When it comes to making sales with a blog, there are some things that can help you… and things that can hurt you.
There are certain “best practices” in terms of blog design, overall layout… and even on a page by page basis that come together to form what I call the perfect blog.
To be clear, there is no such thing as “perfect”. 🙂 I’ll be the first to tell you that even trying to reach perfection will end up being a colossal waste of your time.
But, when it comes to using a blog to drive business, I’ve been at this a long time. 20 years now. Two freakin’ decades (hard for me to believe, really). I’ve tried and tested almost any possible thing that could be done with a blog.
While there is no such thing as “perfect” – and there is a lot of room for creativity on what a blog should look like – there ARE certain blueprints and guidelines that I have found work the best for a blog geared around CONVERSIONS.
For a conversion-focused blog, we have to stop thinking about the blog… as a blog. It isn’t just a site full of articles or blog posts. It isn’t just about the typical features of most blogs… headers, sidebars, footers, archives, categories, yada yada. It isn’t about those things.
A perfect blog isn’t really a blog anymore. It is a strategically engineered content marketing environment.
Every element is carefully constructed to achieve a particular (and measured) result. Every page has a goal. Every design element has a reason. Even more importantly, the things that are NOT there… there’s a reason for those, too.
When a visitor enters this strategic content marketing environment, they are gently guided into their next action. Things just flow. People flow. They flow to the places you want them… because it was designed that way. There’s nothing pushy about it. It is just designed to further the intentions they already had.
The structure of this perfect blog is pretty simple, really. The blog posts themselves are designed to attract new people, deliver value, then provide a next action. Every blog post is formatted and structured in a strategic way in order to make that happen. Even the topics chosen for those posts are strategic.
Then you have the core pages of the blog. Things like the about page, the home page, the blog index, the contact page. All these core pages are designed to provide the backbone and infrastructure to your content marketing environment. Each of those core pages has a specific purpose… and each page is put together to further that purpose.
Bringing these core pages and your blog posts together is your overall theme. And, like everything else, that design and layout of your blog is a fundamental part of the overall marketing environment. How does it communicate the brand? What effect does the color selection have? What about things like fonts, font sizes, white space?
The perfect blog is cohesive. Elements and pages work together. Everything has a purpose. And, the result is that people FLOW into the things that they should. What does this mean in more concrete terms?
It means more sales. More opt-ins to your list. More affiliate commissions.
Whatever the marketing goals are for your blog, you’ll get more of it. Because that’s the way your content marketing environment was DESIGNED.
Right now, inside THE LAB, I am currently creating a completely revised and totally new version of our course, The Perfect Blog Blueprint. We’ve had an old version in THE LAB for a few years, but I am completely re-doing the entire course to bring it up to 2019 best practices for conversion-focused blog setup.
As of now, my target date of completion of this course is May 24th. I am actively recording lessons now and distributing them into the LAB as they are completed. And as I am essentially creating the course in real-time, I am including 2 benefits with this course:
- A dedicated tech support form. With the right tools, implementation of the Perfect Blog Blueprint shouldn’t be a problem for anybody, even without strong technical skills. But, for that remaining gap, we will be there to help you get over the hump.
- Live Q&A and “Hot Seat” session. We will be doing a special Q&A office hours later on in June specifically for the Perfect Blog Blueprint. I’ll answer any and all questions, but we’re also going to do some “hot seats” where we will evaluate blogs live on screen and I’ll show how I would personally tweak things according to the blueprint.
Now, if you’re already a LAB member, you will have automatic access to all of this.
However, if you’re NOT a LAB member, I am making all of this available (with lifetime access) for a one-time purchase. Not only that, if you lock in your seat in the course before May 24th, you will save 36% over what it is going to cost after that.
Keep in mind, this isn’t just a course with a bunch of videos. There will be a tech support line built into this course so you can get help with implementation – AND there will be the live call in June. There will also be several worksheets, checklist and reference blueprints to print off to help you implement the recommended strategies on your own site.
Once you implement this, then your blog will be able to convert even fairly small amounts of traffic into email subscribers… and even sales.
And that’s sort of the name of the game here. 🙂
Here’s how I help people every day…
Make everything about managing your site simpler… by having me on your team to help make sure everything goes smoothly. By providing the very best tools, the best hosting and maintaining everything for you… I’ll take care of the mechanics so you can just focus on growth.
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The WP Edge is the official weekly newsletter of the Blog Marketing Academy.
