Blog Layout, Navigation Tips and Best Practices, Tonight’s #Blogchat Topic!

Here’s the transcript to tonight’s #Blogchat.  Click Transcript on the right.

Tonight (12-1-2013) at 8pm Central, we’ll discuss how to organize and layout your blog at #Blogchat!  This is a very important topic because your blog’s layout and how you present your content has a very important impact on its success.

To frame tonight’s conversation, I wanted to cover a couple of key points.  First, make a list of the top three things you want visitors to do on your blog.  If I come to your blog right now for the first time, what are the three most important things I could do?

Write a comment?

Signup for your newsletter?

Download a white paper?

Think about what you want me to do.  For example, the three things I’d like visitors to do when they visit my site is:

1 – Contact me about hiring me as a consultant or speaker

2 – Signup for my Think Like a Rock Star newsletter

3 – Read my posts on brand advocacy

Those are the three most important things that a visitor could do for me when they visit here.  So I plan my navigation and content here accordingly.  This leads to the second key point:

All content Above the Fold is prime real estate

‘Above the Fold’ means all the content that people see when your blog/site loads.  This is the stuff they can see WITHOUT having to scroll down.  So you want your most important stuff to be at the top of your site, and in general, to the middle and right.  Consider again the 3 most important actions a reader could take here, and where that content is:

1 – Contact me about hiring me as a consultant or speaker (All my consulting/speaking info is on the top nav bar)

2 – Signup for my Think Like a Rock Star newsletter (signup form is at the top of the left sidebar)

3 – Read my posts on brand advocacy (posts are at the top of the right sidebar)

 

All the content associated with those 3 actions is Above the Fold, at the top of my blog.  So if you want me to signup for your blog newsletter, guess what, that needs to be at the very top where I can easily find it.

So tonight we’ll be chatting more about blog layout, navigation and architecture.  Thanks to Jessica Northey for the topic suggestion!

Does your brand or company want to sponsor #Blogchat in January 2014?  Here’s price and all the details.  See y’all tonight at 8pm Central!