Previously… Blogging 101: Choosing Your Blog Structure
Important Blog Design Considerations
It goes without saying, but your blog should always represent a cohesive part of your overall business brand. This isn’t a matter of patching your logo onto the top of it. A brand is really the whole presence you have online, going far beyond logos — your online brand is what you say, how you say it, and the sensory presentation of it. Your logo, your colors, your layouts, your marketing message, your copy voice, your social media profiles — all of this plays a role in your business brand online. Make sure your blog is directly tied to that brand.
Make sure your blog design and layout focus your traffic on your CONTENT first, gadgets and widgets last. Whether your blogging for money or business blogging, content is still king. Period. A blog is one of the most important tools you’ll have to build authority, credibility, and trust with your traffic — hopefully turning them into loyal readers. You can not build trust and authority with widgets and gadgets, only your content and interactions can do that. Make the focus of your blog content, content, content. Your design and layout will either facilitate this or hinder it.
And most importantly, keep it simple stupid (kiss). This can not be overstated. Every inch of your blog is like a piece of blog real estate. Every piece, gadget, widget, or box should serve a specific purpose and not to just fill space. Simplicity works in a magical way online, especially given the heavy interfaces users are engaged in all day online. Keeping it simple increases the likelihood that your reader will take the action you’re hoping for. Excellent examples of keeping it simple blogs include: ChrisBrogan.com and CopyBlogger.com. Less is more!
Blog Design and Layout Must Haves for 2009
Throughout 2008 my team has built over 300 blogs. We’ve monitored and tracked, analyzed and tweaked. Here’s a list of important design and layout considerations we’ve found through testing have contributed to the millions of leads our clients captured in 2008.
RSS and Email Marketing
Make Email and RSS Subscription easy to do and easily accessible. Don’t just have an tiny RSS button at the top of your blog. In client click-layout testing, we clearly see a significant increase in subscribers when RSS and Email subscription options are placed conveniently throughout blogs. Here’s a few examples:
RSS Button Placement Make it decent in size, relative to your design of course. And make it prominent, like the top-right hand corner — but always above the “fold” on a standard computer monitor. Out of sight, out of mind
RSS Button Style RSS is not amongst the masses yet, so be careful in getting too fancy with your RSS button. Our audience is tech-savvy, for the most part, so we had a little leeway in designing our RSS button. Most niches aren’t, so don’t. Orange and typical-shaped may be a safe, small way to make it easy for your audience
Educate your audience about the benefits of RSS. A very simple way to do this is to place a link, close to your RSS button/link, that leads to a page explaining RSS. Here’s what it might look like:
This doesn’t have to be complicated or a thesis paper on the value of RSS. Simply, show your interest in educating your audience, show that you care by answering questions they have before they ask them.
Offer email subscription as an alternative to RSS. Regardless of what you do in your RSS education and encouragement, chances are you’ll have as many email subscribers as you will RSS. Make that option easy for your audience.
Use the same service for blog updates via email as you do for your email marketing. A service like AWeber.com gives you full control in operating your blog updates and your newsletter, using the same lists.
Managing your email lists in one place, makes it so much easier for you. Using AWeber allows you to include blog updates via email (like with FeedBurner), as well as build lists based on special incentives you’re offering – just like an optin list… in one handy, dandy place.
You can use AWeber to provide a compelling offer for email subscription:
Or you can simply offer email subscription with no offer:
Aweber gives you many options to tie your email blog updates and your newsletter together, for a cohesive and powerful communication tool with your audience. Examples of what you can do include:
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Send out a weekly update of your blog’s most recent 5 posts, in snippet form. AWeber allows you to automate and customize the entire process of updating your list on blog posts.
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You can still send email newsletters and marketing materials to your list, on a specific schedule (again fully automated) or on an as-needed-basis.
- Aweber also lets you send an update to your Twitter (and other social media areas), whatever you send to your blog update and newsletter lists.
Here’s an example of what we do for the Web Success Diva blog:
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Blog updates are sent every Saturday automatically with a list of the 5 most popular blog posts. It’s a “here’s what you’ve missed this week” type of email. We’ve set it up to automatically format and send the email to our entire list.
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Monday is our administrative, typical newsletter day. We send out updates on what’s coming up for me and my team for the week. This also tends to be the day we advise our list of partner offers, etc.
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Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday is the day we share very specific tips to our email subscribers that either relate to events during the week or how-to posts on the blog.
Why do we do things this way? We’ve noticed that many of our email subscribers are likely also RSS subscribers – automating part of our email communication, while leaving flexibility in the daily contact has worked best for OUR audience. The point is to work with your audience and their needs.
How do we know this works for our audience? We pay CONSTANT attention to open-rates, unsubscribes, feedback and responses from our audience, subscription tracking, link click-through tracking, and more. There is no one-size-fits-all, especially when it comes to communicating with your audience. To stand out from the noise, you have to communicate in a way that is most effective for your company and your audience. Period.
Often Missed Layout Opportunities for Communication
One of the biggest lessons my team has learned from 2008 is the reality that little things matter. Very little things, over time, can make the difference in having an A-list blog or a B-list blog. The minor details in the strategy of your layout, can make the difference between 300 subscribers and 3,000 subscribers. Here are the biggest missed opportunities most blogs have today:
Customize your blog’s 404 Error pages
Some bloggers simply code to redirect to the home page, others keep whatever came with their template. NOT customizing your error pages is a missed opportunity. Yes, you want to make sure you never have errors, but you will. You can’t control how others link to you and chances are, there are some broken links. NOT customizing, loses that opportunity to re-direct and capture that traffic. Here’s a look at our blog error page, before customizing:
Not bad, better than most… Check this out, do you see the difference in capturing that traffic?
By customizing your error pages, you take a shot at stopping the knee-jerk reaction of your audience to click the “back” button or move on to something else. Think about it, what’s your immediate reaction when you see “ERROR 404″ in big, bold letters… my point exactly.
And at the bottom of that custom error page, don’t forget to offer subscription:
In fact, at the bottom of every page, you should offer options for subscription. Overkill? I think not, gentle reminders and opportunistic layouts tend to build subscribers faster… we’ve seen the numbers in our client projects, over and over, that support this.
Usability and Navigation in Your Layout
Make sure you’re blog is easy to navigate by including a Breadcrumb Navigation at the top. The easier your readers can navigate your blog, the deeper they dive into your content. This ripples through everything, including lowering your bounce rate, increasing time spent on your blog, building loyalty in your readers, and in the level of expertise accredited to you. If they can’t find what they are looking for, how can them know and love your expertise?
In our first segment, we covered must-have Wordpress Plugins for 2009, the Breadcrumb Navigation XT plugin is definitely a good pick.
Ensure you have a good search function, in a prominent place. Again, if you’re audience can not dig deeper into your blog, you’ll never build a loyal readership, nor will you be able to build authority in the minds of your readers. Hands down, the best search feature you can add to your blog is Google Custom Search.
Google Custom Search… You can add multiple sites (like if you have more than one blog, and they are related in content). You can add additional, specific webpages (like landing pages to products related to the content your publishing). You can also add your favorite experts to your custom search engine by adding their blogs to your search.
For instance, in the Web Success Diva custom search engine, I’ve included information I trust from my colleagues like Nancy Marmolejo on Visibility, Mari Smith on Facebook, and Ron Hudson on NLP… For bloggers, Google Custom Search just makes sense… it’s the ultimate opportunity to market AND build value for your readers through being an insanely awesome resource
I’m also collaborating, a key factor in successful blogging!
Plus, the Custom Search page is fully customizable and flexible. Here’s what our search looks…
Allow your audience to share… but don’t over do it! Sometimes I just want to scream at the lack of understanding that — just because you place buttons all over your blog posts, for people to share, doesn’t mean they will. In fact, the more clutter you have, the less action people tend to take. Don’t overwhelm your audience. When your content is compelling and there are simple, intelligent means for sharing your content — people will do it. Our favorite plugins for sharing tools include ShareThis and Sociable.
Include automated ways to share more, related content. An easy way to do this, includes offering related posts at the end of every post using the Yet Another Related Post Plugin we listed in the first part of this series. Make sure to set your settings so that only relevant content shows, by using tags and categories as your sort factor…
The more relevant the posts, the more likely your readers will dig deeper into that topic.
Clutter and Consistency Issues
Reduce clutter on your sidebars. Listen, you’re goal – whether your a professional blogger or solopreneur, business blogger — should be to capture a subscriber and build authority. Keeping your sidebars and blog layout simple, streamlined will help you in this effort.
Don’t sell from your sidebars. Peak interest and capture leads instead. Time and time again, I see bloggers list products, buy-now buttons for services, and multiple sign-up opportunities… Not realizing they are diluting their “call-to-action” options. Keep it simple, capture the lead, build trust, then sell.
Keep your post formatting consistent. In Wordpress, use your drop-down formatter…
Use the H1, H2, and H3 formatting. Keep your post layouts consistent and scan friendly for your readers. Don’t use rainbow colors, bolds, and underline like a kindergarten student practicing art techniques. (Note: Using the H tags can also help your SEO if you’re planning ahead in your blog posting…
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… looking forward to connecting with you!
Maria 
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