Good Design Tips for your Internet Marketing Blog by Ali Templeton
Blogs are a great medium for marketing your products and services on the Internet but how do you stand out in a world of millions of blogs? The key ingredients of a good blog site are informative content, a sense of personality and a great design. This will put you head and shoulders above your competitors.
I will discuss content and personality in another article, but today, I am going to provide tips for the design of your Internet marketing blog.
Firstly, you need to decide how your site is going to look. Do you plan to have your own banner? Will it include photographs? Will you go for a two-column approach and if so, will your list of contents be on the left or right? It is worth spending an hour or so sketching out what you want including colours and fonts so that when you start designing it online, you don't waste time playing around with different styles. A good way to get inspiration is to check out blogs in your niche market and note down what looks good and works well against those sites that don't inspire confidence.
If you have used a free blog hosting site, then you will have a number of templates that you can use for your site. You can customise these templates to a certain extent, but there are limitations on what you can with a pre-selected theme. If you are not careful, your site could end up looking like thousands of others. It is much better to spend a few dollars to get your own domain name and hosting package and then use a free tool such as WordPress to set up your blog. WordPress comes with thousands of themes and templates that you can use and easily customise. If you are a beginner at WordPress, you will find plenty of resources on the Web to help you get started using the tool.
Think carefully about your banner. It is the first thing that visitors to your site will see. Make it stand out by adding a graphic and the title of your blog. Ensure that the banner reflects the content of the blog. If design skills are not your strong point, then hire a web designer to develop one for your site. Check out freelance sites such as Freelancer and Elance for a good web designer. It should only cost a handful of dollars to get an original banner for your blog.
Photographs and images can really enhance your site. If you decide to use photographs on your site, ensure they are original or that you have the rights to use them. There are many websites where you can download photographs on all kinds of subjects and use them royalty free.
More and more blogs are adding audio and even video files to their sites. These can give the site more personality and keep visitors returning. Check how you look and sound online before adding audio and video to your site and, of course, ensure that the content compliments your site.
If you are going to add advertisements to your site, then ensure that they are placed correctly on the site. For example, don't put them halfway through your blog content as this will detract from your content and make the site harder to read.
It is worth spending a bit of time designing your blog site. Consider applying some if not all of these tips when you are designing your first Internet Marketing blog.
About the Author
Ali is an Internet marketer and communications expert with over 20 years commercial experience working for start-ups through to multi-nationals. For her free guide on how to make money from blogs, check out her website at: http://www.ali-temple.com.</a href>
Online Marketing Made Easy!
[simpleaffiliate source="amazon" results="10"]online marketing blog[/simpleaffiliate]
[simpleaffiliate source="cj" results="10"]online marketing blog[/simpleaffiliate]
[simpleaffiliate source="clickbank" results="10"]online marketing blog[/simpleaffiliate]
No comments:
Post a Comment