How To Make Your Blog Professional And Generate Leads Easily

When 34% of US sellers sell stuff through their own website/blog, now is the right time to start a blog.

With the game being so high starting a blog isn’t enough, you have to make your blog stand out. the blog just doesn’t have to be SEO friendly, you have to make sure your blog is optimized for converting those visitors into leads, the right way.

In this article, I’ll walk you through 3 steps that will make your dull blog optimized for conversions and lead generation.

Ready to make your blog look more professional and conversion-optimized?

Let’s continue.

How To Make Your Blog Professional And Generate Leads Easily

1) Create A Website Design That Suits Your Visitor Base

While the common notion of having a clean website design being the key to conversions isn’t entirely wrong, it isn’t the sole truth either. A clean, distraction-free website is great for conversions and here is how to get one.

Go for a minimal WordPress theme

While we focus on WordPress blogs in this section, clean minimal design can be achieved in almost any blogging CMS you choose.

The number one thing a visitor sees on your website is the look of it. Before even reading your headline, the site design is what plays an important role in inviting attention.

Research shows that the human attention span is lower than that of a gold-fish and you got only less than 8 seconds to attract the reader to read more or perform the action you want on your site.

8 seconds time span is too little for you to pop up your whole article in front of the reader, so what should you do to own the attention of your blog visitors?

Cleaner, distraction-free website design.

A website design that removes all other numerous ads from the site. I personally use thrive themes and Saurabh to uses the same on Techi Bhai. Why?

Because Thrive themes excel in giving a minimal look to your blog rather than those fancy sliders.

Having said that, if traffic is more important, where you need more page views, a magazine format or rather a clumsy website design can do wonders.

But, don’ take my word for it. Continue reading to see a case study that shows a clumsier website design can actually increase your conversions.

In the case study from Digital Marketer where they took their niche site, Survivallife.com from zero to 6 million page views, they revealed that a clumsy website layout where every bit of the site design yelled for the attention of the readers actually played a huge role.

That’s why, if your website is focused on advertising revenue, may that be AdSense or media.net and you want to increase page views and CTR, you might want to check out this list of AdSense optimized WordPress themes known to boost CTR and page views.

Make your headline seductive

By seductive, I don’t mean you to use real dirty website headlines, but you can definitely use power words and other aspects of headline writing to pull your readers further inside your articles.

Power words, have through research, proven to have positive (or negative depending on the words used) effects on the reader.

In a case study shared by my favorite Brian Clark from Copyblogger, the words you and because are great power words that use the art of persuasion to hook you throughout the copy.

The case study is shared by Brian details how social psychologist Ellen Langer used the power word “because” to cut in line to a Xerox machine. She used the following three variations to persuade her visitors to make way for her first.

“Excuse me, I have five pages. May I use the Xerox machine?” – 60% said OK
“Excuse me, I have five pages. May I use the Xerox machine because I’m in a rush?” – 94% said OK
“Excuse me, I have five pages. May I use the Xerox machine because I have to make some copies?” – 93% said OK

While the third line is long, boring at the first glance, the word “because” actually gave a valid reason to the people in the row as to why they should leave the line and make way for her. Magically, it worked!

Here is a list of 189 additional power words that you can use to make your headlines more clickable and converting.

2) Invest Time & Resources In Content Marketing

In order to make your site convert you would now need traffic, right?

About 79% of businesses use articles as an effective content marketing strategy which is by far the best strategy beating even traditional media (30% usage) by 49%.

If you want your blog to look professional and convert incoming visitors into leads and subscribers, you have to invest your resources in content marketing. Studies show that if you blog educational content, solve the problems of your readers, they perceive you as an authority in the field and your credibility boosts up.

Similarly, you also have to build your brand on social media sites because that is also a hot favorite of bloggers and businesses with 74% of the businesses opting for that.

I’d say, you should rather test and see for yourself what works for your brand. If you have a viral niche site then social media traffic can be very beneficial for you while if your blog thrives on organic traffic, you ought to be focusing on keyword research and SEO.

The latter is what we’ll concentrate on in this article, though.

Write what people are searching for

If you’re focusing on search traffic, you cannot write about random topics and wait for an influx of traffic. You have to write about topics people actually search for. there are a lot of keyword tools that suggest you keywords along with their competitive index (as in how difficult is a keyword to rank on the top).

If you can’t afford a paid tool right now, use the free Chrome extension keywords everywhere which gives you an idea of the average number of each keyword whenever you search anything on Google. Scroll to the bottom of the SERP pages and it gives you an average search count for the related searches as well. The search counts are often equal to the ones you get using premium tools like a long tail pro or KWFinder (KWFinder also offers you a free trial of up to 5 keyword searches every day which is great given that it is by far the best keyword research tool I’ve ever seen).

Another innovative way to find what people are actually talking about and what questions they are asking in your niche is to use the free tool to answer the public which when combined with the above extension gives you a fair display of real questions and their search count.

Complete keyword research is certainly out of the scope of this article, however, if you want to delve into the topic, even more, follow the guide by Brian Dean here.

Keep your content engaging

Boring, uninviting content that is full of technical jargon will push your visitors away rather than hooking them up on your website.

Result?

High bounce rate and low dwell time.

Not to mention, these two are very important ranking factors. Leave alone the effectiveness of these factors in ranking your content on Google, a bounced visitor is a lost sale.

When your readers can’t understand what you are trying to say or find it too boring and technical, they will hop on to another blog (do I need to say there are dime a dozen of blogs already churning out better content that you no matter what your niche is?) and never return again.

What happens next?

You stay growth deprived and make no sales (affiliate or own products) and whatever monetization technique you’re following will go in vain.

What to do to make your content engaging?

Write as if you’re writing to your friend on the other side of the computer. Of course, you wouldn’t want to divert from a professional tone but still, conversational writing (like I just did for this post) will keep your readers hooked.

Another important aspect is, use of visual media.

While we have the popular saying “a picture is worth a thousand words” is true, in blogging a picture is worth 60,000 words. The study shows human brain processes images 60,000 times faster than text-only content. Furthermore, visual content helps relieve the visitor of the text-only burden making the content more interactive and pulling the reader into reading further.

Make sure you use any form of multimedia (like videos, infographics or plain images designed using a tool like canva.com) within every 300-400 words to make your content more engaging.

3) Optimize your previous posts

Another key killer of a professional blog look is old, irrelevant, and updated blog content that spoils your authority not only in terms of credibility but also adding to the dead weight of your blog in SEO which often pulls down your site’s cumulative ranking position.

Honestly, no one is perfect in blogging and as you grow, you evolve your writing skills through better knowledge and a deeper understanding of what your readers need. This is why, after a certain time, when you visit back to your previous content you feel like puking out.

Another key reason for irrelevant content is the growth of new events. One thing that was relevant a couple of hours ago, wouldn’t be relevant now.

For example, if you’ve written a post on the best browsers back in 2010 you might have crowned internet explorer as the sassiest browser back then. However, things have taken a huge turn now and internet explorer is far from being the best browser.

For anyone who lands on this page, no matter SEO or through internal links, would be disappointed seeing the carelessness of the blog owner. Most of them will not even know that you’ve written the content back then and consider your site entirely irrelevant.

How to solve this?

To solve the “old content not relevant anymore” issue, you have to visit back to your articles within certain time intervals and update them according to recent trends. Proofread them to make sure you have an error-free copy and update the stats, facts used in them by referencing the latest researches.

Don’t hesitate to update the images/screenshot or even the whole blog post if that seems relevant to you and your content strategy.

Another good way to decrease the harm done by irrelevant content to your blog’s professional look and search ranking is to use delete posts that make no sense at all and redirect them to better and optimized posts on the same topic.

You can do this by going to Google analytics and choosing the pages that have not received any links (if they have incoming backlinks, you better redirect those pages to relevant pages or keep them as is) traffic or social shares within the last 3 months.

Then make a list of them and see if you can improve any of those posts and bring traffic do it immediately. If those are on topics that are no longer relevant, delete those posts and redirect them to related articles in your blog.

This should be done regularly without fail to make your blog always appear professional and conversion-optimized.

Wrapping Up:

With very little effort, you can make your blog look more professional and conversion-optimized. Just keep in mind that the more a visitor is satisfied with your content, the better you can convert them into fans and followers, leads and sales.

What are your tips to make your blog conversion optimized?

If you have any issues, or queries related to this, comment below and we can help each other on making a more professional looking blog.