Essential Ways to Increase Your Website Sales
Blogging has changed a lot over the past few years.
Gone are the days when you can depend on platforms like AdSense to make money as a blogger.
Affiliate marketing, selling your own courses, offering services - there are a ton of excellent passive income sources that you can use to make more profits from your site.
If you're someone who is looking to increase your website sales without being too pushy, this guest post is exclusively for you where you'll discover 5 amazing ways to increase your sales.
Essential Ways How to Increase Your Website Sales As A Blogger
1. Give top priority to your email list
There's a reason why experts like Brian Dean (from Backlinko) includes an email opt-in form above the fold. That's the first thing his website visitors see when they arrive on his blog.
Why so many top bloggers give huge priority to their email lists?
They know email marketing produces the highest ROI.
Whether you know it or not, for every $1 you spend on email marketing, you can get $40 in ROI. That's a big number, right?
Email marketing has a ton of other benefits including;
Above all, when you're building an email list, you own the list. If you're running a Facebook group or YouTube channel, you don't own them (Facebook and Google own them). They can take down your groups, pages or YouTube channels anytime they want (once they find that you're violating any of their rules).
- Build trust with your audience
- Educate about your products and services
- Build strong rapport
- Grow your traffic, sales and conversions
But when you're building and growing an email list, you own it. You have 100% control over your email subscribers. You're the ultimate boss.
So what's stopping you to build an email list?
That being said, here are some of the proven ways to grow your email list to ultimately increase your website sales.
Provide incentives: One of the fastest ways to grow your email list is to offer incentives or freebies. They can be anything including;
Place email opt-in forms at prominent places: Another best way to boost your email list is to use as many appealing opt-in forms as possible at the right locations on your website. You can include them above the fold, on your about page, sidebar, footer section and so on.
- Cheatsheets
- eBooks
- Video tutorials
- Email courses
- Content upgrades
- Giving free access to the tools you own
Write guest posts: If you're looking to build a targeted email list, start writing guest posts for top blogs in your industry. Spend quality time to craft highly informative guest posts and make sure to add a relevant call to actions to grow your email lists. You can also create a dedicated landing page to collect emails (so you can link to those pages while guest posting).
Do you notice Ryan Biddulph from Blogging From Paradise everywhere on blogs today doing guest and contributor posts? Not only does he become recognizable but it also helps build up his email list at the same time.
2. Create unbiased product reviews
When it comes to monetizing a website, affiliate marketing is possibly the best way to earn passive income.
You recommend great products to your audience and in return, you earn a commission whenever they purchase through your affiliate referral links. Don't be afraid to promote affiliate products. After all, you need to survive and make money to be able to run your blog or website for the long run.
Did you know that we generate over $100,000 from our site Bloggers Passion in the last year i.e 2018? Majority of that income came from affiliate marketing.
One thing that helped us make more affiliate sales is this: "product reviews that are genuine". So if you're running a website and already promoting affiliate products, make sure to create unbiased product reviews.
Here are some of the tips to write honest reviews around the products you promote to increase your website sales.
Be honest: You can't ignore this tip. You should be honest while promoting your affiliate products. Don't write product reviews just for the sake of increasing your sales. Only promote those products that offer real value to your target audience.
Write comprehensive posts: Before you write any product review, it's so important to get your hands on any product that you want to cover. You should get a feel of the affiliate products you recommend. Then, you can easily list out pros, cons, features, pricing and so on.
Show alternatives: Every product review becomes unbiased if it shows better (or cheaper) alternatives to it. For instance, if you're writing any hosting-related reviews such as Bluehost black Friday sale, you should also mention its competitors along with their pros and cons. Let your audience decide what's right for them.
3. Use landing pages to boost your website sales
Do you want to know the fastest way to turn random website visitors into customers? Use landing pages. They provide minimal distraction and gives you an opportunity to promote your products in a better way.
One thing that helped us make more affiliate sales is this: "product reviews that are genuine". So if you're running a website and already promoting affiliate products, make sure to create unbiased product reviews. #affiliatemarketing Click To TweetYou can use landing pages for the following pages;
If you're looking at ideas on how to use landing pages to increase your overall website sales without being salesy, here are a few of them.
Give fewer choices: One of the golden rules of marketing is "less is more". When you give too many options and choices to your audience, they choose none. So give fewer choices and your landing pages give you better results.
- Resources (where you can mention all the tools and products you use at your blog - include affiliate links)
- About us page
- Specific products (where there's a huge potential to increase sales)
- Product reviews
- Services page and so on
Create a sense of urgency: Why should any buy stuff from you RIGHT now instead of tomorrow? Create a sense of urgency. Use countdown timers. Offer them extra discounts. It works like a charm.
As a side note, we increased our WPX hosting related product sales once we started providing 50% discount on their first month hosting plans. So yes, offering extra deals and discounts by creating a sense of urgency works great.
Address everything: While creating landing pages, answer everything that your target audience might be asking. If possible, try to include a FAQ section at the end for better conversions.
Invest in appealing design: Landing pages should load fast and look really good if you want to turn random visitors into sales. So invest money in high-quality images and landing page builders if you want to increase your sales.
4. People love free stuff
Everyone loves free stuff, right? "Free" is a powerful marketing term. If you want to make your site popular or boost your site's overall online exposure, you should give away as much free stuff as you can.
Here's a list of ideas that you can try to provide free yet valuable stuff to your website audience to ultimately increase your sales.
Free eBooks: eBooks are easy to create. You can either create one on trending and popular topics related to your niche from scratch. Or you can even compile some of your best articles and turn them into eBooks and offer them for free.
Free blogging courses: If you're into marketing niche, you can offer free blogging courses as they work like a charm. You can use email broadcasts to offer your blogging courses and create dedicated landing pages to collect emails.
Video courses: Video marketing is growing rapidly. People always love watching videos. If you can create informative videos around the popular topics in your industry, you can definitely get more leads that you can ultimately use to increase your website sales.
Note: The above-mentioned ideas can be used anywhere (from growing your email lists to running giveaways, increasing your online presence and so on).
5. Calls to action at the end of blog posts
A call to action (CTA) as its name implies, is created to persuade your blog audience to take some action.
If you want to make your site popular or boost your site's overall online exposure, you should give away as much free stuff as you can. #onlinemarketing Click To TweetA CTA can be anything including;
- Asking for social shares
- Nudging people to leave a comment
- Inviting people to join your email list
- Asking someone to buy your products or try your services
- And the list goes on
Make sure to include a CTA at the end of each and every blog post you write if you want to increase your conversion rates and sales. The key here is to use just one call to action per page if you want better results (less is always more).
Here are some powerful ways to use call to actions to boost your conversions and website sales.
Stop using vague CTAs: Stop using ordinary phrases like "Subscribe now", "Join now" etc won't work as they sound generic and doesn't persuade people to take action. You should use powerful and compelling phrases like "Get it today", "download your free copy NOW" etc. Analyse the top sites in your industry to get more ideas.
Experiment with buttons: Your CTA buttons play a key role. So experiment with button colours, text, size and so on. Analyse the different courses you find on Udemy, check out your competitors' sites, big sites like Amazon to come up with creative and engaging ideas.
Over to you on the essential ways to increase your websites sales
You need to learn the art of converting visitors into buyers. You should build trust with your content and marketing efforts.
Only when you drive your website audience to take action, you'll be able to make profits from your blog. Grow an email list, build rapport with your audience, analyse your competitors.
Make sure to include a CTA at the end of each and every blog post you write if you want to increase your conversion rates and sales. #bloggingtips Click To TweetDid you like the post on the essential ways to increase your websites sales? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.
We'd love to know if you using these 5 methods!