Part of the guide: Blog Traffic
It’s the ultimate question in online marketing.
How do you generate more leads & sales from the same or less traffic?
Ever since the inception of this blog and my first product launch; I’ve been thoroughly testing conversions.
Tweaking every little thing possible in a desperate attempt to better my conversion rates.
Increasing a blog’s conversion rates is very much different to increasing conversion rates of a sales page or squeeze page.
Most bloggers don’t get enough traffic to properly test conversions, so I decided to write a little cheat sheet/list of things to do:
In this guide
1. Create A Resource Page
No matter what niche you’re in; you can always create a resource page. A resource page should essentially be a huge list of resources that your readers might find useful.
Mainly you want to fill your resource page with affiliate links. That doesn’t mean you should promote every single crappy product you can get your hands on. It means you should create an ultimate list of resources for people in your niche that includes links to free sites, services and products as well as paid products, services and sites.
You can make a lot of money from resource pages, plain and simple. Pat from the Smart Passive Income blog routinely makes 5 figures per month from his resource page. Create a resource page, promote it and feature it on your blog.
Reference it in blog posts as many times as you can. Readers happily buy products that are “nicely” recommended in blog posts or resource pages; they tend not to buy stuff that’s directly pitched to them.
When readers hear a pitch, they think there are “attached strings”. A recommendation is a simple “no strings attached” casual offering. To readers it’s like you don’t give a damn if they buy your recommendations or not, because they’re just there to help – not to make a profit. (Not really lol)
2. Differentiate Your Blog From The Rest By Using A Unique Format Of Content
Just by using a different content format; you can massively differentiate yourself from the crowd. By different content format I’m not exactly just talking about the main formats of content: video, text, audio, images.
I’m talking about using the formats in a unique way. For example, your blog could be known for using a video at the top of every blog post and then a numbered list of points below it like in this blog post. The point is, format your content in a unique way and make your blog known for that specific format i.e. always use it.
3. Create Resource Pages For Your Content
If your blog has a lot of content, I’m talking in the range of hundreds of blog posts. You can create resource pages to categorize the content. These pages are seriously powerful.
All you have to do is choose a topic that you’ve written about in depth (at least 4-5 blog posts), write a compelling title, a short introduction about the topic explaining it and below link to the 4-5+ blog posts.
You can always write short introductions to the blog posts before linking to them, to help visitors decide what they want to learn about. Resource pages should educate people on an entire sub topic of your niche.
In the online marketing niche, you might create a resource page for SEO. The 4-5+ posts could be about on-page SEO, link building, the difference between no-follow and follow links, social media and content marketing.
The idea of a resource page is to educate someone on an entire subject to the best of your abilities. So readers can click onto a resource page, read an introduction to get a feel about the topic, then if they want to learn about it; they have 4-5+ posts to read.
You have been paid late before
You have watched the number on the dashboard not match the number in your account. What is different now is simple: it settles on a public contract you can check yourself, not a dashboard I control.
Read the contract →Most participants earn little to nothing. No income is guaranteed. You can verify every payout on the public smart contract.
You should place an opt-in form at the bottom or top of your resource pages so you can build super targeted email lists. It’s also a good idea to pitch a product of some kind on them too. Resource pages give immense value.
Visitors who land on random blog posts of yours don’t realize how good your stuff is. So most of the time they just leave the page without knowing about your 100+ other blog posts that give away amazing value. So by grouping them together in a nicely formatted resource page; people think they’re getting huge value for free.
Access to information they would have otherwise paid for. Blog posts don’t educate people on entire subjects, resource pages do.
4. Split-Test
Split-testing is the ultimate way to increase conversions. If you want more people to join your email list, try out new capture pages and compare them. It’s that simple. As long as you have a consistent stream of traffic, you can split-test just about anything.
The best things to split-test are:
- Opt-in Forms
- Popups
- Sidebar Layout
- Ad Positions
- Design
Split-testing is easy. Track your conversion rates (leads & sales) with your current blog setup, change one small thing, track the results and compare them to the previous setup. Keep repeating this with individual items until you find the sweet spot for every one.
That’s really all it takes to start generating more leads and sales from the same less blog traffic.
In Prosperity,
David Wood
P.S. Leave me your thoughts, comments and questions below.
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Comments (carried over from the previous site)
Scott, July 10, 2012, 11:20
Great idea. It will also help improve user experience in Google’s eyes since the panda and penguin updates. If readers are clicking on multiple pages within the same blog, Google sees it as a good user experience.
Tyronne Ratcliff, July 6, 2012, 04:16
Creating a resource page is an awesome idea, I’ll have to do that myself considering I’ve written over 150 blog posts, thanks for the helpful tips.
Three posts a day. One email a day.
Everything I publish, in one short daily email. Real numbers, no hype, unsubscribe in one click.
Get paid 100%, on-chain, the second the sale clears
Most affiliates earn little, and that is disclosed up front. The difference here is not a promise about what you will make. It is that you can verify every payout yourself, on a public contract, in about twelve seconds.
See how the payout works →Most participants earn little to nothing. No income is guaranteed. You can verify every payout on the public smart contract.
I think what’s being missed in how people will read the resource-page section is that it isn’t automatically dishonest — a genuinely useful list of tools and sites you’d recommend to a friend anyway is a different thing from pretending you have no financial interest in the list. The line that actually undercuts the whole section is the author’s own parenthetical afterward, ‘(Not really lol),’ right after calling it a no-strings, casual offering. That’s the sentence worth sitting with, not the resource page format itself, which plenty of genuinely helpful blogs use without any of this discomfort attached to it.
The unique-format idea in step 2 is really a branding exercise dressed up as an SEO tip — pick one format and repeat it until people associate it with you specifically. I use a version of this with clients: same structure every session, same opening question, so people know what they’re walking into before they arrive. What’s the one format or structure you could repeat on every post without it feeling forced?
Tried Simone’s idea of a repeating format. Settled on always opening with the one number that surprised me most in whatever I’m writing about. Three posts in, a reader commented that they now skip straight to that line first. Small thing, but it’s the first format tweak I’ve made that anyone actually noticed.
Simone’s question is one I have been sitting with. At sixty-one, starting again, I find repetition of format reassuring rather than limiting — it means I do not have to reinvent the wheel with every single post, which matters a great deal when you are learning all of this later in life than most.
The claim that readers ‘happily buy products nicely recommended’ but resist a direct pitch is a real phenomenon in the persuasion literature, usually filed under reactance — resistance that increases when someone feels pressured toward a decision. But the post doesn’t distinguish between genuine reactance reduction and just better-disguised persuasion, which is a meaningfully different thing ethically, not only tactically.
Calling it ‘no strings attached’ and then writing ‘(Not really lol)’ in the same paragraph is the most honest sentence in the whole post.
Roy’s right. Look, at least the author admits it. Most of this genre doesn’t. Fine. Doesn’t make the resource page any less of a sales page wearing a cardigan.
Marla’s cardigan line is fair, and I’d say the same thing applied to most of what I built for six years before I left — resource pages, recommended tools, all of it dressed as generosity. Some of it genuinely was useful to people. That both things were true at once is what took me a while to sit with on the way out.
Ran a diner for nineteen years, and we had a version of this too — the specials board that always happened to feature whatever was about to go bad in the walk-in, dressed up as the chef’s inspired pick of the day. Customers loved the specials board. Didn’t make it not a strategy. I don’t think that’s shameful, I just think everybody selling anything should say the quiet part the way this post accidentally did.