Take advantage of chatbots

 

 Take advantage of chatbots

Chatbots are quickly becoming the next secret weapon for how to grow a blog.

While most people tend to view chatbots as nothing more than customer support tools, it turns out that chatbots and live chat solutions can do so much more when in the hands of the creatively inclined—assuming you’ve used one of the best website builders (like WordPress) that can accommodate these tools.

Imagine being able to personally greet and welcome every member of your audience as soon as they visit your website, or being able to set up meetings and drive people further down your sales funnel completely automatically.

Just take a look at how Acquire uses its own chatbot tool to engage visitors. Their AI chatbot starts the conversation with “👋 Welcome to Acquire! What brings you to our site?” You can talk to different teams at Acquire by simply choosing the option. When you return to the platform, you can continue your chat where you left off. The chatbot also shows resources that might be useful to you.

Be sure to check out all of my top picks for the best AI writing tools and a primer on what AI copywriting is, to see if you should be using AI in your blogging efforts too. My tool suite, RightBlogger, may just be perfect for you.

2. Make your blog’s email newsletter shine

First things first—if you want to grow your blog and email list, you need to give your new subscribers a strong reason to stay. The key to that is crafting a killer email newsletter.

Don’t just treat your email newsletter as another way to notify your audience about your latest blog post, because it can be so much more than that. A well-done email newsletter not only provides your audience with the latest news, updates and content from your blog, but it also gives you the ability to connect with your target audience in a highly personal and engaging manner.

Give people a reason to be excited every time they find an email from you sitting in their inbox.

It’s hard to find a more tried-and-true method of gathering email subscribers to grow a blog, than lead magnets.

In case you’re unfamiliar with the term, a lead magnet is a special piece of content that can only be accessed once someone has given you their email address. Through using lead magnets, you can quickly grow a blog email list with loyal readers and potential customers.

The most effective lead magnets are always ones that solves a real problem experienced by the reader, clearly demonstrates the expertise and value of its creator, and promises an actionable solution. As long as you hit these three things, your lead magnet can be anything from writing an eBook to offering a pre-recorded webinar.

Once you have your lead magnet, it’s just a matter of getting it clearly placed in front of your readership. You can do this by promoting your lead magnet on your own blog through pop-ups, banner ads, text placements and visual callouts in relevant posts, as well as regularly sharing it over on your social media channels.

4 Offer hyper-relevant content upgrades

Anytime you have a popular piece of content that’s generating you a lot of traffic, you have a prime opportunity for a content upgrade.

Simply put, a content upgrade is when you strategically place a lead magnet into the middle of a relevant blog post. While simple, this is an insanely powerful tactic which saw blogger Brian Dean boost his conversion rates by 785% in just one day.

Content upgrades are highly effective as a way to grow a blog because you’re offering your reader something that you know they want.

For example, in my article about the best CRMs to use, I offer my CRM Spreadsheet Template because I already know that if someone’s reading that article, chances are, they’ll be interested in using my spreadsheet template as well.

5. Target exiting readers on your blog

Depending on who you talk to, exit-intent pop-ups are either the most annoying thing in the world, or one of the best tactics for generating more conversions to help grow a blog on autopilot.

Where you land on the side of the debate is completely up to you—all I’m here to tell you is that in my experience, I’ve seen multiple blogs and businesses use exit-intent pop-ups to great effect. Though there’s reason to believe that exit-intent popups may soon be discouraged by search engines like Google.

At the end of the day, the vast majority of people who visit your blog will probably do so for a minute or two and take a quick look around before leaving it—probably forever. But just because someone is halfway out the door, that doesn’t mean that you don’t have one last shot to turn them into a loyal fan.

You can see this in action whenever you visit the Foundr blog. Anytime a new visitor attempts to leave a Foundr page, they’ll be presented with a pop-up that presents them with a compelling lead magnet.

Exit-intent pop-ups work by activating whenever a visitor does a very specific action such as anytime they move their cursor to close the browser window, open or close a tab or into the address bar. Whenever a visitor performs any one of those actions the exit-intent pop-up is triggered and the visitor is presented with a carefully crafted pop-up designed to give them one last compelling reason to stick around.