How to Use WordPress to Drive Sales – With 9 Awesome Examples

Starting a company blog is one of the best long-term decisions you can make to boost your digital marketing efforts. A blog can attract more traffic to your website, improve your search engine rankings, and help your brand, your company, and your product.

More importantly, it can help you increase your sales and generate revenue, especially if you own an ecommerce business. According to research, companies with blogs produce 67% more leads monthly than those who don’t own a blog. Moreover, marketers who prioritize blogging receive as much as 13 times more ROI thanks to this strategy.

We’ll see why that is and how it works in more detail, as well as which specific steps you should take to make the most out of a company blog. But first, let’s see why WordPress seems like the best CMS platform for those who have decided to take this road.

Why choose WordPress?

Historically, in its initial stage, WordPress started off and developed predominantly as a blogging platform. Since then, it’s become much more than a platform purely for bloggers, and now it powers almost a third of all websites globally. And in the meantime, its reputation as the most convenient blogging CMS has only become more prominent.

One of the biggest advantages of WordPress in this context is its customizability. Hundreds of thousands of different themes, features, and plugins open up endless possibilities to customize your blog’s design, content, and range of capabilities. This number will continue to grow visibly, as most of these are created by the WP community, thanks to the open-source code.

Furthermore, WordPress is quite easy to use, which comes in handy to all those users who don’t feel particularly IT-minded. Blogging in WordPress is no more complicated than writing a post in Microsoft Word. Even some of the more advanced features are also easy to handle, so checking your analytics, moderating comments, or expanding your website’s functionality shouldn’t pose a problem for an average user.

Finally, those who still have trouble using WP for blogging can take advantage of a huge community gathered around the software and turn to it for support of any kind. This community provides numerous advantages for both professionals and laypersons, so choosing WP as your CMS seems like a reasonable choice no matter your level of tech-savviness.

Content creation

There are a lot of small tricks and hacks you can use to boost the performance of your WordPress blog, but without having some truly valuable content, it will all be for nothing. The whole point of a company blog is attracting people to read the content and then gradually turning readers to customers. There’s no trick you can use to make people read articles or watch videos they don’t find interesting, relevant, and useful.

There’s a huge number of formats you can employ to attract visitors – listicles, how-to articles, tutorials, guides, infographics, interviews, reviews, videos, quizzes, case studies, webinars, and much more. Whichever you choose, make sure you first do thorough research on who your target audience should be, based on who you expect to buy your products. Attracting an audience that has no interest in your business won’t do wonders for your sales.

So first of all, you need to adapt the topics, as well as the language and the voice you use to your target market. The most important step is always remembering who you write for. Once you have that settled, you can turn to actual content creation.

Address customers’ specific problems

Now, another thing to have in mind is that you should not just be writing for your specific audience, you should write about them. Not in a conventional sense, of course, but in the sense that you should be writing about problems they encounter and answer the questions they’re expected to ask.

Obviously, these problems and questions should be the ones that are in some way related to your industry and your area of expertise. This will attract the right audience and make you look helpful and competent in the eyes of the readers.

Take Amerisleep, for instance, a mattress vendor that’s really done content marketing right. Their blog is regularly updated with stories about physical and mental health, productivity, sleeping habits, mattress maintenance, and much more.

Source: amerisleep.com

Look how they used the article about best mattresses of 2020 to promote their products, but at the same time, they provided a ton of useful general info for anyone thinking about buying a mattress. They managed to address consumers’ specific needs and problems and give some valuable advice on which kind of bed you should choose given different conditions, disorders, sleeping positions, or sleeping routines.

Of course, a random reader can go to another website as soon as they’ve finished the article and buy from another vendor, but Amerisleep dramatically increases their chances of making a sale by offering customers a bed that turns out to fit their particular needs right in front of their eyes, right away.

Show how things work

In addition to explaining different concepts related to your field or helping consumers make up their minds, you can also show them how your product or your industry works. In general, tutorials and how-to’s can be very attractive to your target audience. Especially if they’re followed by some sort of visual aids – photos, videos, drawings, infographics, diagrams, or anything of the sort.

Someone to look up to in this respect is Bigcommerce, a company that provides an ecommerce platform for online retailers. They have the number #1 ecommerce blog in the world, which drives big amounts of traffic and revenue for the company.  

Source: bigcommerce.com

So what are the Bigcommerce writers doing right? They do write all sorts of pieces about all sorts of topics related to the ecommerce business, from digital marketing to cybersecurity and hosting services. But what they’re especially good at is writing detailed guides on how to set up your online shop, develop your ecommerce site, or generate social media traffic, among other things.   

Naturally, in these articles, they have a lot of room to spontaneously bring up what their product is about and promote their services. Sometimes people won’t even recognize it as a marketing move until they click on the link, since calls-to-action don’t stand out at all and seem like any other useful piece of info provided in the article. This is a perfect way of promoting your product without ever being salesy, pushy, or invasive.

Offer solutions

On the same token, offering your readership concrete and creative solutions to their problems can result in great sales-driving content. Of course, these problems don’t have to be matters of life and death. It’s enough that readers have a specific need or wish that your product can help fulfill.

And this is how your product comes into play here. It should provide a useful solution to the consumers, and you’ll have a chance to present it in detail to those who are actually interested in its potential.

It’s important that you don’t get carried away here and remember who you write for first and foremost. So don’t brag about your product, its many features, and how many of them you sold, but instead focus on talking about how it benefits the customer. This is the only way to hold their attention. What you should tell about your product, though, is how it’s different from all the others and what its unique value is from the perspective of the consumer.

A good example of this is BioLite Energy, an online shop selling outdoor energy gear and devices. They address campers, climbers, and other outdoor enthusiasts, and offer articles on topics such as hiking, cycling, ecology, outdoor cooking, as well as recipes and survival tips. For instance, their guide on how to light a fire is a helpful, well-written piece that any camper would find valuable, but at the same time, it does a great job of promoting their products like stoves or fuel pellets.

SEO benefits

Source: depositphotos.com

There are multiple ways in which your WordPress blog will help you increase conversions and sales. As we could see, well-conceived blog posts can provide value for the readers and encourage them to trust your brand and buy your products. Also, shareable articles will bring more people to your website. More traffic means more potential customers, which, in turn, usually means a sales boost.

Another benefit of running a business blog is improved SEO. Naturally, this will only happen if your blog offers quality articles on relevant subjects. Additionally, your content and your entire website will have to be carefully optimized in order to climb up the Google rankings. Here are some quick tips on how to do that:

• Do thorough keyword research. You’ll have to find keywords that work for your industry and your competitors and take advantage of them. Be careful not to overstuff the articles with these keywords as it can have the opposite effect. You need to pay attention to the context at all times since the algorithms are becoming smarter and more competent at understanding natural language.
• Write original product descriptions instead of just copying them from another website. Google doesn’t really favor duplicate content.
• Optimize for speed. SEO is all about user experience (UX), and page loading speed is a big part of it. Get rid of any unnecessary features, design elements, and plugins that could slow your website down.
• Look for WP plugins that can make your life easier when it comes to SEO. As it was said, be careful not to overburden your site with too many of these.
• Devote some time to link building. Having a lot of backlinks that link to your blog or your website increases its relevance. Sometimes you’ll need to do some guest blogging to achieve this, but other times quality content is all you need in order to get backlinks. Websites with blogs get 97% more links, so starting a blog is a great way to build relevance and authority.
• Try taking care of as many other SEO-related details as possible, such as image optimization, internal linking, meta descriptions, headline optimization, mobile responsiveness, or URL structure. All these details can amount to a big difference in organic traffic, so it’s worth putting some effort into this.

There are many examples that showcase how and why search engine optimization can do great things for your WordPress blog and your business. Here’s a particularly descriptive case study of a media company that grew 400% largely due to smart SEO tactics. There were no crazy hacks or magic, just hard work to get every detail straight in order to improve numerous aspects of UX and help the website rise in rankings.

Offer free teaser content

One clever strategy that can help you get more out of your content is offering opt-in freebies. For instance, you can publish the first part of a series of articles or videos on your blog and offer to email the rest to everyone who’s ready to type in their email address and subscribe.

This helps you build your email marketing list and use another channel for marketing your products and communicating with your target group. This is very important, as email marketing has the highest ROI of all digital marketing strategies – around $42 per $1 invested. This move will also let you take your relationship with your readers to a new level, enabling you to establish a closer connection with them.

Source: venturesuperfly.com

A good example is John Benzick, an entrepreneur and startup mentor. He offers a free 20-minute coaching session on launching and growing a business, basically in exchange for your name and email.

This way, he’s offering a free sneak peek of what he’s about before you can decide whether you’ll pay for premium coaching and content. People definitely aren’t ready to invest their money in everything they come across online, and this is a great way of reassuring them that your content or your service is worth it. If you don’t succeed at it, at least you have another name on your newsletter subscription list.

CTA buttons

Another important factor in boosting your sales with your content is how you design and arrange your call-to-action (CTA) buttons. People who read and like your content ought to be aware that you’re actually selling something, and you shouldn’t hesitate to remind them about it.

Of course, this doesn’t mean being too pushy, as it can only annoy and chase away your readers. Having too many CTA buttons can confuse your potential customers and overwhelm them, so you won’t provoke the desired reaction. However, having a discreet link or button (or two) is a must. The more it seems like a natural part of your content, the better.

Making several different personalized CTA buttons is also a good idea. By obtaining and using advanced customer data, you can distinguish between visitors in different stages of the buyer’s journey. Take a look at how Hubspot designed different CTAs for random visitors, leads, and customers respectively, finding different ways to maximize the engagement of each group.

Utilize trending topics

The fastest way to grow your audience is to make sure that one of your posts goes viral. Unfortunately, it’s impossible to predict with certainty that an article will become super-popular, but you can try a few things that will make it more likely to happen.

Namely, writing about hot current topics is one of the most common ways to make a post extra-shareable. This obviously doesn’t mean just any trending topic, but only the ones that are in some way relevant to your industry and your visitors.

Source: apiumhub.com

Take Apiumhub – an IT company from Spain with a great tech blog. Just like many other tech blogs, they’re trying to address the trends in their industry and make them more accessible to their readership. It’s an excellent road to take for an IT firm. 

Even if you fail ever to go viral, if your blog can offer useful info and new angles on cutting-edge technology. This is likely to result in a steady growth in traffic and sales.

Promotion on social media

It’s easier than ever to advertise businesses and content of all kinds using social networks. Don’t miss out on this opportunity. With the help of social media, you can get a lot of eyes on your content. What’s more, you can accurately target exactly those people who are actually going to be interested in your brand and your content, saving a ton of money in the process.

If you want to know how to promote your posts on social media properly, visit some of Neil Patel’s social channels. A famous entrepreneur and marketing expert, Neil Patel does a very meticulous job in promoting and sharing all sorts of content he creates.

A very important lesson to learn from him is that you should also have some quality content that you will upload directly or even exclusively to social media, instead of using these channels only to share previously created posts and videos. This way, you’ll be growing your social networks more quickly and you’ll make your followers more engaged, which will have a positive effect on traffic to your blog posts as well.

Make smart use of plugins

Finally, when running a company blog on WordPress, use all the benefits that WordPress offers. Plugins can help you with sharing, posting, promoting, optimizing, testing, generating leads, monitoring key metrics, organizing, reorganizing, and basically, if there’s any manual work you’re supposed to do regarding your WP blog, there’s likely a plugin that can automate this process.

Of course, once again, you need to limit yourself to those plugins that are actually necessary to your website, or otherwise, you can make it too heavy and slow. (Side note: be sure to avoid nulled plugins, and here’s why.)

One addition that can really help you boost your blog is a commenting feature. Probably the most famous of commenting plugins is Disqus, which you must have already seen around and which is used by giants like ABC News or TMZ. There are many great uses of a plugin of this kind, the most important ones being getting honest and timely feedback, as well as gradually building an active community around your brand or product.

Final thoughts

Source: depositphotos.com

To get the most out of your WordPress blog, you’ll have to stick to all of these tactics we’ve talked about and apply them in a way that best suits your needs. As a matter of fact, you’ll have to consider doing even more than that, as this is a virtually inexhaustible topic. 

For instance, you should also pay attention to the timing of your posts and mobile-friendliness of your website or your content. You also absolutely need to get your hands on detailed and accurate customer info in order to create content that really resonates with your readership.  

And there’s much more beyond that. All in all, if you wish to Use WordPress to Drive Sales and be successful, you need to put in a lot of thought and effort. But if you’re persistent and fastidious enough, you can rightly expect that it will all pay off, both in terms of driving extra sales and strengthening your brand in the long run.