Having a blog is one of the best ways to generate free leads and to brand yourself or a company. Here are 5 quick blog tips to help you on your way to blogging success:
#1. Make Sure it’s Readable
This is a really simple, common mistake I see people make. They put all this effort into their blog, they make it look really good for the most part, but its unreadable. This is the quickest way to turn away visitors and the most common form of this is to have a dark background for your text.
As you can see on mine, the background of the blog is dark grey, BUT, where there is text it is dark text on a white background. I may change the design of my blog in the future, but I will always have dark text on a light coloured background as it is much easier to read.
#2. Make Good Use of Your Header
The first thing someone will see when they visit your blog is your header at the top of the page. This makes this area at the top of your page the most valuable section of your blog. So you need to ensure that you are not wasting this space. Instead of using a genneric header, upload a header of your own design that brands you and sets you apart from others. If you don’t think you have the skills or the time to do this, go to odesk.com and hire someone to do it for you.
Another thing you could do to take advantage of the top area of your blog is to place a promotional banner of some sort just above or just below your banner’s header as I am trialing at the moment.
#3. Implement a Web Form
You know what they say: “The money is in the list”, and using a web form on your blog to capture leads is certainly one of the best ways to build a list. Leads captured from a good blog tend to be higher quality and more responsive. The industry default for email marketing is Aweber and I have a Aweber video tutorial showing you how to put an Aweber form on your blog in a previous blog entry.
#4. Add Social Media Buttons
One of the great things about a blog is that it is very easy to syndicate it with Social Media. One of the easiest ways to do this is to add Social Media buttons via “Plugins”.
In your blog admin page, scroll down to the “Plugins” section and click on “Add New”. Here you will be able to find all sorts of plugins for you blog. The social media plugin I currently have on my blog is: “Digg Digg”, which you can customize to show a number of different social media buttons. Other great Social Media Plugins are “TweetMeMe”, “Add This” & “Share This” but there are tons of others out there as well.
#5. Add an Thumbnail Image to Your Blog Posts
Uploading a thumbnail image to go with each blog post is a great way to get a little extra attention. It will catch people’s eye and they will be more likely to click on the blog post and read it.
A side benefit to this, is when you are sharing your new blog post to a social media site (such as Facebook), you will be able to choose to show the thumbnail image you uploaded, which will help to create attention on that social media site.
This will take a little bit of extra work each time you are making a new blog post, but it should only take an extra 15 minutes or so and is worth it.
Summary
Blogging is an ongoing process, but these 5 free blog tips will help you on your way to blogging success.
