7 Tricks that Will Get You More Traffic & More Conversions with Your Thrive Themes Suite

The suite of tools provided by Thrive Themes is a game changer. It really makes complicated marketing tasks very simple and even fun to use.

But sometimes the guys at Thrive Themes add so many crazy features that they're struggling to explain them all and give context to them (sorry, Shane). That's what this post is all about.

Putting features into context and showing you how to use them to get more traffic, more leads and more revenue using your favourite WordPress framework.

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Let's get started!​

Get More Traffic

More traffic often equates to more money. In many ways and on different occasions, the Thrive Themes framework has helped us gain more traffic. Here is how:

Reformat Your Old Blog Posts

Formatting is easily the most ignored aspect of content creation these days. People understand the power of having targeted content but don't necessarily take the time or have the knowledge needed to make the content look and feel great to the user.

That's a mistake. In today's world​ where material and flat design are dominating, we are used to having everything looking amazing and if your blog doesn't, this causes trust issues.

To validate this theory, we took a post on our health site that used to perform well but lost steam​ over time and decided to give it a face lift with Thrive content builder.

The post in question was a recipe post and so it was easy for us to come up with a better way to share content than boring bullet points and sub titles.​

Here is what we came up with:​

The formatting was simple but good and useful enough for us to stand out.

After we were done with the reformatting, we started resharing the article around (it had around 1,000 shares at the time) and things went nuts.​

The article quickly got viral on Pinterest which got us a lot of traffic and a few backlinks to the post.

2 months later (after the viral rush) here is what the stats looked like​ in Analytics:

before/after content redesign metrics

Traffic was up 800% due to SEO peaking again on the post, time on site doubled, bounce rate went up a bit but that's part of being more popular and overall people were exiting the site less.

Great win without writing a single word of content, just reformatting it the right way.​

We also noticed that time on page and engagement for well formatted posts easily doubles every time. In short, well formatted content makes your traffic stick and explore your site more.​

How You Can Do It

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1 - Find your top content in Google analytics and study its trend

Behavior > Site Content > Landing Pages

2 - Identify posts that have been losing steam

3 - Reformat the content using Thrive Content Builder (check out the webinar recording below to learn more about formatting content)

Read more: Formatting For Increased Traffic, Conversion & Engagement

Improve Your Social Media Sharing Experience​

According to Adweek, 28% of all time online is spent on social media sites. That's a huge potential pool of traffic for you.

The issue with social media is to actually get the attention of people when your content is shared because so much is being shared there. It's now notorious that the Facebook reach is shrinking and you need to be smart if you want to reach your fans.

But what makes it even more difficult is when your content looks like that when you share it:

Luckily, Thrive Themes come with a set of settings that allow you to optimise the social sharing experience of your posts.

Improving these snippets has greatly increased our organic reach and click through. Clearly we can not rely on that for traffic but sharing some of these posts a few times a day generates hundreds of visits daily on some of our sites.

Here is what the finalised post looks like once optimised. Better no?

Not a bad organic reach for a page with 1,000 likes 🙂

How You Can Do It

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1 - Create a cover image for your site that is 1200x628 pixels wide. It's the perfect size for Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and Linked In. (consider using Canva for it)

2 - Create a more click baitsy headline for your content, use the Co-schedule Headline Analyser for that.​

3 - Update your Thrive settings on your post/page to reflect the image, description and title

Social media edit option inside all Thrive Themes

4 - Refresh the Facebook cache with the Facebook debug tool.

5 - Share away and enjoy increased organic reach!​

Read more: How to Create Free Cover Images for Your Blog Even if You Are Not a Designer

Speed Your Site Up​

According to Kissmetrics, a 1 second delay in page load can cost you up to 7% of your conversions. On top of that, how fast your site loads is actually a ranking factor for Google.

​The good news is that on top of being designed for speed, your Thrive Themes contain a bunch of options that will help you speed your site up.

Here is how our site  jumped up in the page speed tool using some of these:​

How you can do it

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1 - Turn Image optimisation on in Thrive Settings (read more about it here)

lossy optimisation is just fine unless you use a lot of graphs, it cuts the image size by around 80% most of the time.

2 - Run the thumbnail resizing optimisation script regularly (read more about it here)

3 - Consider lazy loading comments

But be careful, lazy loaded comments are not indexed by Google and this could reduce the content on your page drastically that in turn reduces your rankings.

Read more: The Non Techie Step By Step Plan To Improving Your Website Loading Speed

Get More Leads

The bigger (and more qualified) your audience is, the better for your business will do when running promos. and product sales. Here's how we use the Thrive Themes framework for that.

Switch Your Opt In Pop-ups Trigger to "On Page Load"​

Ever since they have been invented, "exit intent pop ups" are all the rage and everyone assumed they were "better" because less interruptive.

Yet nobody bothered testing them against traditional pop up triggers.

Well, we did.

​and the results were... surprising to say the least.

Exit intent was the least performant way of triggering our opt in pop ups.

Here are the stats:​

This test is using the exact same pop up design. The only thing that changed was the trigger.

As you can see, switching from exit intent to on page load is an instant 230% conversion boost without really hurting user metrics.

We have not looked back since and never use exit intent for opt in pop ups.​

How You Can Do It

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1 - Clone your existing lightbox inside Thrive Leads

2 - Modify the lightbox trigger on your copy and click Start A/B Test

3 - Set automatic winner settings at 200 conversions

4 - Come back and launch another test when it's done!

Read More: Opt-in Pop ups, the good, the bad and the ugly

Jump on the Content Upgrade Bandwagon

It's no secret that if your lead magnet matches the content people came to consume, your opt ins will be higher.

How much higher?

About 3x higher according to our tests.

That's why content upgrades are all the rage right now.

Content upgrades are basically a specific lead magnet for a specific post that matches the content exactly.

They're great to get new leads but they are also great to segment your email list and see who is interested in what, allowing you to follow up with targeted offers.

As you can see with the screenshot above, event running paid traffic to blog post we manage to convert over 10% of the traffic using them.

Great way to quickly grow your prospect list.

How You Can Do It

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1 - Create a new 2 step lightbox in your Thrive Leads Pannel

2 - Pick a template for your lightbox

3 - Design the pop up and integrate it with your email provider (more on that here). Make sure the list delivers a link to the content upgrade.

4 - Add a call to action button to the end of your post or page and click on "Event Manager"

5 - Add a call to action button to the end of your post or page and click on "Event Manager"

Read More: Why Content Upgrades Are The Single Thing That Will Rock Your Email List

Get More Sales​

The Thrive framework is also an incredible ally when it comes to making sales. Here's a few tricks that are currently making us money using Thrive Themes.

Add Exit Offers to Your Commercial Pages

Remember when I said exit intent was a bad idea? Well not always. When people are on a commercial page of yours (I.E a page where you sell something), exit intent pop ups can be an incredible ally for your sales pages.

Unlike opt ins on blog posts, the last thing you want to do when people go and visit your sales pages is to disrupt them.

You only want to do that if they already expressed the intent to leave. That's when you can present them with an opt in, alternate offer or discounted offer.

We use this tactic on pages promoting affiliate products on our site and only show the coupons we have to offer if people try to leave.

This way if they buy ​without the coupon we make more money and if they take the offer, they were going to be a lost visit anyway.

It's working pretty well for us as we're making around $1.5/click on the exit pop up link:​

How You Can Do It

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1 - Click on the + icon on top of Thrive Content Builder and select page event manager

2 - Create a new exit intent event that opens a Thrive Lightbox

3 - Click "create new" next to the select lightbox menu

4 - Open the newly created lightbox

5 - Design your call to action

6 - Save the event

Rebuild Your Sales Pages Using Thrive Landing Pages

One of the most painful task for a marketer is to create sales pages. You just can't help feeling helpless and I was particularly bad at it which was one of the big reasons why I preferred promoting affiliate products.

​Yet we had a small ebook for sales that was generating a couple hundred dollars monthly.

We then decided to implement this template when Shane released it to replace our old sales page.

​Our sales almost tripled overnight thanks to the mix of information and ease of use of Thrive Content Builder. 

We now generate around $2,500/month with this sales page.​

Conclusion

I hope these case studies and step by step tutorials gave you some ideas on how you can use the features of Thrive Themes to boost your business.

Do you have any other use of the features that boosted your business directly? Let me know in the comments!