You work hard to craft the perfect blog post to engage your customers and keep them hungry for more, but you’re just not seeing the traffic and clicks you had expected from all that hard work. You built it, they came, but your business isn’t reaping any benefit from your online marketing efforts. Where did you go wrong? How Much of Your Posts Do People See?
Getting views is the direct goal of your SEO campaigns, but once you’re viewed, it’s up to the copywriter on your team to oversee the content strategy that turns views into purchases. The question now is not “How do I get people to view my site?” but “How much of my blog post are people seeing?” Believe it or not, if your posts are very lengthy, it’s likely that less than a quarter of your visitors are making it all the way to the end.
If only you could see just how far most visitors were reading so you could tweak your calls to action accordingly. In 2006, Neil Patel and Hiten Shah addressed that very need when they created Crazy Egg. This neat tool shows you how much of each of your posts is being viewed, as well as where people are clicking and other analytics that Google doesn’t supply.
Using Crazy Egg Data
All this information can be overwhelming, but it’s also incredibly useful when it comes to planning your content strategy. For example, if you have found time and again that visitors won’t read to the end of a long post, you might want to consider shortening your average post length by writing more focused posts and cutting necessarily lengthy posts into two or three parts.
Another great blogging strategy to get your message out to those short attention spans is to format your blog posts more like news pieces. A news article uses a format called the inverted pyramid, where the most important information is placed at the top and the least important at the bottom. Newspapers used this format so that articles could be clipped to the right length for the available space without losing any important information, but that doesn’t mean you can’t get some value out of the same format.
When you write your next blog post, make sure that the first paragraph really delivers — make it clear, no one wants to hunt your blog for whatever it is you’re trying to tell them. Take another lesson from news writing for your opening and employ the five Ws of news writing: Who, What, When, Where and Why. Expand your post from there, adding supporting information until you get to the end.
Slip-In Calls to Action
You’re probably already accustomed to putting your calls to action near the bottom of your blog posts, but that’s not the only place you can stick them. Calls to action aren’t sign-offs, they’re a demand for a reader to do something. Online marketing experts have long argued against the slip-in call to action, since it may result in the visitor abandoning the advertising piece before they finished reading it, but couldn’t that be a good thing?
Let’s look at it another way. If you know for a fact that most of your articles only engage 50 percent of your readers a quarter of the way into the piece, why not include a call to action at that point? You already know that half of your readers are about to abandon your blog post, so you might as well send them off with a message and an action to preform..
If you work that call to action in with some finesse, you may find that more readers become customers, even if they don’t read all the way to the bottom of your post. A classy call to action doesn’t offend that 25 percent that will read to the bottom, making it a great way to convert visitors that might otherwise move on to another page seeking a product similar to yours.
It is possible to overdo the calls to action — subtlety is key here. First, figure out where your jumping off point is, then insert those delicate calls to action. For example, if 75 percent of visitors only read the first three paragraphs you’ve written, make that a point where you’ll insert a subtle call to action. Experiment with placement until you’ve got your calls to action right where your readers are — by using a tool like Crazy Egg, you’ll easily see if your slip-in calls to action are being noticed.
Engaging blog craft is an art that takes practice to perfect, but with tools like Crazy Egg in your arsenal, it becomes easier to fine tune the elements in your posts. Whether you attempt to engage your visitors with graphics, an inverted pyramid style post or by writing shorter blogs, having a tool that can give you immediate feedback can help you increase your online sales dramatically.
