Do you want more traffic on your blog or are you struggling to produce more leads from your blog?
In modern marketing, there is a huge demand for high-value content for lead collection. Attracting more people to your blog by showing them an easy way to access the information makes a big difference.
Lead generation is an important aspect of online business and digital marketers are now focusing on the ways to produce more and more leads through. Content marketing, especially blogging has evolved as a top weapon for digital marketers to communicate their message through different social media and online channels.
But, a good design for your blog can open all new ways for producing more leads by creating a good experience in accessing the information that really helps them in their endeavor.
Following are some blog design considerations that will help in your endeavor of collecting more leads from your blog.
Create a well-defined blog structure
Blogging is an important inbound marketing tool to produce more leads. Creating more quality content and generating good engagement are two top things that today’s marketers are struggling with. An easy and attractive blog structure can fulfill all the demands of users to visit your blog and interact their thoughts on a specific topic.
Simple and clean graphic layout blended with attractive images and fonts will set the stage for your audience. However, effective use of different typography style can be useful in enhancing readability for users.
Also, you need to present different blog elements i.e. brand logo, menu, search box, subscription box, social connect and social sharing icons, different forms for showing discount offers and gated content offerings are some important elements to implement strategically while designing a new structure for your blog.
These small designing considerations can really make a big difference to create a better user experience. White space, which is the empty space between the different elements in the composition of your blog page is essential to lead your visitor’s attention and eye from one element to another in a logical order.
Think about what your blog visitors expect from you and if you’ll be able to deliver the same then they will follow what you offer to them if it is helping them. So, in a way you need to understand your audience demand and then you need to offer the same.
In the meantime, the power of the first impression remains the priority for everyone. Therefore, making a first good impression by designing a suitable most blog structure is the first step towards creating a good experience for users.
Fine Tune the Color and Style
Image source: Elegant Seagulls
The colors of your website should match the mood and feel of your blog and the combination should be well thought out. When designing your blog, it is important that every element should follow the same style and color patterns. Each element of your blog should be well-adjusted within a defined structure or theme to keep everything in a synergy.
Defining branding standards helps in better impression and better brand awareness and finally leads to better brand recalling in highly competitive market.
Even choosing a wrong font type can kill your blog visits so, it becomes important to establish as a stand-out brand by choosing standard band elements and stick to them wherever it needed.
It is advisable to keep up with 3 color palettes for your blog other than black, gray, and white. Make sure you have a purpose while choosing any color for your branding.
This is important to create a strong brand recognition or else your audience won’t recognize you. That’s why today’s marketers need to focus more on unaided brand recall in this highly challenging business environment to remain competitive.
Logos, navigation menus, search box, links to social utilities, primary and champion images, content, and bottom of the page are some essential elements that need to blend with the selected branding style and color as per the brand guidelines.
Let’s create a complete brand guidelines document by choosing colors, font’s style and size, image resolutions and showcasing styles, logo usage formats, CTA guidelines and follow it strictly.
Moreover, it is equally important to create a page on your blog for sharing and using your brand guidelines document for third party usage with a clear demonstration.
Easy Navigation is a Must
Image source: Bart Ebbekink
Every marketer wants to turn their blog into a killer knowledge base but it is equally important to show your audience an easy route to access it.
An easy navigation is the key to retaining a user for a longer time on your blog as people may forget what they’ve seen but they always remember what they’ve experienced.
People like clear, direct and easy paths and they will get frustrated if they won’t find a painless route to what they’re looking for.
Poor navigation will leave your users with frustration and it will lead to more bounce rate on your blog. Try to keep it simple and make it easy for users to go through different sections to get what they are searching for.
Small things make a big difference and easy navigation is important to both- users and search. It works like a site map and spiders crawl it to determine the architecture of the site.
An easy, effective and intuitive user interface creates a lasting impression on visitors and they like to visit your blog often for accessing information easily once they have a good experience.
Remember you have a short amount of time to impress the users as it takes less than 2/10th of a second for an online visitor to form an opinion about your blog. And it takes another 2.6 seconds for that viewer’s eye to concentrate and reinforce the first impression. So, when you have this much little time to impress visitors on your blog you won’t miss any chance to create a good and lasting impression.
Responsive and Device Compatibility
One more important thing to consider while designing your blog structure is to make it responsive and compatible with different device size. It is essential as more people access the internet on their smartphones and if your blog is not mobile friendly then you will lose a potential audience that may never return to your blog.
80% of internet users own a smartphone and they like to search for their queries on search engines using their phones. So, it becomes obvious to design and develop your blog for all types of mobile devices.
Furthermore, the responsive blog will power your users with greater mobility and they can access information from anywhere. Empowering your audience with facility to access information from anywhere using any type of device will lead to greater interaction and hence more engagement.
Crafting Lead Generation Forms
The next important aspect that can help you to score more brownies on your blog is lead generation forms creation. Call to actions (CTA), if crafted and presented well can become a quick refresher to your audience on your information architecture i.e. blog.
Now, when your blog structure is all set it’s time to design and create different lead generation forms. Lead generation forms are the best way to collect more leads and you need to set it properly where users won’t feel annoyed and they will share the contact information easily.
OptinMonster, Contact Form 7, Gravity Forms, Jetpack and Google Forms are the most popular form creation tools to create and set form on your blog in an effective style.
Whereas, Hotjar and Kissmetrics are the heatmap tools will be useful in tracking different user behavior on your blog. These user tracking tools can be helpful in deciding on forms implementation on your blog. Based on user interaction you can place and remove forms on your blog.
Lead generation forms can be presented differently on your blog such as placing call to action (CTA) forms on the sidebar, on the top and bottom of blog homepage and you can also create CTA forms for presenting it through pop-ups.
Different types of pop-up forms can be customized for targeting different users as per their past behavior on your blog page. However, by observing different user behavior on your blog page you can showcase different types of CTA differently.
Here are some of the ways you can use the right combination of offer and placement to form the right CTA:
- Inline CTA: It is placed within the blog post and it works when the user can form a connecting flow between the CTA and the content above the CTA.
- Slide In CTA: It slides in after a certain deal of scrolling from the side and remains until the end of the blog page.
- Sidebar CTA: Sidebar CTA can be placed on the right side or left side column of your blog and it comes in two forms- sticky sidebar CTA or a static one.
- Header CTA: the CTA which is placed on the top of your blog is a type of header CTA, which could be sticky or static depending on the type of header you are using.
- Scroll Intent CTA: A Scroll Intent CTA is a kind of slide in CTA that pops up after the user has done a certain deal of scrolling.
- Time Intent CTA: A time intent CTA pops up after the user has spent a certain amount of time on your blog page.
- Exit Intent CTA: This is the one that pops up when the user decides to leave from your blog page. An exit intent pop up is usually the largest of all CTAs, which covers almost the entire screen.
- Footer CTA: A footer CTA is placed at the end of the page with the sole intent of providing the option to subscribe to your blogs newsletters or to Get a Quote without having to scroll all around.
Blog Loading Time
Speed counts! Your blog loading time can affect the bottom line and you won’t be able to collect leads from your blog. Loading time affects conversion and leaves the audience with frustration.
One more thing, as webpage loading speed is crucial for creating a good user experience it is also an important aspect for a search engine to crawl search results.
Nowadays, users need quick response and they get frustrated if a webpage takes too much time to load. Visitors are demanding 3 seconds response time and they will shift to other sites if your blog is taking more time to load.
Thus, your blog loading speed should be optimized to load faster for creating a better impression and ultimately a good user experience.
There are some important considerations that needs to take care for optimizing the speed of your blog for creating a faster web such as using CSS, avoiding nested tables, removing excess white space, keeping code clean, splitting long pages into multiple shorter pages, reducing number of plugins, reducing scripts, and removing unnecessary images.
Also, you need to check blog loading speed against different devices and browsers as well. There are tools that will help you set your blog for multiple browsers and all devices- mobile and desktop.
Your blog loading speed is a major contributing factor to page abandonment. The average user has no patience and if a webpage takes too long to load they will shift to some other quickly. There are some useful webpage speed checker tools such as Pingdom, GTmetrix, and PageScoring.
However, you can use WebPageTest, which is a great tool to enable testing on various platforms using realistic data.
Moreover, Think with Google is an amazing utility tool to test your blog speed and performance on mobile devices. Based on the results you can optimize loading speed of your blog towards different devices- desktop, tablet, and smartphone.
There are lots of things that need to be optimized for getting your blog load faster such as blog page size, number of images, number of JavaScripts, and number of HTTP requests.
However, your blog loading speed is crucial for achieving desirable revenue. Remember, Amazon has discovered that for every one second delay, conversions dropped by 7%, which is critical.
Conclusion
If you take above-mentioned considerations into implementation while designing a new blog structure you’ll surely be able to give a good user experience to blog visitors. And this way you will be able to retain them for a longer period and you’ll be able to sell your product and services through blog.
Ultimately, we can say that a well thought superbly designed blog is all that you need to collect more leads and that’s how designing play its role in converting your visitors into your customers.
Also, you can read different techniques to convert your blog into a lead magnet for better business ROI.
The post How to Design your Blog for Lead Collection appeared first on Design your way.
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