If you’ve got a blog that gets plenty of traffic but you’re still struggling to make money – you might be looking for new ways to monetise your site and start making a good profit. Thankfully, you’ve already done the hard part. Generating traffic. Sometimes all your site needs is a few simple tweaks to start converting traffic and making money. This article is going to show you how.
Make sure you’re getting the right sort of traffic
Not all traffic is created equally. Yes – more traffic is a good thing, but you need to make sure it’s the right sort of traffic. Try and avoid visitors who’re looking for a free ride.
If you entice people to your site with something you can’t really deliver, you’ll be wasting a lot of energy and bandwidth on people who are harder to convert to a sale.
The keywords someone searches for when they visit your site through a search engine play a big part in filtering the “right” sort of traffic. If someone searches for a your keyword plus “free” or “download” – they’re probably not looking to spend any money. That’s the sort of visitor you could be wasting your time trying to convert. Unless you’re offering them a great free report that can convert them into a sale eventually.
Paid clicks could also be another traffic source to avoid. While there are some worthwhile providers and you CAN make money with paid clicks – many of them provide low quality traffic that’s unlikely to make a purchase.
Thankfully, there are also keywords that provide highly motivated, money spending visitors – so it’s a good idea to try and target these. People search for “[product] discount” or “promo” when they know they’re about to spend some money but just want to see if they can save a bit before they do so. These are money-spending visitors and you need to be there to offer them the saving they’re looking for.
Keep your calls-to-action clear
Make sure your visitors know exactly what you want them to do when they visit your site. Where it’s opting-in for an offer with their email, clicking on an affiliate link or sharing your post on social media. Make sure they know what to do – or you could lose people to confusion.
Many blogs have the principle that more ads means more sales, but they could be bombarding people with a confusing amount of information. Yes, you might want a few auxiliary offers that people could be interesting – but if the main foundation of your business is sending to a sales funnel, make it clear.
Keep calls to action above the fold. The further down a page you hide it, the more users you’ll lose. People have short attention spans – especially on the internet. Give them as few chances to get distracted as possible.
Create a list
If you’ve built a blog or site that gets plenty of traffic and your aren’t building a list – you could be missing out. Some experts claim that every email address you get could be worth a dollar in sales – so you can see how building a large list of them could be worthwhile.
Offer something relevant and valuable to visitors to get them to sign up to your email list. Don’t take them for granted and try to only send them good content or you’ll get diverted to the spam folder. Offer value, and you should be rewarded.
You can set up a series of automated responses that are regularly sent out to your list. Once you’ve got a subscriber – you’ve got someone who’s already pre-selected themselves for your brand. Make the most of them.
Test different layouts and sales funnels
Some blog owners simply pick a theme and stick with it – without knowing if it’s really the one that makes the most money. You might be surprised to know that a few simple page layout tweaks could make a huge difference to your sales.
Don’t just guess which one works best – test it and prove it. Run some A/B testing and trial different layouts and themes. Prove which one works best for your site.
Create custom landing pages
You don’t need to send all your traffic to your main front-page. While this could still be the best place for general traffic, if you’ve got certain visitors arriving for a particular reason – you might want to direct them to a specifically designed landing page that’s there to make the most of it – like an email opt-in page.
About the author
Peter Ellington has been writing about internet marketing for a number of years now. He enjoys educating those new to the industry, which works well with his other work for a home tuition service based in Singapore.