7 Best Blog Posts That Will Make People Subscribe in 2017

Do you know how many websites are on the Internet?

Do you know how much competition there is for readership of your blog posts?

According to Webhosting.com there are 1 billion websites on the Internet.

Mostly Blogging has advised how to get blog followers in many articles. Networking and offering incentives for signing up are two of those strategies.

Today’s guest author Andrew Gazdecki explains how to engage readers and increase sign ups by tweaking the kind of content in the blog posts you write.

Andrew’s strategy is like Google Keyword Planner. The goal is to find keywords in demand but with low competition for readership. Andrew takes that logic and applies it to the format of blog posts.

The 7 types of content he suggests are trendy in 2017. These blog post formats are all in demand by readers but have little competition on the Internet.

If you write about these types of content, you will see a vast improvement in your readership and ultimately sign ups.

7 Content Types to Increase Conversion Rates In 2017

By Andrew Gazdecki

Social media has created a significant need for companies to produce content. Blogs, updates, pictures and other content types allow a brand to be consistently active on their social media accounts, which drives engagement, causes more people to convert and allows a company to remain relevant among their targeted consumers. This need for content has created a competitive environment surrounding content marketing. With every business producing blog content, sharing photos and posting updates, it can be hard for a brand to make a splash and get the consumer attention they are after.

Digital marketers must stay vigilant and constantly look for an edge over competitors and their content. Sometimes this means finding opportune times to post content, low traffic social media platforms or just producing a better and more diverse content marketing strategy than other brands. The best content marketers go beyond the common types of content (blog content, photos, status updates) and leverage the types with less competition, but high impact on your brand’s ability to convert consumers into customers.

Seven types of content are less common (and thereby have low competition) and achieve high conversion rates, which you should begin incorporating into your content marketing strategy: contests, surveys, quizzes, assessments, videos, infographics, and calculators.

1. Contests

For a new company that is struggling to gain traction, a contest is a great type of content to drum up a stir. After all, if you aren’t making real revenue, giving away stuff is the best way to get people through the door and spending money. A contest or giveaway can generate competition between potential customers and quickly become a sensation on social media channels. Participants’ activities within the confines of the contest will create new engagement as their friends and family see and feel enticed to join in as well, otherwise miss out on the experience entirely. Additionally, you can leverage a contest or sweepstakes to encourage consumer participation in any of the other strategies listed below.

The conversion rate for contests varies depending on the industry and scope of the campaign. For one example, IDEON, a contract-based furniture company, produced 12-week sweepstakes online that ended up generating 24% increase to their subscriber lists, 31% referral conversion rate and 5% click-through-rate (CTR).

2. Surveys

Somewhere along the line, companies stopped leveraging surveys and polls as much as they used to. There is a common misconception that surveys are a distraction, even an annoyance, to customers. The opposite is true. Customers like to share their opinions with their favorite brands and feel that they have contributed to making the company more successful. A survey gives a very convenient means for audiences to do just that. And, you’ll benefit from the incredibly valuable information that these individuals are providing. This customer data can be used to make better decisions in the future, which enhances the client’s experience and success of the business.

The conversion rate for surveys varies depending on the length of the survey (how many questions are asked) and whether there is an incentive of some kind offered. A satisfaction survey consisting of more than twelve questions and providing no incentive for completion has a conversion rate of approximately 10%, with one person following up. However, if you shorten the survey and add an incentive, this rate can go as high as 75%.

3. Quizzes

People often think they know more than they do. They also like to put their knowledge to the test and can easily have their curiosity piqued with a simple challenge: ‘How much do you know about Healthy Dieting?’ The big success of branded quizzes is when they can show the consumer that he or she doesn’t know as much as previously thought and then provide them with the solution or knowledge they need. Using the above example, the quiz taker may get to the end of the test with a low score and determine that their current eating habits or diet aren’t as right for them as they thought. Then, you offer them the right diet plan or food options.

 

This creates the potential for a fun and seemingly pointless quiz to post big numbers, regarding CTR and conversion rates. A real life case comes from Pampadour, a beauty blog. Before the Mother’s Day holiday, they offered a quiz to help consumers decide which beauty products they should buy their mother or wife. Almost 400 people took the test, and a staggering 357 finished it. Even more impressive, 299 participants submitted their contact information to the blog’s lead generation form. That’s roughly a conversion rate of 64%!

4. Assessments

Assessment-based content has a lot of the same properties as quizzes. A person’s willingness to participate in an assessment is often determined by how curious they are. Assessments also have the same ability as quizzes in offering a solution to a problem that the consumer may not have even been aware they needed/wanted. Where these two types of content diverge is that assessments don’t require any fact-based knowledge; they are a measure of personality. So, think regarding the popular, albeit silly, social media assessments that allow you to determine which era you should have been born in, which Simpsons character you are and the like.

The successful, Internet media company BuzzFeed is the biggest generator of these silly assessment-type quizzes. Their most popular assessments are completed and shared millions of times. This type of content is a huge contributor to the almost 190 million visitors that BuzzFeed receives each month. The New York Times has also had success with quizzes — about 2.5 million people took their dialect quiz in 2014.

However, assessments can be used for just about any purpose including finding out the best app makers, ecommerce platforms, or marketing automation platforms based on your business needs. This type of content draws people in because it touches your reader’s curiosity and provides to them a solution and thereby increases conversion rates.

5. Videos

Two fundamental forces have contributed to the massive success of video-based content over the past decade or so. The first is the mobile smartphone, which allows consumers to access and watch video content anywhere they go. Secondly, popular video sharing platforms, like YouTube, Vimeo, and others, have created an environment to host videos, track viewer insights and allow them to comment, like and share their favorites. The next factor that has the potential to impact the value of video content greatly is interactive videos. New software and services are allowing companies to add interactive elements to their videos. A viewer could be simultaneously watching the video and answering survey questions related to the visual content.

Video content boasts big key metric numbers. If your website or social media pages have video content, potential leads are likely to spend twice as much time there. Perhaps more impressive, shoppers are reportedly 64-85% (depending on industry and price of purchase) more likely to buy a product after they have seen a product video.

[Read: How to Use YouTube to Be a Better Blogger]

[Read: Your Blog Needs Video Content. Here’s Why…]

6. Infographics

Thanks to the Internet and our mobile devices, our brains get more information than ever before. Unfortunately, we can’t always process all this information all at once and in its current form. Enter infographics. These are more visual representations of information that make it easier for the modern consumer’s brain to “download” the idea or subject at hand. Why try and explain how to make an app, if you can show it?

There’s no better way to demonstrate why infographics are successful than to show you this infographic about why people love this type of content.

[Read: How to Create Infographics that Send Hordes of New Visitors to Your Blog]

7. Calculators

While not exactly applicable for every company or industry, calculator tools can be an incredible means of conversion and lead generation. Consumers like this content type because it presents an opportunity for them to punch in their info, which is unique to their situation, and then receive a more exact price, rate, estimate, payment plan, etc. They can adjust and play with their data until they reach a conclusion. This is how these tools generate such high conversion rates — they allow a browsing shopper to immediately and definitively decide if a purchase makes sense, based on their data. In other words, a calculator tool helps a customer decide for themselves whether to convert or not.

Final Thoughts

All the above tactics will help make your content strategy more diverse and dynamic. Your audiences will appreciate that you offer more than the run-of-the-mill blog content and status updates, and your business will appreciate the high conversion and click-through rates of these content types. If your marketing department is particularly creative and crafty, they will have no problem coming up with exciting ways to engage and convert audiences using these seven types of content with high potential impact and low competition.

Author Bio:

Andrew Gazdecki is the founder and CEO of Bizness Apps — making mobile apps affordable and simple for small businesses. We’re a do-it-yourself iPhone, iPad, Android and HTML5 app platform that allows any small business to simultaneously create, edit, and manage mobile apps without any programming knowledge needed. Think of us as “WordPress for mobile app creation.” Many of our customers are white label mobile app resellers — marketing or design agencies that use our platform to cost effectively build mobile apps for small business clients.

Host Blogger’s Comments: Playing detective, I decided to do a little research to confirm the accuracy of what Andrew is telling us: these blog posts are trendy now in 2017.

I went to Buzzsumo and typed in the keyword for this article: “blog posts.” It turns out Andrew is correct. A post that was written just a few months ago that received almost 20,000 social shares contained an infographic as well as two graphics.

Please share, so other content creators know about the blog posts that are trendy now. Maybe they can create them and receive almost 20,000 social shares too. Now, wouldn’t that be nice?

Which of Andrew’s blog post types will you try first? I have made infographics, videos, and held a giveaway. I look forward to your responses in the comments section.

Related Post:

How to Create Blog Content Your Readers Will Love– Guaranteed!

Source for Graphics:

Shutterstock