Implementing a poor blog design
WHAT’S THE MISTAKE
You’re focusing 100% on content and ignoring valuable design elements of your blog that can act as powerful boosters of traffic and leads for your business.
WHY IS HURTS
Yes, as an inbound marketer, your blog content has to be amazing. However, a bad blog design can hamper even the best content. Think about it this way: would you buy an expensive sports car and drive around with four flat tires? You’d still be able to go fast, but not nearly as fast as you could be going. A clear, leadfocused blog design will help turbo-charge the results of your inbound marketing content.
EASY FIX
A blog’s design could be one of an infinite number of choices. However, great business blog designs share common traits of success.
1 - A CTA In Every Post :
In a chapter about blog design, it would be simple for us to start out with some “fluffy” design advice. But that wouldn’t help your company’s bottom line, would it? Even if you stopped reading this post after this tip, you’d still leave with its most important takeaway: You MUST put a call-to-action in each of your blog posts. Yes, you should test the design and placement of your callsto- action, but first and foremost, you need to use them in your posts. This is one of the most powerful levers for transforming your
blog into a well-designed lead generation machine.
2 - Subscription CTA :
Every visitor to your blog isn’t going to convert into a lead instantly. Some visitors will need to learn about your business over time. A way to help expedite this process is to get more visitors to subscribe to your blog via email or RSS. To do this, you need to have a clear call-to-action that encourages people to subscribe via either method.
3 - Clear connection to the website :
Your blog isn’t an island; it’s a key component of a successful website. Your blog design must make it clear and simple for a blog reader to get to key parts of your core website. It’s great if you have awesome content, but it needs to be connected to your products or services to help move relevant visitors further along in the buying cycle. Have a clear blog navigation that connects to your website, and consider using some sidebar real estate to direct visitors to key website pages.
4 - Social media sharing buttons :
Too much of a good thing can be bad. Yes, you want people to share your blog posts, and having social sharing buttons on your blog is helpful. However, giving people too many sharing options is distracting. It actually causes users to become overwhelmed and, subsequently, take no action. So limit the sharing buttons on your blog to only those networks that send traffic and leads to your business. If you don’t get any traffic from StumbleUpon, then why clutter your blog with its button?
5 - Post Previews :
Marketers must think like publishers. It’s easy to think of your blog as just a blog. However, you should think of it as a digital publication. Your blog is just like a trade magazine for your industry. One trait of magazines that people love is the table of contents that provide a preview for all of
the articles in that issue. Instead of displaying your entire, most recent article on your blog’s homepage, display only an excerpt and an image from several of your most recent posts. This will allow visitors to scan some of your blog’s content and give them a choice of what to read first.
6 - Simple sorting of content :
Depending on how prolific of a writer you are and how long your business has been blogging, your blog design needs to make it easier for visitors to find older and relevant content. As a marketer,
you have several design elements to help achieve this, including blog search, tagging and recommendation widgets. As with social media sharing buttons, you don’t need to use all of these. Organize some user testing sessions to understand what people unfamiliar with your blog find to be the best methods for discovering past content.
7 - Prominent headline formatting :
In your blog design, make sure that your headline is formatted correctly. This means it needs to be the star of the show when it comes to the text on a page. Make sure it is significantly larger in font size than the body or subhead text on the page. This may seem like a small detail, but making your headers pop makes a huge difference!
8 - Prominent post image display :
A great blog is visual. You shouldn’t knock readers over with blocks and blocks of text as soon as they arrive. Look at your blog design. How are you using images to draw in readers? There are many ways to showcase images from posts in the design of your blog. It can be as simple as an image next to an intro paragraph on your blog’s homepage or something far more customized. The important thing to remember is to not make assumptions on what your readers want. Instead, conduct user tests to collect feedback and determine the best option for your audience.
9 - Fast Page load times :
Online readers are impatient. When they are looking for information, they want it NOW . If your blog post
takes too long to load, then your visitor will bounce and go elsewhere. In order to prevent this issue, you need to test your blog’s load time. This free tool from Pindom will tell you how long it takes for your
blog to load. Ideally, the load time for your blog will be under two seconds.
10 -A clean sidebar :
A blog’s sidebar can easily become the junkyard of the page. It’s all too easy to keep cluttering a sidebar until it has a seemingly endless list of useless widgets. Look at the sidebar of your blog. Look at each widget or design aspect of that sidebar. Does it really serve a purpose? Is that individual element encouraging the
behavior you want your readers to take? If the answer to either of these questions is “no,” then delete it from your sidebar. Declutter that blog sidebar and get users to take the actions you want.
11 - Social media Follow buttons :
Your blog is a great place to promote your business’ presence in social media, and it’s often the first place people look to find it. Consider adding buttons with links to your corporate Twitter account, Facebook fan page, LinkedIn company page and Google+ business page to encourage people to connect with you on social media.
12 - A Search Box :
Encourage readers to spend additional time on your blog by enabling them to easily search for other blog content. This can easily be accomplished by adding a search box to theheader or sidebar of your blog.
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