Principles of Effective Blog Design

This is a guest post by Peep Laja, CEO of Traindom.

People judge books by the cover, and other people by their looks.

Take a look at these two men:

Now answer these questions (you can’t choose “neither”):

Which one would you rather ask investment advice from?Which one would you rather have babysit your children?Which one would you rather have cook your dinner?

… and so on. You don’t know anything about these men. Yet you make assumptions and can even take decisions based on their looks.

What does that have to do with your blog? Everything!

“As aesthetically orientated humans, we’re psychologically hardwired to trust beautiful people, and the same goes for websites. Our offline behaviour and inclinations translate to our online existence.”—Dr. Brent Coker

Dr. Brent Coker studied the impact of attractive websites on human behavior. Websites that are more attractive and include more trimmings create a greater feeling of trustworthiness and professionalism in consumers.

If somebody knows you well, they don’t care about your looks that much. If they see you for the first time, looks matter a lot.

The content of your blog is always more important than the design, but you need to woo people with your design first. You draw them in with design, and keep with content.

“Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”—Steve Jobs

The following advice will help you design a better blog and this in turn will help you sell more (whether you’re selling free sign-ups, coaching sessions, products, or whatever).

Who is your site for? What are they looking for? Value function over aesthetics: 76% of people want it to be easy for them to find what they want.

What kind of blog layouts are they used to using? Remember, people spend most of their time on other websites, not yours. Avoid totally new and never-seen-before layouts. Your car isn’t unique, and your house might not be either.

For return visitors, search is vital. Make sure your search box is clearly visible (above the fold), at least 27 characters wide and that the search can actually find relevant stuff. WordPress’s built-in search is very poor, and it lists the results by date, not relevance. Use a plugin like Relevanssi to improve it tremendously.

Use plenty of white space. Don’t fill every possible space with banners, messages, or whatever else. The more breathing room there is, the easier it is for visitors to consume the information you produce.

Here’s an excellent post on using white space.

You should never publish a blog post without an image. A visual communicates your ideas much faster than any text can.

The best images follow the rule of thirds: an image should be imagined as divided into nine equal parts by two equally-spaced horizontal lines and two equally-spaced vertical lines, and that important compositional elements should be placed along these lines or their intersections.

Image licensed under Creative Commons

See how the image on the right is more interesting? That’s rule of thirds in action.

Content and clarity are important parts of the design.

What is this place? What can I do here? How is it useful? First-time visitors need to get answers to these questions within their first seconds on your blog.

Make sure it’s possible to clearly understand what your blog is about and who’s it for—no matter which page the visitors land on. The better you build a connection between your reader and your blog, the higher the chances they will stick around.

People start reading your website from the top-left corner. The fixations go in order from left to right. That’s where you want to place the most important information.

The text on your blog should be beautiful and easy to read.

Use large fonts (at least 14px), short lines (see the width of Tynan’s blog posts), and lots of white space. Create a new paragraph every three or four lines, and a subheading after every two to three paragraphs.

The best blog typography lends a meaningful purpose to the content while triggering emotions in your readers in the process. Besides picking a beautiful web font, make sure that different text elements have a different look and feel (main headings, subheadings, regular text, italic text, quotes, lists, and so on).

Here are 10 Examples of Beautiful CSS Typography and how they did it. Also take a look at Space, a WordPress theme designed for reading.

You can use TypeTester to test and compare different fonts, sizes and so on.

Over 95% of people won’t buy anything on their first visit. Hence you should not even try to sell to your first-time visitors. Instead, try to get them to come back so you can build a relationship and add value before you make them an offer of any kind.

How can you do that?

Invite them to subscribe to your RSS feed (and state how many people already do as a type of social proof).Use a lead magnet to attract them to sign up to your email list.Invite them to subscribe to your blog posts over email (Feedburner is a good tool for this).Ask them to follow you on Twitter or become a fan on Facebook.

Make sure you focus on one of these options most (email list is best), but give a choice of up to three options.

This is how aext.net is doing it:

The aext.net follow invitation

The best signup forms:

put the form labels above the input box (not next to it)give clear reasons to take actionhave the submit button say what’s coming nextask for as little user data as possible—an email address is enough in most cases.

The more fields people have to fill in to subscribe, the less likely they’ll be to do it. Email personalization by name is not working as well anymore anyway, so you might as well not ask for those details.

The One Question, a site helping people find their life purpose, has 30% of new visitors sign up via this form every day:

The One Question subscription form

Why is it so effective? The form offers the exact thing people search for on Google to come to the site. If you offer people what they want, they are happy to sign up.

You don’t need to hire a fancy designer and pay top dollar for your logo. Even huge budgets might not make much difference here.

You can create a beautiful logo using text. Pick a beautiful fontand a background color you like—and voilà! A designer from Edicy took just 15 minutes to create this logo for an imaginary company (Tajo Oja):

Edicy's text-only logo example, by Tajo.ee

Stock photos seem like a good idea, but 90% of them are utterly fake and cheesy. Have you googled “women laughing alone with salad” recently?

How can you expect to be taken seriously if you feature suits shaking hands and half-naked women measuring each others waists?

Some people advocate that given the proliferation of low-cost cameras and smart phones, your own photography should be used rather than stock.  I agree.

Let’s say you like the color red, but can’t decide what other colors match your favorite shade of red.

You don’t have to guess or ask your friends. You can use online color matching tools for this:

That’s actually not the right question to ask. You should only change it if there’s a real need behind it. What’s not working for you today? Put the goal first, and the redesign second.

Will the new design help you get more clicks to your ads? Increase pageviews or signups?

Ideally you’ll see your blog as a living, breathing organism that never stops evolving. Constantly A/B test your most important pages and design elements, and measure the improvement. You can only improve what you measure.

Peep Laja is the CEO of Traindom, online software for building online courses and membership sites.

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50% Discount Ends in 36 Hours on the Blogger’s Guide to Online Marketing Kit

A few weeks ago here on ProBlogger we launched a product I’m really proud of—the Blogger’s Guide to Online Marketing Kit written by the Web Marketing Ninja (the guy who has helped me shape my own blogging business model over the last few years).

The kit is essentially based around three things:

a comprehensive ebooka library of 21 templates, documents and examples to help you develop your own blogging business modela 70-minute bonus recording of a Q&A webinar that the Ninja, Chris Garrett, and myself did last week for buyers of the kit.

The kit is really about helping bloggers who want to get serious about turning their blog into a business to do just that. You can read the full details of what’s included and who it’s for here.

We launched the Blogger’s Guide to Online Marketing Kit with a limited-time 50% discount (down from $99.99 to $49.99).

The kit has had some really positive reviews and feedback so we’ve left the discount open a little longer than we’d anticipated, but that discount ends in around 36 hours time (this Friday, US time).

So if you’re looking for some teaching from an experienced online marketer on how to make your blog profitable, grab your copy of the kit today.

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6 Lessons I Learned Selling a $50,000 Website

This guest post is by Chris The Traffic Blogger.

My hands were shaking like crazy and I had to focus very hard on entering my bank account information correctly. Just minutes prior a buyer had been approved for my website on Flippa (see the actual auction page here), and I had to somehow manage to calm down to fill out my escrow payment options.

The bid was an astonishing $50,000!

Yeah, that amount was almost enough money for the down payment and closing costs of my first home combined. Even now, when I think about it, I still get chills up my spine at the sheer amount of money that my website sold for. If I had been a little more patient, I may have been able to sell it for closer to $75,000, especially with the steady $4,000 it was earning per month on autopilot.

Today I’d like to touch on six major lessons I’ve learned from selling my first website for so much money. It’s my way of saying thank you to Darren, Georgina, and all the contributors of this fine community for your support and advice over the years. Also to you, the reader, for your comments, emails, and patronage.

I felt that escrow was essential for providing a safe environment for selling my website. The way it works is like this: if the buyer cheats the seller, then escrow holds the money until the seller’s goods are returned. If the seller cheats the buyer, then escrow charges the seller for the transfer fee and cancels the transaction entirely.

I also liked all the options I had for presenting my information on Flippa, such as attachments, a chart of the last year’s earnings, and even Google analytics. All this information was readily available on the auction page, along with countless other little details.

The only major snag in selling the site occurred when the buyer couldn’t figure out how to use my EPP codes and login information to transfer domains from my hosting provider to his.

This was one of the reasons why I went through so much stress and agony trying to sell my website—I didn’t totally understand the process either, nor did I have the experience of knowing how to transfer the domains to the buyer.

I lost about three nights’ sleep before I calmed down enough to come up with a solution to the transfer issue. Instead of trying to get the transfers done between the two of us, I had the buyer change my personal information on the domains to his and also my passwords so that he essentially controlled my domains.

Now the transfer process was on the buyer, not between the buyer and seller, since he owned the domains. This decision allowed us to move forward with the escrow payment process, instead of getting bogged down in figuring out the technical issues of transferring between hosting providers. I think I actually had a few hours of sleep that night!

I had a blogspot.com domain changed to .org about two years into the site’s existence. When I went to enter my .org site’s age I put down three years. However, Flippa detected that the .org extension was only available for the past year and said that I was basically contradicting the evidence Flippa had discovered.

There was no way to go back without completely cancelling the auction, so I probably lost a few potential buyers to this mistake.

I knew why I was selling my site six months prior, when I decided that I wanted to focus on other projects. I intended on using the influx of quick cash and free time to build up other projects.

To achieve the selling of my site which was so dependent upon me to survive, I then had to go about the process of replacing myself with a team of writers that could blog in my stead. The new owner was pleased to see a writing staff, as that meant he could take over without needing to create his own content. This was the only reason I was able to sell the site in the first place—otherwise it would be like Darren selling problogger.net years ago when he was the sole contributor. It just wouldn’t have worked.

Google Docs were amazing for listing all the account logins, instructions, and writer information that was needed to run the site without me.

Given the time difference between the buyer and myself (I was on the US East coast; he was in Malaysia), Google docs provided us with a convenient method for storing information and communicating, and it worked out far better than hundreds of small emails would have.

I understand that you most likely do not have a website worth $50,000, but that you would love to get it to that point. If you are serious about blogging and want to turn your hobby into a business, then you need to create a sales funnel.

A sales funnel is simply a system for obtaining leads, building trust, and finally converting leads into buyers. Even if this is simply a post series that you link to, it’s better than nothing. Whether you use email marketing or advertise products on your sidebar, you need to have some method for determining how much money you can make per new subscriber to your site. This will enable you to make calculations regarding what services you could afford to outsource to and still make a profit while growing your site.

Even though building backlinks is crucial for growing your website, you still have to focus a large portion of your effort on your sales funnel, or else you’ll be gambling instead of taking calculated risks.

I’ve learned a lot from this process, and unfortunately I couldn’t possibly fit it all into a single post. I have compiled everything I learned from this experience into a downloadable report which can also be viewed online if you don’t wish to download it. There’s no opt-in: this is my way of saying thanks to you!

Have you ever sold a website? I’d love to hear what you learned from the process, too.

Chris is a self proclaimed expert at showing bloggers how they can get traffic, build communities, make money online and be successful. You can find out more at The Traffic Blogger.

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Is Facebook Trying to Kill Privacy? [OPINION]

This post reflects the opinions of the author and not necessarily those of Mashable as a publication.

Facebook has finally done it. It’s just a few updates away now from euthanizing the concept of privacy, already ailing on its network.

Timelines and Open Graph, introduced at this week’s f8 conference, sit on either edge of the sword that’s just been run through privacy’s heart. It is finished. It is done. This turn of events probably makes CEO Mark Zuckerberg happy. Let’s look back:

“When I got started in my dorm room at Harvard, the question a lot of people asked was ‘Why would I want to put any information on the Internet at all? Why would I want to have a website?’

“And then in the last five or six years, blogging has taken off in a huge way and all these different services that have people sharing all this information. People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people. That social norm is just something that has evolved over time.”

That was Zuckerberg’s January 2010 argument that sharing is the new social norm. But that’s only half of the sharing equation. Zuckerberg didn’t talk about the other half: privacy.

The first big change Zuckerberg revealed on stage was Timeline, the completely overhauled version of profile pages. No longer is your Facebook profile about what you did recently–now it’s about everything you’ve done on Facebook and beyond.

SEE ALSO: Facebook’s New Profiles: First Impressions

The Timeline interface lays out everything you’ve shared on Facebook. One of the new features, Map, lays out your checkins on a world map. My map is sparse because I primarily use Foursquare to share my location. But now that I see how sparse that map looks, I feel compelled to start sharing my location via Facebook.

In addition to laying out everything you already shared for the world to see, the Timeline encourages you to share more than ever about your life so far. Millions of people are likely to post their baby pictures so that the beginning of their Timelines — birth — isn’t just an empty box.

Timeline is just the appetizer. The second announcement, the launch of the new Facebook Open Graph, is what will forever transform the world’s largest social network.

There are a couple of key changes that deserve mentioning. The first is the addition of customizable actions and gestures. No longer do apps prompt you just to “like” something on Facebook. Instead, you’ll share that you “hiked a trail” or “rode your bike” or “kissed a girl” (and liked it). Any action can be shared via Facebook, and the only limit is the imagination of developers.

The second addition is the new permissions screen for giving apps access to your Facebook account. It’s more robust and explains exactly what an app will be sharing with it. The result is that the prompt will only appear once. Once you accept, the app can share exactly what you’re doing to your Facebook wall as you’re doing it.

There is no longer a “Would you like to post this to Facebook?” prompt. It just posts. When you run with Nike+, it gets posted. When you use your favorite cooking site to make a new dish, it gets posted. When you go to bed with a device tracking your sleep patterns, it gets posted.

Everything can, and eventually will, get posted. Facebook has done something nobody has ever been able to do at scale: It has enabled passive sharing.

In 2009, Mashable‘s CEO and founder Pete Cashmore argued on CNN that privacy was dead, and social media was holding the smoking gun:

“We’re living at a time when attention is the new currency: With hundreds of TV channels, billions of Web sites, podcasts, radio shows, music downloads and social networking, our attention is more fragmented than ever before.

“Those who insert themselves into as many channels as possible look set to capture the most value. They’ll be the richest, the most successful, the most connected, capable and influential among us. We’re all publishers now, and the more we publish, the more valuable connections we’ll make.”

While I agree with his assertion that in an age where attention is king, privacy is simply an illusion, I disagree about the murderer. Sure, Twitter, Flickr, Google and others played a part in privacy’s death, but Facebook made the killing blow.

But thanks to what Facebook launched at f8, we’re at the point of no return. Facebook’s passive sharing will change how we live our lives. More and more, the things we do in real life will end up as Facebook posts. And while we may be consoled by the fact that most of this stuff is being posted just to our friends, it only takes one friend to share that information with his or her friends to start a viral chain.

Sharing with just your friends doesn’t protect your privacy. I know the people at Facebook will disagree and argue that users can control what is shared with whom. But this is simply an illusion that makes us feel better about all the sharing we have done and are about to do.

We may not notice the impact on our lives immediately. But it won’t be long until your life is on display for all of your friends to see, and then we’ll all know what Facebook has wrought.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, RapidEye

The Social Analyst is a column by Mashable Editor-at-Large Ben Parr, where he digs into social media trends and how they are affecting companies in the space.

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Mashable is the largest independent online news site dedicated to covering digital culture, social media and technology. With more than 50 million monthly pageviews and 14 million unique monthly visitors, Mashable has one of the most engaged online news communities. Founded in 2005, Mashable is headquartered in New York City with an office in San Francisco.

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New Net Neutrality Rules Become Official

The revised Net neutrality rules that the FCC approved in December became official on Friday when they entered the Federal Register. They will take effect on November 20.

Net neutrality advocates have long lobbied for laws that prevent Internet providers from blocking competitive content, charging for faster connections to certain sites, and a slew of other tactics that would destroy the “open web.” Meanwhile, broadband and wireless providers have argued that it’s government regulation — not Internet provider discrimination — that threatens the open web.

While the new rules [PDF] do prevent fixed broadband providers (cable, fiber and DSL) from blocking access to sites and applications, they are different for wireless providers and not as clear as advocates on either side would like.

The rules lay out three basic protections:

Fixed and mobile broadband providers must disclose the network management practices, performance characteristics and commercial terms of their broadband services. No blocking: fixed broadband providers may not block lawful content, applications, services, or non-harmful devices; mobile broadband providers may not block lawful websites, or block applications that compete with their voice or video telephony services. No unreasonable discrimination: fixed broadband providers may not unreasonably discriminate in transmitting lawful network traffic.

When a draft of the rules came out in December, roughly 80 grassroots organizations signed an open letter avowing their disapproval. The letter complained that the Order “leaves wireless users vulnerable to application blocking and discrimination,” uses “unnecessarily broad definitions,” and claims that specialized services “would create a pay-for-play platform that would destroy today’s level playing field.”

Wireless providers, which are in favor of minimal regulation, also complained. Verizon filed an appeal, Sen. Mitch McConnell said that the rules would “harm investment, stifle innovation and lead to job losses,” and the Republican party reportedly started planning its repeal within an hour of the rules’ approval.

The House of Representatives voted to overturn the rules in April, but the resolution is unlikely to pass in the Democrat-controlled senate. President Obama has threatened to veto it even if it does.

Now that the rules are official, however, all parties are free to launch their legal offensives. Get ready for another round of lobbying, damning public statements and lawsuits.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, enot-poloskun

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7 Powerful Reasons Why Companies Will Pay for You to Blog

This guest post is by Lina Nguyen of Words That Influence.

Influential bloggers are being paid top dollar to write sponsored posts (thousands of dollars per post is not unheard of). They’re gifted with luxury items, cars and overseas trips, and invited to events previously exclusive to A-List celebrities and long-established journalists.

Bloggers worldwide are proving to be fierce competition for mainstream media, as companies decide how to get the best return on investment for their marketing buck.

If you have the following seven things, then your blog and social media networks will be highly valuable digital assets, sought after by major companies.

Even if you don’t quite have the same reach and clout as some of these bloggers, you can still apply these principles to negotiate your own deals with smaller businesses in your niche.

ProBlogger Training Day event speakers Craig Makepeace and Caz Makepeace are travel bloggers who landed a corporate sponsorship deal with a major airline, to cover a high profile international sporting event. At the end of this post, we’ll see these seven points in action, as we take a look at their success in attracting sponsorship from a major brand.

The people in a profitable niche for major companies tend to be decision makers, consumers or influencers in the buying process, for either highly priced items (like cars, technology, travel or finance), or highly consumed items (like food, health products, household goods).

How do you know if your niche is profitable? Just take a look around in mainstream media. If companies are already paying big bucks to advertise to your audience on TV, radio, magazines and newspapers, then you’re in a profitable niche.

If you’ve created a group of people who gather on your blog and social media networks, then what you’ve created has the potential to be extremely financially valuable.

Companies always want to know where their target market is hanging out and get in front of them. Trouble is, as outsiders, whose primary motivation is to sell, they’re not exactly welcomed.

That’s why they’re willing to pay to get access to your tightly formed online community, which has its very own culture, rules and etiquette. Your intimate knowledge of how your community thinks and behaves has a valuable price tag on it.

Being in a commercially attractive niche and having impressive reach in numbers (in terms of blog traffic, subscribers and social media followers) makes your community really valuable. A big corporate client will be after the exposure you can give them.

What kind of numbers are valuable? That all depends.

Essentially, it comes down to the demand to reach your niche, how targeted your audience is and what other advertising avenues are available to the company to reach that specific audience.

The more profitable the niche, and the harder those communities are to access, the more money a company will be willing to pay you to get in front of them.

This is what makes a blogger much more appealing to companies for advertising potential than say, television, print media, billboards and flyers.

Bloggers engage with their audience, who eagerly share their thoughts and feelings. In addition, they actively give bloggers permission to communicate with them, by following or subscribing.

Engaged communities also show clear signs of activity, through comments, posts and tweets. This is valuable in the eyes of a potential marketer, because an active community gives the company a way to evaluate and measure a campaign’s success.

An indicator of a successful marketing campaign is one where the target market responds to it, hopefully positively (although a highly engaged negative response can also be seen as successful, depending on the company’s objectives).

A blogger with a highly engaged and active community is more likely to have influence, which is what’s really going to make a company take notice.

A company will pay for your ability to help get the word out, your referral or your endorsement.

If you can do all three, to an audience who will listen to you and believe you, then you are in a very strong negotiating position to command a price.

A bigger company with a large marketing budget is most likely interested in building brand awareness, exposure and chipping away at a longer-term objective to improve market perception.

The good news for a blogger is that they’re unlikely to expect a huge spike in sales from working on a one-off campaign with you. This eases the pressure off you, relieving expectation that you’ll influence your readers to rush out and buy the product.

Having said that, if you do have the clout to change attitudes, beliefs and market perception about a particular product or service—or you can get people to buy in noticeable numbers—then that will clearly make you extremely valuable in the corporate marketplace.

If you have all of the above advantages, then what a company wants is to align with your brand. You’re obviously credible and your brand says something that they want to be perceived as being.

They want your audience to think they’re worthy of attention, too.

Is your going rate less than the cost of advertising with traditional media power houses, or a celebrity endorsement? Most bloggers are. You’re instantly more appealing, price-wise—especially if you’re willing to accept non-cash payments which the company can offer you at low cost to them.

More importantly, if a major company is willing to do business with you, then they see you as a profitable return on investment.

To demonstrate these seven points, let’s take a look at a blog that’s had success in attracting big-brand sponsorship.

yTravel Blog's Caz and Craig Makepeace

After blogging for a little over a year, Craig Makepeace and Caz Makepeace secured a sponsorship deal with Australia’s leading international and domestic airline, Qantas, to travel around New Zealand and cover the Rugby World Cup.

If you would like to hear more about the specific steps they took to secure this sponsorship, you can listen to my exclusive interview with Caz on my blog, Mother’s Love Letters.

Blog: y Travel Blog
Niche and Community: Travelers, world-wide.
Sub-niches: Independent world travel, working holidays, family travel.
Reach: 

50,000+ visitors a month70,000+ Page Views per month3,000+ Facebook fans5,000+ Twitter followers1,200+ subscribers

Level of engagement: Average 15-20 comments per blog post. Daily social media interaction. Reply to almost every blog comment. 12,000+ Tweets to date. Facebook fan page is the most interactive and engaged in this niche.
Influence: Klout Score: 70

Brand:   Fun-loving, friendly travellers who are about making your life a story to tell. They believe life is all about the memories, so they make sure they live their life in a way that creates many memories through travel. Their goal is to help people get inspired, get informed and get going.

The deal: All expenses paid 12 day tour of New Zealand, doing activities and attending Rugby World Cup matches. Qantas will also be promoting the bloggers. In return, all Craig and Caz have to do, is have fun, blog, Facebook, and Tweet!

What impressed Qantas most: The bloggers’ level of engagement with their active community.

A key secret to their success: Guest posting. This was key to growing traffic.

Their top tips: Be clear about your brand and make it authentic. Network and build relationships in order to build your community. Social media is crucial, but look at offline networking opportunities, too. Value yourself. Consider how short-term income opportunities for advertising and sponsored posts that compromise content quality may affect your blog perception and brand in the long term. Learn how to write a sponsorship proposal. Don’t be limited by the fact that you’re a new blogger. Every big blogger starts off by being a new blogger.

Is corporate sponsorship for bloggers something that’s common in your niche? Are you looking at aligning yourself with a company, as a monetization strategy?

Lina Nguyen is a blogger in the Australian Mummy Bloggers niche. She is also a copywriter, digital media consultant and online communications expert at Words That Influence.

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How the World Uses Social Networks [INFOGRAPHIC]

The Social Media Infographics Series is supported by Vocus‘ Social Media Strategy Tool, a free, six-step online tool that lets you build a custom social media framework tailored to your organization’s goals.

Amidst the Facebook-centric society in which we now seem to live, it’s important to remember that groups of people around the world use social networks differently. We’ve taken a look at the social media breakdown in 10 countries — how they’re engaging with social networks, blogs and Internet culture.

Based on data provided by Nielsen, Facebook is clearly the favored social network. However, you might be surprised to see how runners-up like Twitter and LinkedIn rank on a global scale.

Take a peek at our infographic, and please let us know in the comments below which social networks are popular (or gaining popularity) in your country of residence.

Editor’s Note: Because reliable data about emerging online markets like China and India is difficult to source, they were regrettably omitted from this graphic.

Infographic design by Nick Sigler

Series supported by Vocus

This series is supported by Vocus‘ Social Media Strategy Tool, a free online tool which lets you build your own custom social media framework in six easy steps. It helps you determine your organization’s goals, explore the latest MarketingSherpa research data, and create your own workbook packed with the strategies, tactics and resources you need. Try it today!

Infographic design by Lorena Guerra

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