Conversion Matters

This is a topic that ChrisG has touched upon before (and probably others) but I believe it is an important one that deserves revisiting.

As a blogger you have to realise that people will consume your content in different ways. You will have organic search traffic, RSS subscribers, and referrals from other bloggers and social media sites.

Organic Search Traffic

If people are visiting your blog as organic search traffic, it is likely to be the first (and possibly last time) they will see your blog. Here are some questions you should be asking yourself:

• How do you get the maximum value out of that visitor?
• Do you even know what your ultimate goal for organic search traffic is?

Let’s look at the second question first.

Do you even know what your ultimate goal for organic search traffic is?

In an ideal world the ultimate goal for organic search traffic would be that they enjoy your content and find it useful, e-mail it to a few friends who they think may find it helpful, bookmark it at del.icio.us, digg it, and subscribe to your RSS feed.

In reality, however, many of these people probably have no idea what an RSS subscription is and have never heard of digg or del.icio.us. So what can you do to get more value out of these visitors?

How do you get the maximum value out of organic search traffic?

Firstly, you can keep them interested in your blog and on it for longer by showing them other interesting related content. You can either do this by manually adding relevant content to the end of all your posts. This is quite time consuming but it’s likely to provide a greater degree of relevance. It’s not that practical though for many bloggers and if you’re going to go down the automatic route I’d recommend a plugin called Related Entries.

Secondly you can perhaps push them towards email subscription. I dare say the average Joe has heard of email newsletters over RSS feeds.

Thirdly - advertising. I’m of the opinion that shoving adsense or other advertising down your regular readers throats is just, well, a bit rude really. It’s probably not going to help your blog grow and become a respected authority blog. However, I do believe that putting advertising on your older blog posts, where appropriate, that receive organic traffic is fair game.

For example, I have a completely off topic post about free laptops and every day it receives a handful of visitors. The rest of my blog provides no value to them. Even the post itself probably offers little in value. At least by adding a bit of adsense I have the potential to earn a trickle of money from that post as opposed to it going totally to waste.

RSS Subscribers

People who have subscribed to your RSS feed have already found enough value in your blog to want to read all your updates. You should be very thankful for each and everyone of your subscribers.

Don’t annoy your subscribers

While you can’t please everyone your aim is not to annoy your subscribers - heaven-forbid they unsubscribe! What does this actually mean?

My number one pet hate when reading a feed is seeing something along the lines of ‘If you enjoyed this post why not subscribe to our feed’. An RSS subscriber doesn’t need to see this! Move the message into your post template. That way you don’t have to worry about attaching it to the end of every post and you won’t annoy me or other subscribers!

Secondly (and very hypocritically) I don’t really like it when I have to visit the original site to view the whole post, that sort of defeats the point of RSS feeds in my opinion. Now I say very hypocritically because I actually did this myself up until writing this post. Now, it’s not that I’m trying to force you to visit my site, I’m honestly not, I’m just trying to avoid duplicate content issues.

I’ve kicked my arse into gear and installed a plugin called full text feed. I shall update this straight after to let you know if it works or not. If it does, I implore you to consider using it or something similar. There are benefits from using the more tag but not for your RSS subscribers.

Update:  The plugin above works just fine, download it now!

How to get more value from your RSS subscribers

It’s likely that at least some of your RSS subscribers are also bloggers. You owe it to all your readers to provide them with quality content updated regularly if you can manage it.

RSS subscribers are already providing a lot of value just by the fact that they’ve subscribed. However, they can be provide even more value if they are fellow bloggers and they agree/disagree/find value from your content enough to talk about it on their own blogs.

That’s really the holy grail: subscribers who blog about your blog. They increase your brand awareness (yes, I firmly believe your blog is your brand) and blog exposure, further growing your daily visitors and subscribers.

Referred Traffic

These are people who have been sent to your blog from either another blog or a social media type site.

This is the reason you have that prominent subscribe button!

Your primary goal for referred traffic should be to turn them into repeat visitors, or more likely in the case of a blog, subscribers. The main added value referred visitors can bring is by subscribing to your blog, although arguably, also commenting is of value, though not so much as subscribing.

To maximise the potential value of these visitors you should have prominent subscribe buttons, above the fold. This should be followed up by a subscribe to this blog link at the bottom of the article. That’s probably where they are most likely to subscribe. Just after they have read a great article.