Blogging is a great way to interact and build rapport with your clients or customers. You can use that platform to create relationships, share useful and valuable information, and increase your standing in your field or industry. Blogs have a lot of power. And if you use this power wisely, you can see huge improvements in your subscribers, sales and other conversions. But if you squander this power, you can also see the credibility of your brand tank quickly.
So much of the success of a blog revolves around its design. If you’re able to create a blog that’s beautifully designed and executed, you can achieve success you never even thought possible/. And on the flip side, a badly designed blog can make it next to impossible to reach your goals.
So you can help yourself, here are three design tips that will increase the conversions you’re able to get from your blog.
Be Careful How You Implement Social Media
Using social media in conjunction with your blogging efforts is a great way to get more online success in a faster timeframe. Those in your communities will share your content with their own personal communities if you’re able to give them amazing content. However, when designing your blog and implementing social in your layout, it’s important to be careful how you choose to show your social media presence to your audience.
Although social proof is a great way to increase the trust new visitors have for your brand, Jonathan Long, a contributor to Entrepreneur.com, shares that you shouldn’t give your visitors too much exposure to your social channels directly on your blog.
Designing a running feed from your various social profiles may have seemed like a good idea at the time, but this will only leave your design looking cluttered and badly managed. Rather than going this route, Long suggests merely linking your social accounts to icons located in the footer of your page. This will make it easy for interested visitors to find your social accounts without inundating them with posts they didn’t intend to see.
Visually Distinguish Calls-to-Action
The easiest and most clear way to get conversions from your blog is to ask for them in the form of calls-to-action. While calls-to-action don’t have to be huge buttons or large form fills, Smriti Chawla, a contributor to VWO.com, shares that by visually distinguishing your calls-to-action in some way, you will have greater success drawing your visitors’ attention and getting the desired action.
One way Chawla recommends designing your calls-to-action is by putting them “inside a container”. This means instead of treating your call-to-action like another design element on your page, you make it the most eye-catching part to entice visitors to interact with it as often as possible. Differentiating the size, color, font, or borders could be an effective way to do this.
K.I.S.S.
If you want someone to convert on your page, you have to make that the priority; but you can’t very well do this if the page is crawling with text, images, javascript and more. For this reason, Peep Laja of ConversionXL.com advises keeping the overall design of your big-converting-pages simple. This can be done by not giving the visitor too many options for conversion, limiting the amount of fields they need to fill out, and being explicit with your directions. These simple yet effective design ideas will keep the excess off your blog, so you can see an increase in desired outcomes.
Designing blog pages with conversions in mind takes a special skill. To improve your ability to do this, use the tips mentioned above when designing your next blog post.
