Everyone says content is king. To some extent, that is absolutely true. You need good content to attract readers and to encourage them to return to your blog again and again, helping to drive conversions. However, if you have a poor design, you’ll never convince your visitors to stay and check out any of your content. They’ll see your poor design and leave, sending your bounce rate sky high.

You have to put just as much effort into your design, if not more. Here are the top 5 mistakes you might be making with your blog design that are costing you readers:

The Design Is Too Busy

Simple is always better. If you clutter your page with too many graphics, too many widgets, and too many contrasting fonts and colors, you are going to make it very difficult for your readers to focus on anything. Your page will be too cluttered and too difficult to navigate. Instead, you need to focus on a simple, streamlined design that will make it easy for readers to get the information they need quickly.

Too Many Sharing Buttons

Social media marketing is a great way to promote your blog, and it’s important to make sharing easy by including buttons on your blog. However, when you have buttons for each of your social media in the header, the footer, and the sidebar, and when you have sharing buttons on the end of each post and page, and you have a floating sidebar for sharing content and a popup to follow you on Facebook, it’s all a little too much. Put links to your profiles in the header OR the sidebar, and use one widget at the end of posts or in a floating sidebar for sharing.

Poor Ad Placement

Advertising is one of the most popular ways to monetize a blog. However, when you allow your blog to become too cluttered by ads, you alienate readers. Even for those readers who stay on the page, the placement is not effective because the disorder just causes readers to overlook all the ads. Focus on a simple ad placement that includes one in the header and maybe a couple in the sidebar. Choose in-post ads very carefully.

Hidden About and Contact Pages

Readers want to know who you are, and they want to be able to contact you if they have questions. Supplying this information and making it easy to find inspires trust and confidence in your readers. Make sure you have these pages published on your site, and make sure they are easy to find — preferably putting them right in the header.

The Design Is Not Responsive

The mobile market is exploding. More and more customers are accessing the web from their smart phones, tablets and other devices. However, your website does not automatically appear the same way on all these devices. You must make your design responsive, meaning that it will adapt according to the advice so that users have a good experience no matter how they access your site. Most themes are now created to be responsive, so this should be an easy thing to do. However, if yours is not, you must make sure you correct that so you don’t lose readership.

Content is indeed one of the most important aspects of a successful blog. However, your design is almost equally important. Make sure you’re not making one of these common design mistakes and losing out on readership for your blog.

What other mistakes do you see people making with the design of their blog? Share your thoughts in the comments!

Bio: Amber Satka writes on financial topics, such as her look into bad credit car refinance. Amber is a former office manager and current mother and writer.

It can be a tough blog-eat-blog world out there. How can you increase readership and garner traffic to your new blog post despite all the competition? Learn how to write your most popular blog post with some easy steps.

The basics: know your audience and how they share

To write a blog post to gain readership, you must understand your audience. While writing is a form of expressing your thoughts, feelings, observations, and the like, writing for an audience can often take different approaches than personal rants and raves. If you do not know your audience that well, go out on a limb and ask them: what do you want to see more of? In what fashion?

Besides knowing your audience’s preferences to content, it is also important to understand how your audience shares content. Hopefully, they do share content. Sharing content helps a post to go viral — it is being shared with numerous other people, even outside your target audience. This can help increase readership, subscribers, and traffic to your blog. Do some research on your audience. Do they share content on their own blog, Facebook, Twitter, etc.? Make sure to have a sharing platform linked to your blog for easy sharing.

Interact and maintain blog relationships

There are many blogs out there on the Internet. To help promote your own blog, find high traffic blogs in the range of your audience, and interact with them. Acting as your blog and not your individual self, comment on interesting posts and share some content from another website. This can help spread awareness of your own blog, and invite other blogs to share your content as well, in a supportive (not manipulative) give and take relationship.

How to save money by wearing only striped t-shirts to work

If that headline were a link, would you click on it? To gain traffic to your blog post, it should have an attention-grabbing headline. Be creative, but still stick to what your post is actually about. Make people want to click on your post to read what you actually mean by saving money on wearing striped t-shirts to work — perhaps that headline is a funny quote from an anecdote about saving money on clothes, for example. Pulling a quality idea from your post and making it into a clever headline won’t compromise quality over obvious and annoying attention-seeking.

SEO is the name of the game

SEO stands for search engine optimization. It is the results when you search for a topic on a search engine, like Google. The first results you see have supreme SEO; that’s where you want to be. What is your blog post about? Find the keywords or keyphrase of your post and use it in your writing. However, do not overdo it. You do not want to jeopardize your quality content over SEO optimization. Check out Google AdWords, a free tool you can use to conduct SEO research for your blog post.

Make your post attractive to readers

Organize and format your blog post to be aesthetically pleasing. Make sure font style and size are consistent, images are imbedded without cutting off text, etc. On this note, include pictures in your post to complement and enrich your writing (cite the source properly, too). Show that your post is worth a reader’s time with effective formatting.

Remember, a popular blog post takes time and effort. Don’t skimp on the basics, invest in the research, and, most importantly, have fun with it!

Angie Picardo is a staff writer for NerdWallet. Her mission is to help consumers stay financially savvy, and save some money with the best savings rates.

Many bloggers are pressed for time. You have a business to run or kids to take care of. You love your blog, of course, and want to see it be successful, but you also do not have a lot of time to devote to it. That often means you feel like you can’t blog but that is not true. There are easy and fast ways to blog even when your time is limited.

Keep it short – One of the first things I always tell bloggers when they ask me how to keep their blogs going strong in a limited amount of time is to keep it short. Blog posts do not have to be thousands of words in length. In fact, most readers do not want to invest that much time reading a blog post. Instead, try to write around five hundred to two thousand words in your blog posts. Any longer than two thousand and you start to lose readers. Any shorter than five hundred and you start to lose search engines. Both of those are a no-no to serious bloggers. It is not hard to write five hundred words. About one page typed is all it rounds out to be.

Break it up – Another issue I often run across is that the blogger who chose to write at the very longest limits (around two thousand words) also tend to drone on in long paragraphs for pages and pages. Ug. Who wants to read that? Instead, make sure you break up your blog posts into short paragraphs. You can even use headers to help readers follow along easier. If you have a lot to say and you start to go over the upper limits of your text, why not just break up your blog post into more than one? A blog post series is a great way to update your blog frequently with quality content while not having to really write that much. A direction piece, how to guide, or explanation easily be broken up into parts one, two, three and so on. Even a story can be broken into several blog post segments to make it easier for readers to consume. No one wants to sit and read a novel length blog post!

Use lists –A great way to break up blog posts, get new readers in and play up to the search engines without having to write a lot is list posts. List posts are great because readers love to scan them and read only the points that apply to their situation. Lists also give readers a sense of how long a post will be. Like a post with five points will be much shorter than one with fifty points and so on. Search engines also like number posts like the “ten best” the “top five” and so on. Writers should also love list posts because they are so easy to write. All you have to do is come up with the points and then fill them in one by one. It does not matter if they do not flow together. A list is always choppy. Instead you can focus on just getting a hundred words down for every point and you will be done in no time flat.

Use multimedia – Many blogs are bland and colorless. They are full of pages and pages of text. While they may be well written, no one will ever read it because it is boring to look at. Liven up your blog with multimedia. Videos, images, infographics and more can all be a blog post or part of one. I make a point to include an image in every post so that it will catch readers’ attention and also give a hint about the content of the post. I also love to include videos that inspire me, ones that tell about the same issue I am discussing or an infographic that illustrates my points. Using multimedia can get you more traffic with less writing.

Have fun with it – We all know we write faster when we enjoy what we are writing so if you are pressed for time try to pick a subject that is fun for you to write about. Maybe it is your favorite television show or something you saw that was funny that you just have to share. Whatever the case, the more you have fun the easier and faster it will be to write.

Have a backup – Sometimes I have really good writing days. I have lots of time and I am inspired to write. On those days I make sure to write at least one extra post and save it for later. Those poets are great for the days you have no time or desire to write. Having backup post means you can update your blog in seconds and get on with everything else you have to do. Of course your backup should be evergreen content, so avoid recent news or time sensitive issues when creating backup posts.

Just start – One of the hardest things for me to do, especially when I am pressed for time, is to get started. I will sit there and stare at the blank page hoping inspiration will strike. Of course sit rarely does that way. Instead I have learned to just get started. If I start typing it brings new ideas to my mind. Even if it is just something stupid like “I hate to write” or “This is not going to work”. I find that it does indeed work and I get a blog post done in record time.

Have a goal –Another thing that inspires me is having a goal for my writing. Am I going to write five hundred words or a thousand? Am I going to cover a topic I have never done before or talk about something my readers are familiar with? Do I want to get likes? Comments? A thousand readers? Links? Having a goal means you stay focused and on task so you can get things done faster. You should also know who your target audience is and what they are looking for. By writing with your audience in mind you can really increase the impact your blog posts have on your traffic.

Get ideas –The hardest part about writing in a hurry is trying to come up with ideas. Instead, try to come prepared. Come with ideas. I keep a notebook with me all the time just so I can write down ideas when I have them. I also use Pinterest to store cool things I run across and I refer to those sources often when I get stick. It has really helped me to be able to get new blog posts done faster and also widen my range of topics that I have covered on my blog.

Get emotional –Last but not least, get emotional. We all write faster when we are passionate about something. Maybe you are mad or sad or happy about something that has happened in your life. Maybe you wish the government would do this or that or you just want to rant about how bad the customer service was at a business you visited. Maybe you met someone who made you cry for joy or maybe you just broke up with your partner and want to vent your pain at the world. Writing with your emotions sometimes does not get your best writing out there, but it does ring true with readers and can help them to connect with you on a very real level.

You know that updating your blog frequently is the only way to keep it alive and growing. Hopefully these ten tips will help you to keep updating your blog even when you do not think you have the time to do so. Happy blogging!

Author Bio:

Jason Miner an expert freelance writer loves writing articles on different categories. He is approaching different bloggers to recognize each other’s efforts through “www.blogcarnival.com”. He can be contacted through e-mail at jasonminer8atgmaildotcom.

We should really applaud Google for the tools they offer free of charge. The barrel loads of tools they offer are all of a very high quality, and yet they do not charge for their use. Other software companies are charging a fortune in license and subscription fees, all for something that Google offers for free. This article explains how those tools may be used to improve your website. SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is not vital for the success of your website, but the application of SEO techniques is free (unless you are silly and buy links). The tools used to measure and improve your SEO are free (if you use Google Webmaster Tools). So refusing to follow SEO guidelines and free SEO tools is a little bit like shooting yourself in the foot, looking a gift horse in the mouth, and turning down a free meal, all rolled into one.

What does Google allow you to do?

You can submit a sitemap and check it. You can check the crawl rate of your website, and view the statistics about how the Google bots access your website. You can actually generate a robots.txt file and check it too. You can use this to check which of your website pages are being blocked.

You are able to see what internal links are linked within your site, and what external pages are linked to your website. You can even see the broken links for your site. You can check to see what keyword searches have lead to people visiting your website. You can see what keywords have placed you where on the search engine results pages. You can also see what your click through rate is too, to see if the information being listed on the search engine results page is pulling its weight and bringing you traffic.

You can see the statistics about your site that are listed in the Google index. It will point out any possible errors and you can set a preferred domain display. It will determine how your page URL is displayed on the Google search engine results.

Get your Google messages through Google webmaster tools

If Google want to send you a message then this is how they will do it. They will let you know if your website is being punished or is going to be punished. They will also tell you why so that you can fix the problem.

Site links can be changed

If your website is a bit of an authority site, then sometimes in the search engine results page, Google will show a few links of other pages that it feels are important. Sometimes they will show links to pages that do not make you look very good online, and you can change this function to hide them on the search engine results if you wish.

The Google AdWords keyword checker is powerful

You will probably have a few keywords for each web page. This tool can help you find new ones, better ones, and check how powerful your current keywords are. The best thing is that the tool can be used hundreds of times for free. Your website may be based around a much focused topic, but with the AdWords keywords tool you can come up with plenty of keywords to share around your entire website.

Use Google Analytics to see how well your website is doing

If you set up your analytics correctly, then you can pull a lot of information from it. You can see how well your website is linked internally and externally. You can see how many people are visiting your site and where they are coming from. Basically, you can gain access to almost all of the factors that decide your PageRank. You can even use it to see if people are looking at your website right now.

You can tailor your entire website based upon the information you get from Google analytics. It is especially good if you have set up landing pages and would like to see how well they are performing. It is also good at showing you were you are doing unexpectedly well. It is able to show you how, where and why your website is receiving more traffic on one URL over another.

Author’s bio: My name is Sonia Jackson. I represent the Australian web-site http://www.essay-bag.com. We’ll help you to solve all problems with writing different essays and research papers according to the rules of the universities and colleges in Australia.

Social networking is a great way to promote your blog or website. It’s a free tool that can connect you with potentially millions of new users. That’s a lot of new business you can tap!

There are literally hundreds of social networks (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_social_networking_websites). How do you choose the best ones to promote your blog? Here are the top 10 social media websites you can use to promote your blog:

Facebook

Facebook has more than 1 billion active monthly users, and it is easily the most popular social networking site. You can set up a fan page for your blog and connect with unlimited users. You can post links to your blogs, information about products, photos, videos, and more. A Facebook page can be used as effectively as an e-mail marketing campaign to increase conversions.

Twitter

This micro-blogging platform is typically the second-most popular option for social media marketing. You are limited to status updates that can be used to build relationships with readers and to share links to blog posts and promotions.

Google+

Google introduced its social marketing platform to great fanfare, but it has yet to rival Facebook as predicted. Still, it’s a great tool for marketing your blog, and it can be used in the same way as Facebook. In addition, the friends and likes you gain on Google+ can help to increase the page rank on your site.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is the professional’s answer to social networking. You have to create a professional profile on the site that includes a virtual resume. As a blogger, you can use your LinkedIn profile to participate in forums and groups on the site and promote your blog.

Pinterest

Pinterest is the fastest-growing social network, and it is responsible for generating enormous referral traffic. The key to promotion on the site is sharing compelling visuals — usually associated with unique how-to articles. You can pin your own best content on the site, as well as other useful information. The more followers you get on the site, the more traffic you are likely to drive to your own.

Instagram

Instagram was purchased by Facebook earlier this year, and the site is rapidly growing. Instagram is strictly a photo-sharing site, with no links associated with the photos. You can use it to promote your blog by sharing photos of yourself, your products, or your services in action. Your followers can then check out the information on your profile that directs them back to your website. The more followers you have, the more traffic you are likely to get.

YouTube

Videos are another great way to market your blog. You can create video blogs of yourself talking about your topic, or you can create more in-depth videos that offer tutorials or how-tos. Sharing these videos will not only show off your expertise and establish you as an authority, it will also drive more traffic back to your site.

Stumble Upon

Stumble Upon is a growing site, which allows you to bookmark pages that you love. You can them “stumble” through pages to find other sites that are similar to your interests. Stumble Upon offers you a great opportunity to share more of your blog posts and pages and to get others to do the same. You can easily generate a great deal of traffic for your blog if you are active enough on the site.

Digg

Digg catalogues the top stories on the Internet, based on user suggestions and votes. You can submit your blog content to the site, and if it gets enough votes, you can generate a great deal of traffic for your site. The key is to submit your best and most relevant content.

Reddit

Reddit is similar to Digg, though the criteria for content is not so strict. Instead of sharing news articles, users on Reddit share whatever they find interesting or funny. As with Digg, you can submit your blog content on Reddit and, if it gets enough votes and comments, it will rank high on the site and send a lot of traffic to your blog.

There are many more great social networking sites that you can use to promote your blog, but these are some of the most popular and are the sites that will give you the most traffic for your efforts.

What social networking sites do you like to use to promote your blog? Share them in the comments!

About the Author: Alexis Bonari writes for one of the largest open databases of college funding opportunities. Specific topics like scholarships for Hispanics are described in detail to provide multiple resources for students.

When you are setting up a blog for your company, you hope that you are building something that is going to be worth reading and that will gather a large following. However, what you hope and what you do can be very different things. You have to make sure that you are working toward creating a great blog, as they don’t just happen. Here are some steps that you are going to need to take whether you are writing a blog about VPN service or about the cute things that your kitten does.

Why Do You Need a Blog?

Why do you need to create a blog for your business? You are going to want to blog for several reasons. First, you want to help establish and build your brand, and you will want to use the content on your site to help you generate more leads. In addition, your blog will serve as an introduction to you and your company. This can help lead to sales right through your blog and your site. Knowing why you are blogging for your business will help you to keep your focus.

Now that you know some of the reasons that you are going to want to blog, you will want to develop a theme or concept for the blog. This is going to depend greatly on your company and your niche. Knowing your niche is going to help ensure that you are creating the right type of content to find and keep audience.

Something else that you are going to have to think about when you are starting a blog is whether it is going to be its own entity, or if you are going to have it as a part of your site. If you keep it under the same domain, you will have the benefit of getting better traction with your SEO.

Frequency and Type of Content

You will want to know just how often you should post to your blog. Unfortunately, you are not going to find a magic answer that works for everyone. It depends upon your audience, your blogging style, and the amount of time that you have. You could blog each day, once a week, or even once a month. If you are blogging daily, you have to make sure that you have enough content to keep up with the blog, and that you have enough time to write it. In some cases, it might be a better idea to hire someone to write at least some of the content for you. In most cases, the more often you post the more traffic you are going to get.

You should make sure that you post consistently. If you post every day, then you need to keep up that schedule. When you have a “whenever” schedule for your blog, it can be difficult to keep readers.

Consider some of the other types of content that you will be able to add to your site as well. In addition to text, make sure that you think about the possibility of adding some photos to the posts, or even doing some video posts. On your posts, make sure that you have some social media icons so that readers will be able to share your content easily and with a single click.

It’s a good idea to make sure that you have some type of call to action in each of your blog posts as well. You could ask for peoples’ opinions, ask them to download your e-book, sign up for a newsletter, email for more information, or just about anything else. The important thing is that you get the reader to engage.

Veronica Clyde is a dedicated writer at VPNServices.net – a website where you can read about VPN services and Online Security. She also loves to share VPN technology, WordPress and Blogging tips.

If you have just set up your first website then you are probably wondering how to have it ranked on Google. The process is not easy, and the task is long. If you try to get your website ranked on the first page of Google within the first few months then Google will punish you later on down the line (or within 2 months of you ranking highly if you are unlucky). Google do give a few passive tips on how a new starter can begin the journey, but this article builds on that to help you continue climbing up the search engine results page.

Google tells all new starters to take part

They want all new starters to take part in the online community. They want you to comment on blogs, on articles, and talk in forums. You need to go a step further and start making online acquaintances. You need to start saying hello and chatting with people who can help your SEO. You are looking for people who you can share reciprocal SEO benefits with. For example, you can reciprocally “Like” each other’s fan page. You can comment on each other’s blogs, or set up reciprocal links.

Start uploading 5-10 articles per week

There are a lot of article sites out there, and some of them have low quality standards, which means that even if you are a bad writer, there are still article sites that will accept your submissions. If you want to get onto some of the better sites such as Squidoo and Ezine, then you should hire a writer or two. Uploading 5-10 articles per week should help you to get your link-average up. After between 3-4 months you can lower the amount of articles you upload every week. Doing this is going to create a nice foundation of links for your website, so that you can get off of the bottom rung of the Google search engine results (and Bing/Yahoo).

Make sure that you link to different pages

When you are setting up your link campaign, do not make the mistake of linking to your home page. You need to link to different pages with each link. Uploading as many as ten articles with links per week may seem excessive, but if you have 80 pages, it is going to take you at least seven weeks before every page has at least one link pointing towards it. Plus, do not forget that some links will break and you will have to set up new links.

Link to your sitemap at least once per week

This is not the XML. sitemap that you set up to submit to search engines. This is the sitemap that your users can see. If you link to it at least once per week, then you are helping the search engines to crawl all of your linked pages. This is especially handy if you are adding new pages on a regular basis. It is also good if you are updating your pages frequently (as you should).

Guest blog post at least once per month

Hire a writer to write you two very specific articles. These must be on a subject that is dear to the heart of your website users. You then need to find a few high PageRank-ing blogs and submit your idea for a guest post to them. Hopefully you can negotiate to allow you to post your article(s) and link to your website. It is a good idea to have two written, just in case nobody wants to publish your first attempt (you will have a backup piece). Do a little research and find some high-ranking blogs that often accept submissions from guest posters. Link to a page that you would really like to see highly ranked, such as your home page, your favorite landing page, or a popular product page. Just make sure that the anchor text for the link, and the article you have written, has some sort of relation to the page you link to (e.g. an article on chicken welfare that links to your site that sells eggs, etc). Add a keyword or two into the article too, to give it a bit of extra kick.

Author’s bio:
My name is Sonia Jackson. I represent the web-site www.essay-bag.com. We’ll help you to solve all problems with writing different essays and research papers in a short time; we’ll answer all your questions and give you useful advice.