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Home » The Famous Blog » Blogging For Money – Beginners Guide #3

Blogging For Money – Beginners Guide #3

December 30, 2009 - Last Modified: December 30, 2009 by Francisco Perez

Blog Theme and Template

Welcome to the third part of the Blogging for Money beginners guide series. In this post I will be taking about several things that you should be aware of when choosing your blog theme or template and the things that are important to ensure that your readers are provided with the best experience when visiting your blog.

A blog theme or its design is a very personal choice. For this reason, it is difficult to recommend a standard or specific blog template and layout for you to use. While content is King, your blogs layout is the King’s castle. It should be easy to use, pleasing to the eyes and at all possible easy to navigate. When someone “lands” on your homepage or any pages of your blog, it should not be complicated for them to find what they are looking for. Remember that you only have some split seconds to convince your visitors to stay a while so you must leverage on that. I have seen many blogs with good content, but, due to the poor choice of colors, ad placements, navigation structure, download time, etc., I for one, have never returned to those blogs again. When this happens, you loose traffic, and when you are blogging for money, no traffic = no money, period.

That being said, here is a checklist of items that I recommend, to provide your readers with a waterfront view, when they visit your blog.

Do I need a GPS system here? Where am I?

An easy to use navigation structure is essential to any well designed blog! Information that are important should never be more than two or three clicks away. Consider creating a good “Menu” about your most important topics and make use of keywords for that matter.

Download Time

Not only Google has hinted that pagespeed will probably be playing an important role when ranking websites, DOWNLOAD TIME is probably one of the most important factors in your design. Visitors that arrive on your blog will not wait for more than 10-15 seconds for your page to load completely before they decide it is taking too much time and move on. While images are worth a thousand words, excessive use will hamper your blogs loading time. Use images sparingly or use thumbnail images to avoid this from happening. Scripts are also one of the main reasons why a website takes too much to load. Avoid external calls from your blog to increase speed.

Too much ads

Pop ups, widgets, plug-ins, banners, flash ads, badges, running animations and other intrusive ads annoy your visitors, makes your site difficult to use and bury your messages in a sea of clutter. If you use text links, infolinks or any other similar monetizing method, ensure that you disable them to appear on your visitors comments. It is not right to use your visitors comments to “hunt” for keywords and adding links to other information. That is not wise.

Outdated Information

Updating your blog with outdated information is like telling you now that Google is the dominant search engine as breaking news. If you stand to correct it or use it as a reference, fine, but do not blabber about something that is not fresh news.

Keep your backgrounds simple

White or light colors usually work best. Your background should not compete or disrupt with the content of the page for the users attention. Your text must be seen and easily understood by contrasting the background with the text color. If you would like to use a background image, select one that uses muted colors or format your picture as a watermark. If you do this, be sure that the text colors will contrast well with the background picture.

Like the tunes?

Unless you are promoting or selling MP3’s, your visitors probably won’t enjoy it either. Normally, it is best to skip the tunes, but if for some reason you think that it is a must to have music on your blog, be sure you provide a way for them to turn it off or better yet a way for them to turn it on, only when they decide to do so. Have you ever taught that your visitor may enjoy classic music and instead hears Poker Face when landing on your blog? What do you think they will do? Worst than not re-visiting your blog? Blacklist you:)

Check Your Spelling

While no one can be perfect, it is always recommended to run a spell check on your post before publishing it. There are many people with high tolerance for this type of problem, but then again there are those who don’t.

Browser Compatibility

While Internet Explorer is still widely used, there are other browsers that are available on the Internet. Different browsers, such as , Google Chrome, Firefox, Flock, Opera, etc., may display your page very differently. Check your website in as many different browsers as possible and avoid components which only render properly in specific browsers.

Other

Images not loading properly, broken links, hyperlinks leading to wrong pages, orphan pages, etc, are also reasons for driving your visitors away. Verify your links once in a while by using many SEO tools that are available for free. This will ensure that any links you provide your visitor can be accessible and most importantly, will not hurt your search engine rankings.

There you have it. As I mentioned, there are no specific suggestions for a perfect blog design, but avoiding certain things that I have said above, will help your blog stand out far better. If there is anything you think that we should be including in this list, please share them with us.

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Filed Under: Beginners Guide, Money, News

About Francisco Perez

Follow @ditesco

Francisco (aka DiTesco), helps you achieve online business success by providing resources on internet marketing, blogging, social web, SEO, and making money online. He does this by providing internet users tips, tools, consulting services and information to run a profitable home based business.

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{ 10 Responses }

  1. Udegbunam Chukwudi says:
    Google Webmasters tool now reports(yesternight) that my site speed is down to 2 seconds according to Googlebots. Thanks to W3 Total Cache. March is around the corner so I 'm anxiously waiting to see if something good happens to my PR ;) .-= Udegbunam Chukwudi@Work Online Nigeria´s last blog ..StrictlyOnlineBiz’s Top Blog Posts Of The Week 6 =-.
  2. Dennis Edell says:
    Very good tips, although I must say, nowadays even 10-15 seconds is being generous. .-= Dennis Edell´s last blog ..PLEASE COMMENT - Have You EVER Used The Added Feature Of My Subscribe To Comments Plugin?? =-.
    • Kharim says:
      thats true. if you waste time then you waste money .-= Kharim´s last blog ..Making Money Online: Affiliate Marketing vs. Pay Per Clicks =-.
    • DiTesco says:
      Sorry for the late response Dennis. Too much work offline. Getting back on track now (hopefully). Indeed 10-15 seconds is being very generous. Lately though, it seems that site speed has been some concerns in the sphere. .-= DiTesco´s last blog ..Site Speed: An Important SEO Ranking Factor? =-.
      • Dennis Edell says:
        Only since Google announced it's adding load speeds to it's ranking algorithm. .-= Dennis Edell @ Direct Sales Marketing´s last blog ..Holy Power Outage Batman, Not Again! Yep, Another Two Days Shot to Hell… =-.
  3. chandan says:
    This is really very nice guide. Well google new ranking system called google caffiene also now look all things like page load time, broken links, proper navigation etc before rank a page. Specially I hate the contexual link, they look so odd within the content. .-= chandan´s last blog ..Wish you all happy 2010 =-.
  4. Tinh says:
    I have made money online since 2003 and now I earned some good $$$ but I have never read a full ebook on this niche. I think I need to redo this soon. Thanks .-= Tinh´s last blog ..One Year Premium Hosting for FREE Worth $60 =-.
  5. lawmacs says:
    Well said Ditesco these are al very important tips if some one is interesting to make money online as you have mentioned about page loading time this is very important as it can be really annoying when this happens another wonderful post .-= lawmacs´s last blog ..Web Design Tips Page speed =-.

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