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Traffic may measure the popularity and prestige of a website, but profitability is ultimately decided by conversion rate. Remember that monetization not only makes sense for e-commerce stores, affiliate sites, and business websites. As a blogger, you deserve to be rewarded for the time, effort, and talent spent in building your site.

Without further ado, here are five of the best practices that will help you monetize your website:

 

1. Build Efficient Forms

Forms incorporate interactivity with any site—thus, making the experience more “complete” for your audience. However, they can be tedious for your audience to fill, especially if you are asking for too much information. Inefficient forms may also be too slow to load or be difficult to find.
The first thing you need to do is only to ask for essential information, depending on the type of conversion you are after. For example, a name and email address should suffice for a newsletter opt-in form.

 

2. Stop Using Irrelevant Stock Photos

Remember that the online community is getting tired of ads. Millennials and members of the Gen Z, in particular, have developed “banner blindness” and can smell an ad a mile away. That said, it is no longer practical to use generic stock photos, especially the ones that are irrelevant to your content. Instead, experts recommend using real faces to help establish familiarity between you and your target audience.

A great example is the strategy of Harrington Movers where they replaced cheesy stock photos with real images of their moving crew. When they rolled out the new page, their site achieved 45.45% increase in conversions. Replacing the stock photo with custom-made content (image of their moving truck) also performed well with a 45.05% improvement over the stock photo.

 

3. Improve Your Call-to-action Buttons

A call-to-action or CTA button gives that “extra push” needed by a lot of potential customers to convert finally. To improve its visibility, make sure you use a color that contrasts well with the background. There are plenty of case studies that prove how CTA button colors can affect conversions. You can perform split-tests to help you identify the best color combinations for your site.

Aside from colors, you should also pay attention to the CTA text and find something more precise and compelling. Although it is important to be short and sweet, it is also a great move to highlight quickly the benefit of converting to entice more users. Finally, you should consider placing the CTA above the fold (the top section that’s visible when the page loads) to make sure it gets attention.

 

4. Improve Your Landing Pages

Landing pages play a crucial role in the conversion process for your website. They must supply all the necessary information that will convince your customers to convert. However, it can be tricky to highlight everything without cluttering landing pages. One strategy that will help you solve this problem is to use explainer videos to keep the landing page design compact while communicating substantial information in a more efficient way.
Also, make sure you pay attention to other landing page elements that contribute to user experience. For example, use clear and compelling headlines that help your target audience know what your site is about. Be more specific to make sure you attract the right crowd in SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) and close more conversions in the process.

 

5. Aim to Build Trust

Every conversion that ever occurred had trust backing the would-be customer’s decision. After all, a user will never invest anything—be it an email address or their hard-earned cash—if they do not trust the brand behind the offer.
There are several ways to build between you and your target audience. One is to provide social proof in your content by showing the number of likes and reshares it receives in social media. Make sure you show positive reviews to help readers gain positive expectations from your brand. You can also show off your badges and accreditations (if there are any) on your site to reassure readers that they are dealing with a legitimate brand.

 

Investing in Top-Notch Content

Whatever you do, you should never let subpar content drive your conversion rate optimization efforts. Focus on building content that you want to represent your brand, exemplify the quality you offer and win the trust of your target audience. Contact us today and let us help you develop a solid content strategy for conversion rate optimization.