How to Drive Sales with Your Company’s Blog: Do’s, Don’ts, and Need-to-Knows

One of the best long-term strategies to boost your sales is to use your company’s blog. Websites that blog receive 97% more inbound links, and companies that publish more than 50 blog posts per month experience a 77% rise in median monthly leads. Blogging can be very valuable not just for driving sales, but also to build credibility, increase brand awareness, and improve search engine visibility.

It goes without saying that you’ll need high-quality content that’s well-written, grammatically correct, relevant, and informative. However, to fully optimize your blog for driving sales, you’ll need to do more. Here are some tips and tricks you may find useful.

Address customer problems and questions

Simply put, the point of you company’s blog is to attract visitors with compelling content and then gradually turn them into customers.

Now, in order to attract the right type of audience, you should predominantly write about topics related to your industry. Make sure it’s truly helpful for the readers, try answering actual questions they’d ask, and help them solve some frequent issues.

You can even openly ask your audience or your customers what they would like to read about on your blog. All this will make you look attentive and knowledgeable, which are both big boosts for your branding efforts.

For example:

Eachnight, an affiliate site for mattress vendors, offer great reads on sleep health, sleep studies, mattresses, beddings, and many other relevant subjects that attract the right audience.

Mind the CTA buttons

Great articles on relevant topics are a good start, but they’re still not enough. You need to let the reader know you’re selling something and try to casually promote your services through your content.

The right way to do it is with subtle, yet clearly visible CTA buttons and links. You need to make these call-to-actions seem like an integral part of the content. It’s even better if you can use them in a way that’ll make it clear exactly what you’re selling and how it relates to what you’re writing about.

However, you shouldn’t randomly cram a bunch of CTAs into every article, whether they fit in naturally or not. These CTA buttons will awkwardly stick out and make you look desperate. Avoid being too pushy, salesy, and intrusive.

For example:

ClearVoice, the content marketing platform, ends their articles with clear CTA button and a 45-second video explaining what they do. In the body of their articles, you can often find a couple of unobtrusive, strategically placed CTA links that will take you to the sign-up page or redirect you to some other good reads on the website.

Leverage trending topics

To boost the positive effects of your blog, and remain current, it’s advisable that you address appropriate trending topics. This increases your reach, and generally does good things for your traffic, at least short-term.

However, there are some big don’ts hidden in all this, and you’ll have to be very careful with utilizing current issues for content creation. You should only do this when the topic in question actually concerns your industry, your product, or your brand. Otherwise, it’ll just seem like a ridiculous cry for attention.

For example

Medical Alert Buyer’s Guide has been publishing articles on how seniors can deal with the COVID-19 outbreak. This is a great approach since they normally write on health topics. But now we’re seeing a variety of organizations offering their take on this subject, even when there’s absolutely no connection between the epidemic and their sphere of interest.  

Invest in SEO

Quality content on your blog will definitely improve your visibility and organic traffic. Whenever users google a certain topic or ask a question related to your niche, the most relevant articles will appear. Obviously, those who come across your articles will have a high chance of discovering your products as well.

Now, good content is essential, but if you want search engines to easily find your website, you need to put in some extra effort, including :

• Optimizing keywords, headlines, images, and meta descriptions
• Speeding your website up
• Implementing a responsive design
• Building backlinks
• And much more

Nowadays, search engine optimization is at the heart of a huge industry, and examples of its effectiveness are everywhere. Just take a look at this case study that describes how top-notch SEO helped a media company’s website grow 400% in 18 months.

Good UX is an imperative

When it comes to the design of your blog, good looks are indeed important, but the real priority is UX. A fast, intuitive website that’s user-friendly, easily readable, and mobile-responsive is an absolute must for anyone looking to improve their sales and conversions.

Therefore, don’t overburden your website with unnecessary features, plugins, and design elements. Users have very little patience nowadays, so you’ll want to ensure smooth and effortless browsing around your blog in order to keep them engaged.

For example:

Canva, the graphic design platform, did this right. As a website that deals with design, their blog is full of high-res images that often slow websites down. However, this site works flawlessly, thanks to a slick, clean design that uses basically no additional features, apart from a few social buttons and thumbnails that link to related articles.

Final thoughts

Finally, you need to remember that for a business blog to be truly successful, you can’t keep your writing team isolated.

They’ll need to hear the feedback and adapt accordingly. The goal of running a company blog is to increase conversions and sales, so if a certain type of content doesn’t work for your audience, your writers need to reconsider their approach. They’ll have to work closely with the rest of the marketing team, as well as the sales department, customer service, and management.