How to get blog traffic to visit the website
The blog visit problem: the bouncers
The blog drives most of the traffic of the LEADSExplorer website. The problem is that most people just read one or two blog posts and then leave again. A large number of them read just only one post.
The blog posts are addressing the target market as we receive a relatively high amount of B2B companies visiting the blog posts.
However the main goal of promoting the lead generation and customer retention web service is not achieved as the connections with the main website are being ignored or overlooked.
The blog doesn’t drive traffic to the main website.
The solutions:
Text links
Several months ago, as a first trial we have inserted changing texts that link to the main website in-between two blog posts.
Only a very small amount of people have clicked on them to switch to the main web service website.
Maybe these texts are:
- Not apparent enough
- Resemble too much text-link ads or Google Adsense: due to ‘advertisement blindness’.
- Not interesting enough: If you know how to explain what our service does in just a few words and without sounding boring: let us know!
Whatever they are hardy getting clicked upon as if people are blind to them.
Maybe we made them look too much like advertising as found by this Nielsen study.
Buttons in flashy colors
The Free 30-Day Trial button on the main website gets clicked quite often.
Hence in order to draw more attention we decided inserting 2 buttons in flashy colors:
- Introducing the web service.
- The 30-day Free Trial teaser.
They are sure more apparent than the ‘quiet’ text lines which we have kept in place as they support the buttons by explaining the goal of the web service.
The buttons are below the blog post, thus we added the introduction button for the website also in the right hand column for those who don’t scroll completely down: The fast bouncers.
Maybe this one is overkill. We don’t know – but we’ll let you know when the results start rolling in.
Post exit pop-up for lost visitors
It is widely know that people hate pop-up buttons, probably even more post exit windows that pop-up when the visitor leaves the website.
As we consider the visitors who just read one blog post as lost, we would like to test if we can generate interest from a part of this population for our service using such a pop-up.
The pop-up will only be triggered on the blog for the first time visitors or when returning after several months.
The challenge will be finding the most appropriate text to convince the bouncers to look into our web service.
Success?
If these systems can persuade just a minority of the blog readers to visit the website, these actions can already be considered as successful.
We will let you know:
- What was effective or not.
- If we got complaints about the first time pop-up.
- How much more visiting companies did convert to sign-up for a free trial.
How about your website traffic?
How does it compare to the blog traffic (if you have a blog)?
