Adding a blog to your membership site not only helps you attract more visitors, it can also increase new member signups.
Each time you publish a new blog post on your website, it gives your target audience another way to find your membership site in Google.
However, if you haven’t optimized your blog page for more conversions, all that extra traffic might be going to waste.
So to help you make the most of the visitors who arrive at your website, we'll explain in this blog post how to design your blog page for ultimate conversions.
How to Create a High Converting Blog Page
Have you been busy engaging in content marketing and publishing useful articles on your blog that are aimed at your target audience, but you're not seeing the increase in new member signups you were hoping for?
Chances are your blog page could benefit from some optimization.
Following are a few tips for optimizing your blog page for higher conversions.
Ensure Your Website Has a Trustworthy Design
First up, it’s vital that your blog — and membership website overall — has a professional and trustworthy design.
Thankfully, this doesn’t have to mean boring or corporate. And depending on the content of your membership site, you can have some fun with its design.
For example, if your site is focused on teaching your members how to excel at their favorite extreme sport, a bold and stylized design might be appropriate.
But if your membership site offers career advice to aspiring lawyers, you might need to tone things down a bit.
Either way, your membership site and its blog should have a high-quality design that gives them a credible appearance. You want to make sure your site looks like a safe place to hand over payment details in exchange for access to your content.
We’ve previously published a guide on how to make your membership site look more professional, but some additional points to consider include choosing a high-quality theme, publishing user testimonials, and investing in a professional logo design.
Once your site begins to look more credible, you should find that more of your visitors are prepared to sign up and become members.
Create A Separate Landing Page
A blog page is great for attracting new visitors by increasing the visibility of your site in search engines, while also giving your existing audience content to share on social media.
However, it might not be the most effective conversion tool for your membership business.
After all, the primary purpose of a blog page is to display your content in an easy-to-read format, not selling memberships.
So with that mind, creating a separate landing page on your website that you direct your blog readers to could help you achieve higher conversion rates.
Landing pages are typically pieces of content created with the sole purpose of generating leads or sales. So in this case, the landing page would be focused on explaining why visitors should sign up and join your membership program.
To increase conversions, these pages often have no distracting or unnecessary features, such as links to other content on your site. And the only action that can be taken is to sign up or hit the back button.
Some WordPress themes come with landing page templates, so you might already have a quick way to add one to your site.
Another option is installing a page builder plugin, like Beaver Builder, on your membership ship site so that you can craft your own landing page.
TOP TIP: Make the Most of Page Builders With MemberPress
In fact, with the Beaver Builder MemberPress add-on, you can add MemberPress Rules to rows, columns, and modules to personalize user experience for members and non-members.
For example, you could create a landing page that displays different content or offers to visitors based on their membership level.
If a visitor is a free member, they might see an exclusive offer to upgrade to a premium membership.
If the visitor is not a member at all, they might be shown testimonials, exclusive content previews, or other incentives to join.
Utilizing the Beaver Builder MemberPress add-on in this way not makes for a highly targeted landing page. It also ensures a cohesive and compelling user experience that can significantly boost your conversion rates.
MemberPress integrates similarly with other popular page builders, Elementor and Divi.
By tailoring the content and offers to individual visitors' needs and interests, you're creating a more persuasive and effective pathway to conversion, turning curious visitors into committed members.
Alternatively, if you would prefer a simple landing page, there are free and premium tools out there that can help you launch professional-looking pages with relative ease.
Whichever method you choose for adding a landing page to your website, creating one that you can funnel your visitors to from your blog should improve conversions.
Don’t Be Afraid To Ask Or Tell
While some of the visitors to your blog page might sign up and become members without any prompting, most of them will require some gentle nudging in the right direction. Some might even need to be told what to do next after arriving at your blog and reading an article.
As a result, you need to use calls to action on your blog and throughout your website. Depending on your preferences, and what works best with your audience, calls to action could come in the form of subtle text links or unmissable banners and buttons.
Your chosen WordPress theme might provide you with tools for inserting buttons and other call-to-action elements into your content, but if it doesn’t, a plugin like Ultimate Blocks can help.
Display eye-catching buttons in your blog posts as well as at the end of articles that take readers to a landing page or registration form for your membership site. This will ensure that your visitors have the ability to easily perform an action that’s in line with your goals.
Give Your Visitors A Few Different Options
While the goal of your blog page might be to generate more registrations for your membership site, not all of your visitors will be ready to sign up right now. Some suggest that the average customer will visit a site multiple times before making a purchase.
To avoid losing those prospects for good, it’s well worth putting something in place that allows you to keep in contact with them until they're ready to sign up.
One way to do this is to offer your visitors the chance to join your email newsletter, rather than registering as a member then and there.
You can use lead magnets to encourage visitors to join the newsletter, then start forging a relationship with them by sending them useful content on a regular basis via email. The best email marketing tools make it very easy to set up and automate a campaign.
So, while it might be great to convert all of your visitors into members, giving them the option of taking another action allows you to play the long game and nurture your leads more effectively.
Final Thoughts
Hopefully, you now have some ideas to help you create a high-converting blog page for your membership site.
Ensuring your blog and membership site has a professional design is a key first step in growing your business.
Then you might want to consider creating a conversion-focused landing page you can direct your blog readers to.
Being proactive and asking — or even telling — your readers what action to take next can help increase conversions too.
Remember that some of your visitors, especially first-time visitors, won’t be ready to register today. But they might be ready some time in the future. Creating an email list that these potential members can join gives you a way to keep in touch with them until they're ready to sign up.
How will you design your blog page for ultimate conversions? Please let us know in the comments below.
Joe, thanks for this post! It’s true, no matter how good your content is, it doesn’t mean anything if nobody can find it. It’s worth it though. Keep at it, post stuff people find valuable, and share it in relevant circles. The results will not be immediate, but consistency and diligence will pay off.