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Design is to Attract, Usability is to Engage-Part 2

Monday, March 12, 2007

There were a lot of obvious things we talked about in the first part, here are a few more. Obvious because after going through you may realize, How Could Have I missed that? Or I knew about this, but is it that necessary? Every point we talked about or would be talking here may be known to each one of you, but as humans we tend to miss out important things without realizing. Read out the comments and you will know what I mean. Here are a few more points that can seriously effect your blogs performance.

8. Don’t make your blog a junk-yard- Widgets are nice little decorations and plugins for your blog often used by bloggers in their sidebars. If you feel one is actually relevant or shows your site stats like traffic, go ahead with it. Overdose of everything is bad. Lots of badges, animations your favorite actors hinder your projected professionalism and you would passed of as a newbie or a regular blogger. This can actually take down your blogs performance.

9. Niche Sensitivity- Blogging on different topics will make you jack of all and master of none. Entertainment blogs do good, yes even here you are going to sacrifice your seriousness as well as search engine rankings. If you really want to sometimes blog apart from your niche, what you can do is, create an entertainment/miscellaneous or other related category and add such posts to it. If you find your niche to be very tight, try covering your parallel niches. Remember this is very important for traffic from search engines also.

10. Domain Name- Don’t look at mine here. Blogandpintutorial.blogspot.com is certainly one of the worst ones you can have. Blogs ending in a blogspot.com, typepad.com will be soon equivalent to having an @gmail.com email address. This is not a campaign against free services but its like giving away the fruits of your own hard work. When you are using someone else’s domain name, you are actually letting somebody else smarter than you to cash in your publicity and links.

Before further telling you about domain names let me tell you I am a firm believer of this and like to follow what I teach. Soon you will find yourself at BloggingtoFame.com. I cannot stress more importance of it.

The time you get serious about blogging remember to shift your blog to its very own domain name and in ideal circumstances it won’t cost you more than $8 per year. The longer you delay, the more you will feel the pain doing it and the actual pressure to do so. You have to be the in charge of your destiny, do not hand it to somebody else. Keep your fingers crossed that somebody else has not parked your domain. I’ll soon do a post on how to choose a correct domain name for your blog and why to do so.

11. Post Titles- What do you read when you first pick up the Newspaper? Headline is as important to a newspaper as a Good Post Title is to your Post. That is the first thing that your visitor will read and it is the one that will encourage your visitor to read your post. Put in a Hypnotic and descriptive title. Your readers as well as the search engines will love you for it.

The most important function of a post title is to get attention, something that invokes a thought. That is why its always bigger than rest of the text. You can ask an open ended question, or let your title lead into a story. Your aim is to gain your visitors attention and later on trust. Your post should be apt to your title.

How about the Headline- The Death of Search Engine Dominance in Web2.0.
The death factor still works!

12. Post frequency- When we talk about web usability, we refer to reach out and fulfill your visitors expectations, so do not delay posts from your frequency. Post regularly, nobody wants to read stale information. Schedule your posts and publish them accordingly. Whatever it may be it should be evenly paced out. Its not necessary to post daily. You cannot create quality content on daily basis. Posting twice a week or on alternate days is also fine. Once you have made out your choices, it will help your readers to come back to your blog according to your schedule. Do not post when you have nothing valuable to say, but do not also let months go by without a single post. This will make your blog loose its visitors. Out of Sight Out of Mind, As you know.

There is one last important post to it. Stick through and wish me luck for my BloggingToFame.com

Happy Blogging,
Divya

Related Posts:-
Design is to Attract, Usability is to Engage- Part I
Design is to attract, Usability is to engage- Part 3

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posted by Divya Uttam, 12:27 PM

10 Comments:

Yes.. we are waiting for that BloggingtoFame dot com!!

commented by Blogger ilker, 12:56 PM  

Thanks for spending the time to write a well-written, easy to read article. I enjoyed the entire post.

Important Question:
Will you participate in my Blog Revenue Study? I'm particularly interested in your stats because you place 468x60 banners at the end of your posts.

Please participate when you have some time.

commented by Anonymous Anonymous, 5:42 PM  

Nice post Divya and it's a good thing I found this blog. I have been looking at blog optimisation information from an Indian perspective.

The template you have looks pretty good. Did you design the template yourself or download it from somewhere? Where did you get it from?

commented by Blogger Andy, 9:51 PM  

I like this post. One query I would have is with the profile bit. If you are writing on a specific topic, by all means qualification is important but what if you are talking on a number of random topics which your subscribers like?

Well written article by the way!

commented by Blogger David McQueen, 3:55 AM  

That will be soon available Ilker, and I think its going to be worth our wait.

Just fill me up with the details Bryan I'll sure love to be a part of it.

Andy I have downloaded Andreas 04 which is a three column blogger template easily found on net and have personalised it in the way you find it now. It did took a little hard work but it was necessary.

If you have a blog like lets say Random good stuff which has its identity due to its random posting by all means go ahead with it. The thing it will be lacking in is good traffic from Search Engines as you would not appear on SERPs(Search Engine Result Pages) coz you'll be lacking in Keyword optimization and Relevance.

commented by Blogger Divya Uttam, 10:34 AM  

Are you worried about losing your Technorati ranking after the switch or do you not care about it?

When people start linking to BloggingtoFame.com, those links will count towards that site only, and your old links to your old blogspot address will stay separate.

But I'm glad you wrote this -- I too am starting a new dot com, but I'm leaving my blogspot URL the same for now 'cause I don't want to lose my rankings.

Thanks,
Paula

commented by Blogger Paris David, 5:48 PM  

Very good post. Useful information we can all use. Thanks for the good tips!!

caplondon

http://lasvegasfun.blogspot.com/

commented by Blogger Unknown, 7:18 PM  

Thanks for the great post. I learned more than I expected. Your knowledge is appreciated!

Take care,

Rick Uyesugi
http://500daystofame.com

commented by Anonymous Anonymous, 12:06 AM  

Once more...Another great article. It never ceases to amaze me how much I learn from your blog everytime I visit:) Great Post.

commented by Anonymous Anonymous, 6:19 AM  

Great idea! I've got a few ideas from reading your work. Thank you.

commented by Blogger Brad Woods, 2:02 PM  

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