Need CRO expert who has experience with travel websites focused on 3-8 day tours.

The steps are the easy part. It's the execution. You can put together a great lead gen machine using content, cookies, and email marketing.

You have to have something worth selling....and position it properly which means clear calls to action. Most sites are informative and miss the calls to action...people are lazy, they won't look hard. Personally I leave if not interested

Having a smart call to action at the end of each blog post is generally a good practice. Make it stand out, and make sure to add value to the visitor by signing up. I strongly recommend A/B testing (also called split-testing) your sign up call to action. That's the only way for you to improve the results of the signup rate. In regards to the conversion rate it's extremely difficult to predict. Depends on your value proposition, quality of content, your industry and so much more. Best advice is just to get started and be smart about the a/b testing. If you are running Wordpress I can strongly recommend OptinMonster to manage your call to actions. Unlike other solutions you won't have to pay a fortune, and it's very good. I'd also like to throw some flame to the fire on the ever ongoing discussions about popups. They receive a lot of flak, but are extremely effective. You can expect up to 200% more signups by using exit intent popups. Again - make sure to offer value to the visitor.

I'd love to hear more. I'm a travel professional with 9 yrs in the industry.

First, you need to make sure you have the conversion funnel set up properly. Enter the urls for all of the checkout steps (cart, login/register, checkout page, etc) and then look at the conversion funnel. This will help you to see if there are any bottlenecks or major problems causing a huge portion of your customers to drop-off at any point in the checkout process. Ideally a checkout should be one page, the more clicks, the higher the drop-off. Also look at all of your individual pages, see which ones have the highest abandonment and the highest conversion. That will help you see what you are doing right/wrong. I'd also highly recommend doing extensive A/B testing. You'd be surprised how much difference the wording of a button or even the color can make on whether or not a user clicks on it. Same goes for navigation elements, position of items on a page, promotions, etc. You can never A/B test enough!