Few things are worse for your bounce rate than an ugly blog. Users who aren’t immediately pleased by your appearance will likely pick up and leave before the site has even finished loading. Here are a few things to do right now in order to give your blog the professional edge.
1 – Use A Great Logo
If you want to be taken seriously, your site should have an attractive logo that will stay in people’s minds and convey something about your site. Because of this, it’s well worth it to pay an expert graphic designer to build your logo. You don’t need to spend hundreds of dollars to accomplish this, talented designers can be found all over the web.
2 – Optimze The Homepage Experience
Using your site should be an enjoyable experience. Make your blog easy to read and enjoyable to look at. The sidebar should be minimalist so that what is there actually stands out. Avoid clutter or risk making your site “noisy” to look at. Speaking of noise, your site shouldn’t make a single sound that the user doesn’t expect.
3 – Pay Attention To Spacing and Fonts
Unless you’ve branched out into other media, the primary thing that most users will be doing on your site is reading. This means that your content should be very easy to read. Use a font such as Verdana or Arial. These are fairly basic fonts that are pleasing to look at.
Use the enter key often. White space is your friend. When a user arrives on your page and sees a dense block of text, they will become intimidated very quickly. It’s almost impossible to use “too many” paragraph breaks.
Not only do frequent breaks make the text less intimidating, it’s actually easier to avoid losing your place so that you don’t end up reading the same line over and over again. (We’ve all been there).
4 – Use Images
Every blog post should have at least one image. The longer the post, the more images you should use. Images keep things interesting and make the post feel more concrete. An image will likely make a blog post more memorable as well, since memory is mostly sensory information.
To avoid copyright issues, it’s worth it to pay for stock images if you are incapable of making your own. If you can present some of your ideas in the form of an infographic, this is also a great idea if you have the design skills to make an attractive one, or if you can buy them from somebody else.
Of course, even the occasional purposefully low-quality image has the potential to go viral. As a general rule of thumb, the uglier an image is, the funnier it had better be.
5 – No Pop-Ups!
Few things are more irritating to a user than a popup advertisement. The first reaction of most users is simply to close the window. Worse, if the site doesn’t make it easy for them to close the window, they will immediately leave.
It might look like a popup ad is offering better conversions than an in content ad, but that’s only because most of your users aren’t even reading your content because they are so put off by the pop-ups.
6 – Use Lists
Use bullet points or lists to make your posts easy to skim. This isn’t appropriate for every type of article, but in most cases it works very well. Try visiting nPromote to see just how many topics can be covered in this manner.
If a list doesn’t make sense, be sure to use plenty of subheadings. Bold or italicize the most important points that your post has to make.
Most of these changes take very little time or money to implement on your site. Even if you don’t use all six strategies, try to incorporate some of them into your blog. You will notice a difference.
About the author: Benjamin Sawyer is a blogger and internet marketing consultant. He is also a content writer for nPromote, a New York SEO Company. He likes to share his knowledge and experience with others.