You’ve seen it all before. Blogs that appear to be brand new and the blogger is actively adding content, but he forgot one thing…The blogger didn’t think about blog Optimization.

It’s pretty amazing isn’t it?

If you read my Guide on how to start a blog, then you surely know that I have a complete blog optimization plan ready, before I even published my first post.

It makes sense right?

The moment I publish my first posts and start promoting them I’m ready to add subscribers to my list and make sales.

Sure, some bloggers add an opt-in form in their sidebar, or at best use a popup to collect emails, but those aren’t very good tactics.

In this post, I’ll show you 2 things:

1. A case study I did a couple of years back when I was more of a hobby blogger (but which yielded great results).
2. How I’ll set up Bloglivin to maximize results using parts of the case study I did earlier.

In case you didn’t realize it yet, if you want to start a blog, building your email list is crucial for your success, so I’ll spend a lot of time optimizing and tweaking my campaigns.

And obviously, you can watch over my shoulder as I move forward.

So let’s first check exactly what I did 2 years ago with a blog in the “make money online” niche, and how I’ll put my own twist on things with my new blog here.

Blog Optimization By Defining My Target Audience

Get this wrong, and you’re bound to fail, period.

Most people that want to start a blog get started the wrong way. Sure you need to blog about something you’re passionate about or you’ll get bored and quit, but that speaks for itself.

Before you even write your first post you have to know one thing: Where do the people that will find my posts helpful hang out?

Just think about it, why would you write amazing content if nobody will ever see it?

And if you want to rely solely on search engine traffic, you’ll be very disappointed initially.

Why?

Because it will take weeks, if not months to rank for keywords that will bring in a decent amount of visitors every day.

So what was my first focus back in the first months of 2015?

I figured that before I write a single word of content, I need to know WHY to write that content.

So my blog optimization plan back then was to:

 Find out what problems my target audience was having
 Create content that solves those problems
 Reach out and genuinely help people with their problems

Thinking back, that was a pretty solid approach.

Doing Research On My Target Audience

This was a fairly simple but crucial step to take before you I even got started writing content.

So what did I do?

I checked out what people in my niche are talking about, and more importantly, what questions they have and base my content ideas on issues.

So for my internet marketing blog that was fairly easy:

 People look for ways to make money online
 People want to grow their email list
 People want to get more traffic
 People suffer from shiny object syndrome
 People buy one WSO after another

Back then I was an active member of the Warriorforum for a long time already, and I pretty much knew what people that are just getting started to try to make money online want.

Many people are looking for help, and because the information they can find on the main forums is too limited to get started, they head over to the WSO section to buy a report.

I did a lot of research on this, and something I noticed was that there was a huge shortage of actionable guides which are provided freely on a blog.

So with this in mind, all I needed to do was to create these guides and engage the audience which was hanging out on the Warriorforum.

You know, the people that are looking for the next best $10 report until the end of time.

So coming up with a strategy was fairly simple:

 Create posts that are the same (or better) quality than paid Wso’s
 Drive Wso buyers to my blog posts
 Build an email list to update my audience about new guides

I figured that it will be very easy to turn repeat Wso buyers into repeat blog visitors if the quality of my free guides exceeds the quality of the average Wso.

Did this approach work?

It surely did!

Here you can see the result of the 2 first days I started promoting my blog:

As you can see, my blog went from practically no traffic to nearly 300 visitors in just a couple of days.
Without creating high quality content and engaging my audience where they hang out, this would be pretty much impossible.

The Blog Opt-In Conversion Booster

So without traffic, your content is worthless.

But by the same rationale, if you don’t have an optimized blog and funnel in place to make sales, your content is worthless too.

The problem back in 2015 was simply that I didn’t have a decent product to sell.

I made affiliate sales and sold a lot of $10-$20 products, but the fact remains that I didn’t have a great funnel that would make me a full-time blogger.

However, I did have a great converting blog!

My blog optimization strategy to ensure that as many people as possible would sign up to my email list was versy solid.

And obviously it worked!

I’ll first explain what the method is about and how it can be used, and then I’ll show you the little twist I used to really kill it.

The Content Upgrade Method

First of all, I learned this method from Brian Dean from Backlinko.com, so all credit goes to him.

What it comes down to is that you offer the readers of your blog posts an upgrade to that particular post.

This upgrade can be a:

 Bonus video
 Bonus report
 Checklist
 Infographic

I’m sure you get the idea.

Brian actually adds a content specific upgrade to each one of his blog posts. That’s a great idea because it’s very targeted, especially if your content is of the highest quality already. (and this is something I’ll do on Bloglivin too)

Here you can see an example of how he does it:

When you click the “Download a free checklist” link, a popup appears where you can subscribe to his list as seen here: This is pretty ingenious.

The first thing you need to understand is that a regular blog converts at about 1%.

This is even when you add all the bells and whistles everybody else is adding such as an opt in form in the sidebar, in your posts and even an exit popup.

Brian created a little case study about a guy’s blog about golfing. As you can see, this person’s blog wasn’t converting at all:

However, after implementing this technique his blog conversion rate increased by a stunning 459%: That’s a huge improvement don’t you think?

And to make things even better, he achieved this with a simple little tweak which doesn’t take too much effort.

Creating a checklist of your blog post only takes about 30 minutes, but it can add hundreds, or even thousands of extra subscribers to your list every month which you wouldn’t have got otherwise.

My Tweak To The Content Upgrade Method

So Brian teaches you to add a content upgrade related to the post. And as you saw, this works awesome.

I was thinking of doing something similar, but I came up with a great variation of this method which did even better.

So while I was contemplating the things that what would benefit my audience the most, I made a summary of a possible scenario:

 I write high quality guides related to making money online
 I add 2-3 new guides every week
 I add all reports in a collection of high quality reports

With this in mind, I came up with the idea to create a PDF of each one of my blog posts.

So instead of adding post specific upgrades, I used one global update.

When people subscribed to my list they got instant access to ALL my guides in PDF format.

Each time I created a new post, I will add it to a special download page that people can access after subscribing to my list.

Pretty cool right?

And what makes it ice-cold is the fact that it works.

These are some stats from the third day of using this method on my blog:

These are stats from a blog that had zero traffic 3 days earlier!

Do you think I would have gotten an 8,81% conversion rate and have added 31 subscribers to my list without super high quality content and using the content upgrade method?

You think a simple free report and an opt in box in the sidebar can achieve this?

I don’t think so…

Opt-In Box Placement

The little case study you just saw is pretty much the same tactic I’ll use on my blog here.

But, with a few tweaks.

First of all let me show you the final part of this case study which is the opt-in box placement I used on my blog to get these type of results.

After that I’ll show you an overview of all the opt-in boxes I use on Bloglivin and how I’ll use a couple of twists.

Opt-in form on the homepage

I’ve seen these opt In boxes on other blogs which actually fill up your entire screen. I didn’t really want to use that so I added an opt in box just above the most recent posts:

This way I could introduce myself to new visitors, and the links to my money making guides were visible to increase conversions for the opt in box.

Back then I didn’t consider this to be a very important box.

You’ll see later on why I was probably wrong about that.

Sticky opt in box in the sidebar

On all pages except the homepage I added an opt in box which scrolls down too as the visitor scrolls down the page.
Here you can see that:

So no matter where the visitor is on the page, the opt in box remains visible.

And of course, he can see the links to the money making guides below too.

Creating a sticky widget is super simple actually. You can do this with a simple plugin, and all you need to do is mark a box to make the widget stick to the page.

To get the plugin go to the “add plugin” page in your WordPress dashboard and type “fixed widget” in the search box.

And this is the plugin I’m talking about:

After that you can mark the box in the widget area to make whatever widget you want stick on posts and pages. in this case the opt in box widget: This is also a great method to use when you got a special announcement or promo or whatever you want to get noticed, because there’s no way visitors won’t pay attention when they scroll down the page.

Attention bars inside blog posts

This is the content upgrade method I referred to earlier, for which we need to add a clickable link in the blog posts (as you saw in the example).

I did something similar but my blog optimization strategy contained an attention bar. The one’s you sometimes see on top of a website.

Here you can see the example of the attention bar on top of my post:

And I also added one at the bottom of the post: When people clicked the download link, an opt in popup appeared like this: Do you think these get good conversion rates?

They sure do!

I have to be honest, I didn’t have much data up until the time I was writing this, as I only promoted my blog for 2 days and only had 3 guides.

That being said, the reason I included this little case study to increase website conversions is to show you what steps you should take BEFORE you get started promoting your blog.

So these stats are absolutely relevant.

Here you can see the conversion of these attention bars in just one day:

A conversion rate of nearly 10% isn’t bad if you ask me.

Remember that I mentioned the average blog only gets a 1% conversion rate or even less?

Because of multiple reasons I wasn’t able to stay focused on my blog so I haven’t got more info and stats than this.

But don’t worry, on Bloglivin I’ll keep track of everything and show you my results for a longer period of time.

The post Blog Optimization Guide – How To Get Nearly 10% Email Conversions on Your Blog appeared first on BLOGLIVIN.