Educational and inspirational content has a powerful impact on your audience, but design plays a huge role in your blog's performance. How your readers experience content on your site directly affects social shares, newsletter subscribers and even sales (if that's your goal).
If you’re serious about building an audience through blogging, it's important to optimize your blog to convert visitors into regular readers, subscribers and customers.
Quite a few design considerations come into play when optimizing your audience’s experience on your blog. This article covers five design tips to help you improve the overall blog experience and, in turn, increase conversions.
1. Place your newsletter signup at the end of every article.
If you aren't already collecting email addresses through your blog, you should be. Your newsletter is the most important thing to keep your most loyal visitors coming back to your site, again and again.
Most blog owners place a callout to their newsletter signup at the top of the sidebar, which is a good idea â€" that's where most visitors will expect it to be. But there is one place even more important for your newsletter callout to make an appearance: at the very end of your blog posts.
Here’s why: Those visitors who stick around long enough to make it all the way through your article are much more likely to enter their email address in order to hear more from you. You delivered on what they were searching for after they clicked the link that led them to your blog. Now you’ve converted a casual visitor into a loyal fan of your blog (and eventually a customer).
You can also implement a newsletter signup box that slides up from the bottom of the screen once you’ve scrolled down near the end the article. This kind of animation is attention-grabbing, which can help increase conversions. However, be aware that some visitors might find it overly intrusive to their reading experience.
Image: HitTail
The HitTail blog has a slide-up email signup box, which is powered by a new email marketing tool called Drip.
2. Include high-contrast calls to action.
It's important to include high-contrast elements that stand out on your page (newsletter signup boxes are a good example). These design features elevate their positions in the visual hierarchy of the page, making it one of the first things the visitor sees when his eyes scan the screen.
If the background color of your blog is white, try using a dark background for your newsletter signup box. To make it really stand out, be sure this is the only element on the page with that background color.
Don't go overboard. A simple, stark contrast of color will be enough to draw plenty of attention to these calls to action. Don’t boost the font size, add circles and arrows, or make it blink â€" you’ll be competing with other elements on the page, diminishing the experience.
Image: Buffer
The Buffer blog uses stark contrasts in color to draw attention to its email signup box.
3. Consider relevance for the blog's navigation.
There are two very common mistakes when it comes to navigating a company blog. First, the company blog shares the same top navigation with the rest of the company website.
Links to products, pricing, information about the company and quote requests are perfectly fine to include on the company homepage or when viewing product information, but they aren't relevant to visitors who are reading the blog. The goal of the blog navigation should be to encourage further exploration of your other articles.
Remember, most of your blog visitors arrived via a Google search or social media. They came for your content; they can discover your products later.
Second, too many navigation links compete for the reader's attention. Keep it simple with just a few key links to help the reader discover the very best content on your blog.
Adding a list of "popular posts" to the sidebar is a good idea, especially if it is curated to direct traffic to your highest-converting blog articles. You don't need to include the tag cloud, archive links, author links and other links here, too. Of course, you will want to have one callout to draw attention to your company or product, but it shouldn’t be the primary attention-grabber when viewing your blog.
Successful blog navigation keeps the emphasis on content by directing readers to key blog categories and a list of popular articles. A small callout to the product can be present but de-emphasized.
4. Include great images.
As important as your writing and topics are for your blog, there’s no getting around the simple fact that most readers will respond to engaging visual elements. That’s why it's so important to incorporate beautiful, bold and high-impact imagery in your blog posts.
You can find free images by searching Flickr Commons. Compfight is a popular tool for searching Flickr, and another free resource is Wikimedia Commons.
You can also find higher quality photos by spending a little money. Sites like 500px and Photodune are quite affordable.
Don't limit your blog to just photos. Add custom illustrations, diagrams, charts, graphs and wireframes to really drive your points home. It’s easy to whip up charts and graphs using Powerpoint or Keynote. Wireframing tool Balsamiq helps you sketch a diagram to illustrate a point.
Image: Nathan Barry
Software designer Nathan Barry's informative diagrams illustrate the complex points he makes in his blog articles.
5. Include strategic social sharing buttons.
The conversion goal for your blog isn’t only to convert visitors into subscribers, or subscribers into customers. You also want your visitors to share and spread your content on social media.
When people share your content, they feel a sense of responsibility to their followings; what they’re recommending is worth their followers' time. That’s why delivering valuable articles is so critical.
There are a few ways to make social sharing easier for your audience. One very popular technique is to add social sharing buttons that remain fixed or "float" alongside your article as the reader scrolls down.
The key to making these floating social buttons really have an impact is to carefully select which social networks to include. This comes down to knowing your audience â€" you don't want to overload it with every single network on the web. Pick the three networks where you know your readership is most active, and add those buttons.
Another useful tool is ClickToTweet, which lets you create a custom "Tweet This" link. You can place this link anywhere within the content of your articles. The most effective way to use this tool is to place a “Tweet This†link right after a sentence that is particularly insightful or worthy of sharing.
Like everything else, it's important that you don't go overboard. Add no more than two “Tweet This†links per article in order to avoid diluting your content. The more prevalent something is, the less noticeable it becomes.
Which design techniques do you use to boost conversions on your blog? Share them with us in the comments.
Image: iStockphoto, simonox
No comments:
Post a Comment