A great way to increase signups for your product is to directly talk about it in your content.

It’s also a great way to improve customer retention, as every piece of content helps your customers get more value from your product.

The Ahrefs blog is a perfect example of this strategy.

Most of Ahrefs’s articles reference their own SEO tool. And not in any small way, either: they include screenshots of their tool and step-by-step instructions on how to use it.

For example, their excellent guide to link-building pretty much doubles as a beginner’s guide to the Ahrefs software.

Now, Ahrefs is fortunate.

Their product can be used for almost anything SEO-related. So it’s natural to talk about their own tool in any SEO-related content they publish.

But if your product doesn’t lend itself to the same thing, you can still find ways to call it out on occasion.

For example, CoSchedule makes work management software for marketers.

In this blog post they published about writing case studies, there isn’t a natural place to talk about the CoSchedule software in an in-depth way. It would’ve seemed forced.

So instead, they just included a single reminder sentence:

By driving product signups directly from the content, that one sentence probably paid for the cost of the article many times over.

On the customer retention side, remember that blog posts aren’t the only content format around.

Also consider:

• Feature walkthrough videos
• Downloadable guides
• Live training webinars

Educational content like that can all help your existing customers get better at using your product. Making them less likely to churn out over time.

And for high-ticket items, that content can help with customer acquisition and sales enablement as well.