Many bloggers are unconsciously making it hard for new visitors to decide to stick around. They’re not selling themselves, nor are they selling their blogs.

If marketers behaved in the same way, nobody would ever buy anything and we’d all live like Zen monks! (Though maybe that’s not such a bad thing…)

In this post, I want to explain how you can use lessons learned studying how marketers sell products to convert more new visitors into loyal readers.

Selling the maker

Just as a company invests millions of dollars into its brand image, you need to emphasize the qualities of the person who makes the product. You!

A blog might promise to provide life-changing advice and suggestions, but for this promise to be effective, the visitor needs to trust that the author is worth listening to.

While personal information about your interests and your family is important (it helps show visitors you’re a normal person and not some kind of scam artist), many bloggers forget to sell themselves.

Use your About page to tell visitors why you’re worth listening to, and why the content you create is likely to be of a high quality. Here are some questions you can answer — though you want to filter out answers that don’t help to sell you.

• How long have you been involved in the field you’re writing in?
• Do you have any formal qualifications relating to the topics you write about?
• Has any of your writing ever been linked to by a popular blog visitors are likely to recognize?
• Has something you’ve written ever been very successful on social media?
• Can you demonstrate that you have a passion for what you write about, even if you don’t have formal qualifications? For example, you might not have had a story published, but what if you’ve completed NaNoWriMo five times? That’s worth mentioning.

When a company markets a product it often markets itself alongside the product. By doing one, you’re doing the other. If you think of your blog as a product, you need to emphasize the strengths behind the maker of that product.

Don’t be afraid to sell yourself. People are used of it. It might seem like boasting to you, but it’s the kind of information readers are hungry for. They want to know that you’re a capable and trustworthy source of information.

Selling the product

When companies sell a product, they don’t focus on its innate qualities alone. Instead, they focus on ends: what the product can do for you. People aren’t interested in an iPod just because it’s an iPod. They’re interested in what it can do for them (and what it will allow them to do).

New visitors approach your blog with the same mindset. They ask themselves: what will I get out of reading this blog? What does it have to offer me?

When selling your blog to new visitors, you need to convince them that it has something to offer. You should start with your About page. This stuff needs to go at the top, right above where you sell yourself.

• What does this blog offer?
• What kinds of people will benefit?
• Why is it worth reading?
• Has your blog been very successful on social media?
• Has is been linked to by a popular blog?
• Have you written for other well-known blogs?

All this information engages new visitors and helps convince them that your blog has something to offer. You can take your answers to these questions even further.

What can you offer?

You can convince new visitors of the worth of your blog outside of your About page, too.

Showcasing your most popular content (or what you think is your best content) helps to do this, because it puts your best selling points right under the noses of each new visitor. Just like a store will put the products it most wants to sell in the front window, giving lots of exposure to your best stuff will draw people into your blog.

Tag-lines can also be an effective place to sell your blog. In a sentence or two you can make a statement about what your blog has to offer and who it’s written for. You can also do the same thing with a little ‘About’ blurb on your main page (but I don’t think this is ever a substitute for a dedicated ‘About’ page).

Packaging is key

Even if you don’t have a budget for design, it’s worth investing as much time as is needed to finding a really nice theme for your blog.

Brands pour millions into packaging. That’s because decades of studies and focus-groups have shown that packaging matters. People will judge your product by the care that’s taken in the packaging it comes in.

Luckily, when it comes to finding a quality theme for your blog, you’re in the right place :-).

And remember: don’t be afraid to experiment. Try new themes, re-jig your About page, add new selling points to your blog and refine existing ones. Don’t feel obliged to stick with something just because it’s what your readers are used to.

Unless your blog is growing at a cracking pace, change is the only way you’ll be able to breathe new life into your blog’s growth.

Thank you Skellie for Writing this amazing post on Blog Perfume