How We Convert Blog Readers into Paying Customers (Tactics that You Can Use, too)

Care for a story of drama and desperation?

I hope so, because I’m in a mood for sharing and that rarely happens. And (spoiler alert!) at least I can promise a happy ending.

At the end of 2015 I was starting Idunn. I had finally decided to bite the bullet and move from being a freelancer or a job hunter to owning an agency with all the paperwork, extra work and hassle it involved.

As a proponent of inbound marketing, I couldn’t have imagined a website without a blog. So I had my first blog posts ready to publish even before the design was ready.

And I kept blogging religiously for a while.

Fast forward a couple of months. Do you know what happened?

If you guessed that I managed to convert tons of blog readers into paying customers, you’re dead wrong.

Crickets.

That’s what happened.

Effing crickets on my content.

Let me rephrase that: nothing, nada, zilch!

Not only had I failed miserably to convert blog readers into paying customers, but my traffic numbers were incredibly low. Can you imagine what it feels like to publish a blog post and have it read by only 5 people?

I don’t have to – I’ve been there.

Naturally, I was disillusioned. After a while, I even quit refreshing Google Analytics compulsively. It was too depressing.

I felt like I was wasting my time on my own blog. As you may know, the time of a solopreneur is also very limited. So I (kind of) quit. I let entire months pass without updating my blog.

Then it hit me: our clients had GREAT results from the blog posts we’d write for them. Their traffic increased like mad. And, more importantly, they managed to convert blog readers into customers.

So I went back to the drawing board.

I finally realized that I didn’t practice what I was preaching.

We were writing and posting content that we would have never submitted to the client. No wonder we couldn’t convert blog readers into customers! I wouldn’t have bought from me at that time!

This is what we changed.

The Tactics We Use(d) to Convert Blog Readers into Paying Customers

The first thing I did was admit I didn’t have to do it all alone. So I got together with my top writer at the time via Skype to discuss a new, better strategy.

We started with what had worked for our clients. We went over their buyer personas and identified the posts that worked best for them.

It didn’t take long to translate this into our own strategy.

Want to have all the lessons we learned about high-converting blog posts work for you? Check out our copywriting and content writing services and get in touch!

We started with the most obvious part.

1. Get to Know Your Buyer Persona

This is not something you only do to convert blog readers into paying customers. There’s a reason why every marketing strategy starts with target audience research.

I know what you’re thinking: this is a cliché.

Sure, but do you know why clichés are clichés? Because they’re everywhere and because they’re true in nine cases out of ten.

Of course we knew what our buyer persona was. Or at least we had an idea. There was nothing written down.

So we thought about our best clients. The ones we worked for with the most dedication and delight. More importantly, the ones who knew the value of authority content, great social media marketing and management services and more.

We then pulled a buyer persona template from HubSpot and got to work. Turns out that, as soon as you start writing things down, everything changes.

We had a name for our buyer persona (Amanda). Amanda became our best friend. I put together a mini training course for our in-house writers and explain the importance of getting to know our (or a client’s) buyer persona and writing for them.

It took less than a month until we started writing and posting targeted content.

Here’s a brief example of how things changed:

In the beginning, we were posting copywriting or social media tips and tricks. It was OK-ish because it helped establish the Idunn blog as an authority in the field. However, the majority of our (few) readers were fellow copywriters or DIY marketers. The average post length was 500 words.

After our research, we began writing about how to hire copywriters, social media experts, how to work with agencies and what to expect in terms of performance and prices. We didn’t give up on the tips and tricks topics altogether, but they weren’t our main focus anymore. The average post length became 1800 words.

Some of the posts that brought us the most traffic and converted the most readers into paying customers include:

6 Mistakes to Avoid at all Costs When You Hire SEO Copywriters

Cost of Copywriting Services – How Prices Are Calculated and What You Should Expect to Pay

6 Things Freelance Copywriters Say Just to Get the Gig (or Drive the Price Up)

On-Page SEO: 18 Factors to Optimize Every Page on Your Website

10 Reasons to Outsource Social Media Management and Marketing

Let me explain why this worked.

2. Solve Real Problems of Your Buyer Persona

Remember when I said that most of our traffic came from other copywriters or marketers in the beginning? Well, that’s because we were writing for them and solving their problems.

When we switched to explaining the best practices for outsourcing content writing or social media management and marketing, everything changed. We managed to get to the people we really needed to read our content.

We used SEMrush and BuzzSumo to help us come up with ideas for relevant content. But we didn’t dismiss the plain, old, FREE Google search either.

By looking at the “people also search for” section we learned what people are really interested in. It also helped us find long-tail, very specific keywords that we could easily rank for.

Another tool that we use on a regular basis is Quora. By simply typing in the topic, you get a list of questions on it. All you need to do is sift through them to see which of them match your buyer persona’s needs.

Why does this help to convert blog readers into paying customers?

Because when you get ultra-specific and solve real problems, people are more likely to trust you. Sure, some of them will only trust you as a source of information. But others will also trust you with their content and their budget.

3. Ask People to Buy

The first blog posts on Idunn had no CTA. None. I just assumed people would know that they can click on “Services” and book us for their digital marketing needs.

Oh, boy, was I wrong!

The comment section of certain articles was flooded by people asking for strategy help. For FREE.

I did my best to answer some of their questions and politely tell them that I’m representing a business. And businesses need that ugly thing called “money” to survive.

To be honest, I was also a bit frustrated and angry.

“Why would these people assume anyone wants to work for free?”

Then it hit me: it wasn’t their fault. It was mine.

If you think about non-business bloggers, most of them are willing to share advice with their readers. And they are happy to answer emails or messages that ask for even more advice on specific matters. That’s because their money comes from somewhere else – sponsorships, ads and so on.

This wasn’t my case.

So I added a CTA at the end of each article, along with a contact form. You know, so that people don’t have to click on “Contact” to get to us. I made things easy.

My CTA copy also made it clear that our help comes with a fee.

In time, I refined this CTA even more. I now have in-text CTAs. Because we all know that very few people get to the end of a long-form article.

The result?

Each change in the CTA helped us get better at converting. I finally accepted that it’s a work in progress. If I want to convert blog readers into customers, I have to be prepared to adjust my content strategy quite often.

People change and so do their needs and preferences.

4. Create In-Depth, Authority Content

As I previously said, one of the biggest changes we made was in content length.

We moved from 500-word posts to more than 1800-word posts. Some of our articles are even close to 5000 words.

Getting very specific with our topics helped. Exploring every topic in and out and adding visual materials and/or appropriate references to high-DA websites also helped a lot.

In a nutshell, our content became easier to read, more informative and better optimized for search engines. All in a single swift makeover (well, not so swift, but you get the point).

Did our content get fluffy?

No, absolutely not!

In fact, I would argue the opposite. When you set out to explore a topic in a manner that truly helps your audience, there is little room for fluff. If you have the right writing team on your side, of course.

We read the statistics. Almost everyone argued for long-form content. At the time, there were still voice that said today’s readers don’t have the attention span and the availability to read articles of more than 1000 words.

But we decided to give it a shot anyway.

The result?

As I’m sure you’ve already guessed, our SEO got better, our readers got happier. And, more importantly, we started to really convert blog readers into paying customers.

You see, going in-depth can truly establish you as a thought leader. Sure, our 500-word posts were a good start. But they were barely scratching the surface.

Even more, the kind of reader we wanted to convert into customer was wicked smart. They needed proof, they needed references and they needed an in-depth explanation of…everything.

So we offered it.

However, we never have a set length for our blog posts. We know that this is the surest way to end up with fluff.

Our process always begins with thorough research. We gather all the materials and data we need to create an in-depth post before we even type in the title.

We only take a look at the word count when we’re done writing. This is how we get to have posts that are around 1000 words and posts that are upwards of 3000 words.

We always focus on quality over quantity.

Conclusions

I haven’t found the magic formula that converts blog readers into paying customers. There’s nothing magical about this. Write well, solve problems and add relevant CTAs in relevant places.

Now that I read this, I chuckle.

It sounds SO easy.

We’ve been doing it for clients for years.

Unfortunately, the formula (magical or not) is definitely not universal. Every industry, every company needs to find its own way to convert blog readers into clients. My only regret is that I should have started to work on mine sooner.

Have you discovered how to convert the readers of your blog into paying customers? If not, we can help! Get in touch with our skilled, conversion copywriters and let’s get started!