcription of the show as well over at problogger.com/podcast/192. I’ll highlight John’s post there. Also, check out the Facebook group, the ProBlogger Community Facebook Group. You can go to problogger.com/group. This week being the start of May, we’ve been talking in the group about our goals for the month. We’ve been doing some accountability there. I also share the new tool I’m using for live streaming on Facebook which is just blowing my mind, really affordable tool. We’ve had discussions on SEO, affiliate marketing, video and much more so we would love you to join the group at problogger.com/group. Let’s get into today’s show. Last week on ProBlogger, we published a fantastic post by John Stevens, a guest post. It was titled, as I said in the top of the show, The Nine Conversion Habits of the World’s Most Successful Bloggers. In this post that John wrote, John analyzes how some very well-known bloggers have built successful businesses around their blogs. He talks about these nine habits that they’ve gotten into. These are things that have been around for a little while but have changed over the last few years. As I think back to 2002 and look at how blogs are today, what he’s highlighted are really some of the key changes that have taken successful bloggers to be successful business people. There’s a rule distinction there. Just building a successful blog that’s well read is great and that could be just your goal, to have lots of readers but if you want to monetize your blog, if you want to build a business around your blog, there are certain things that you probably need to work on. John has highlighted some really good habits to build. There’s lots of good advice. I really do recommend you have a read of the post because it’s a great snapshot of some of the current trends in blogging and building an online business from a marketing perspective. In today’s episode, I want to just pull out three of the things that John talks about and add some of my own thoughts. As I said at the top of the show, I want to add in something that isn’t really there in John’s article. I’m not saying he’s wrong, I’m just saying that this is something that I think is just as important, if not more important, than these other things to keep in mind. Because sometimes we can get a little bit distracted by the new things, and the trends, and these strategies, they’re important but there’s other stuff that we need to keep in mind and keep in balance. The first thing that I want to talk about that John picks up and it’s his first point as well, is that the successful bloggers that he’s talking about use multiple opt-in boxes on their site. John correctly identifies in this article that email is so important in most of the most successful bloggers’ strategies. This is something that shouldn’t be new to you. I’ve been talking about emails since my very early episodes. If you go right back to the start, you’ll see there’s numerous episodes on how to build your email list. Email is so important if you want to sell anything to your audience, if you want to build traffic to your blog, if you want to build community with your audience. It can help you in all of these different ways. It’s really important to build that list. I’ll link to some of the shows that we’ve had in the past on email on the show notes today. But John here is really highlighting one strategy that will help you to build your list. That is that you shouldn’t just ask for people to opt-in to your email list once on your blog or even once on any one page. John identifies here that most of the key successful bloggers that he’s looking at have multiple calls to action to opt-in on every page on their blog. The reality is that people are becoming increasingly blind to our calls for them to opt-in to our email list. If you think back to 2004, 2005 on the Internet, the big cool thing back then was banner advertising. I remember seeing my first banner ads and I was fascinated by them, “Oh, what are these things?” Google AdSense was starting to put all these text ads around the internet. People were clicking those links and those ads like crazy back then because they were new. Then couple of years later, people in the advertising industry began to write articles about how people were suffering from ad blindness. This is a thing that we all know today because we all know there are ads on most websites on the internet but very few of us even see the ads anymore because we’ve become blind to that marketing technique. This is something that is happening in most marketing techniques today and one of them is opt-in blindness. People are becoming increasingly blind to our calls to action to subscribe, whether that be by us offering them a free guide to something, or a free video, or a free report, or a free resource, download these calls to subscribe to my list and get a free stuff, people are increasingly ignoring them and that’s because they’re seeing them so often. I don’t believe that we should stop doing opt-ins on our site but we need to get a little bit smarter about how we call people to get those opt-ins. One of the ways that we can do that is to have multiple opt-ins on our page. The key with this and John talks about this in the article, is to find balance. We’ve all been to sites that constantly interrupt us, asking us for an opt-in. You arrive on the site and there’s a pop-up before you can see anything and then 30 seconds later after you’ve closed that pop-up and you scroll down, there’s a little slide in box that comes on. Then before you visit the second post that you want to visit on the site, there’s another interruption. Then as you’re leaving the site, there’s another interruption. All over the site there are calls to action. I’m not talking about that. I don’t want you to annoy your readers to the point where they either leave your site or give you their email address. But I do think we can be slightly more aggressive than just having one call to action. This is something that I’ve experimented with both of my sites Digital Photography School and ProBlogger. On Digital Photography School at the moment, if you’ll arrive on that site, you’ll be greeted if you’re on a desktop computer with a welcome mat and it’s a big slide in from the top. It’s fairly aggressive and that works really well. If you come back again, you won’t see that. We don’t want every visitor every time they visit to see that so the first time they’ll come they’ll see that. Then there are a couple of more subtle calls to action on the site. In the sidebar, there’s a really subtle call to action. In some articles, we also have at the bottom of the article we might have a call to action. Also, if you view a few pages while you’re on the site, you’ll see an exit pop-up as well. This is where you go to leave the site and there’ll be a little box come up and ask you to subscribe then if you haven’t already subscribe that is. It’s tracking whether people take action on the first few times and if they have, they won’t see, the second recall to action. What we found is that by adding that last exit pop-up, we’ve increased our sign-ups quite considerably. I think it went up 30% or 40%. Having more than one opt-in on your site is something that a lot of bloggers now are doing. As I said before, you got to get the balance right. There’s a couple of bloggers that I have been to their sites recently where I’m just like, “This is just too much. I’m just being bombarded.” In some cases, there are bloggers that have already subscribed to their email list and it’s even more annoying because I know they produce good stuff but I just don’t want to keep seeing those messages. There’s a variety of ways to do that. I’m going to link in the show notes to a few episodes that I’ve had in the past on email and how to get those subscribes. But do experiment with the different technologies that are around at the moment. The second thing that John highlights in the article is to use the space above the fold on your website really well. Good use above the fold. If you’re new to blogging, if you’re new to the internet, you’re probably going, “What in the world is Darren talking about?” Above the fold is a term that’s a bit geeky. It basically means if you go to a website, what you see above the fold is everything that you can see before you start to scroll. If you go to a website on your desktop, you will see the top part of the website and then you begin to scroll. Everything that you see as you begin to scroll is technically called below the fold. Really want to think about what can people see when they arrive on your site because what they see without having to scroll, they’re much more likely to take notice of and they’re much more likely to take action on. It’s significantly high. What is above the fold on your site is really important. John shares some examples of what people do on the front pages of their blogs above the fold and talks about particularly on the front page of your site, including things like benefit statements, social proof, your opt-in calls so getting that email address, proof of authority. These are some of the things that John talks about as being important. He does give you some really good examples of what bloggers do above the fold there. The other thing I want to encourage you to think about above the fold is what’s happening on your blog post pages. The reality is that most people will be arriving on your blog not to your front page but to a blog post. What happens above the fold on your blog post is really important as well. One of the things I’ve noticed happening increasingly over the last few months is bloggers putting so much stuff above the fold on their blog post that you can’t actually see the content when you first arrive on their site. Whilst I can understand why they might do that, they might want to have a big email opt-in at the top of their blog post because that’s the most important thing to them, the reality is that if someone arrives on your site expecting to read an article on a particular topic and they can’t see it then that creates an impression upon them. Whilst a percentage of people might give you their email address before they read the article, I think that it’s smarter to show the article first and then try to get the email address or give them a chance to start reading it and then interrupt them in some way as well. Really think about above the fold, it is very important. But on blog posts it’s really important to make sure your content is viewable immediately when people arrive on your site so that they don’t have to start scrolling to read anything and to get some value. You want to start delivering value right up top on your site. Pay attention to what’s happening on your front page obviously, I’m going to talk about that in the next point as well. Above the fold, there is a different kettle of fish. You want to be doing some different things on that front page but in the blog post itself, make sure there’s content above the fold as well. The third thing I want to pick up from John’s article and there’s lots more in it than just these three things is he talks about the use of the home page. He talks a little bit about how that has changed in blogs over the years. The successful bloggers that John’s talking about, he talks about how they use static home pages to funnel additional leads. This is been a massive shift over the last few years of blogging. If I think back to my first blog in 2002 and my blog back then was pretty much the same as 99% of blogs back in 2002. If you went to the front page of that blog or any other blog, you would see the last 5 to 10 blog posts on the front page of the blog in their entirety. You would go to my blog and it was a very long page, you would see the whole latest article that I’ve write. Even if it was a 5000-word article, it would all be on the front page and then you’d scroll below there and there’d be the next article in its entirety. Then it would be the next article in its entirety. I did that, I went back and had a look at my first blog in an internet archive version of it. This is what happened. It was a very long page. There were 10 articles in their entirety and this is what bloggers did back then. It’s just what happened. It’s just the way that the things were. Then things began to change a little bit. We began to see in probably 2004 or 2005, people began to just show excerpts of their articles. It would just be down the page, it would be the most recent article at top and then the next one, then the next one. It’d be 5 to 10 articles, the title and then excerpt, might be the first couple of paragraphs. There was massive debate about this when it first started and people first started to do it. People are like, “I don’t want to have to click.” They were complaining about having to click to read more and yet people did it. They realized it was a better user experience for people. People would be able to scan from page to find the article that they wanted to read. It would be a shorter front page as well, takes less time to l…
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