Internet Marketing - Matt Bailey [212]
The main focus of building the blog is to style the content and the navigation to suit your business needs. That involves a focus on your audience, which then demands clear information architecture. Continue using keywords in navigation, categories, clear titles in posts, and well-designed content.
Remember also to evaluate the theme you have chosen to be sure that contrast is included in your customization. Some templates like to do things differently in order to be artistic, but we know that contrast is important in navigation and in the calls to action. Watch especially for the links contained in your blog, because many templates will change the colors of the links and the rollover effect. You want to be sure that visitors know that the links are links in both color and action.
Poor Interlinking
While blogging software makes the ability to administer a website and publish online accessible to anyone, there is still a learning curve in developing the ability to draw people into a website or blog beyond their first page. This is where interlinking pages, content, categories, and products can enable your visitors to engage much more deeply than the content on the page.
Chances are, if something attracted them to the initial page of content, be it search results or a website link, they are interested in that subject. By adding links to related content on your blog or your main website, you can offer more. This is why there are specific groups of links available in the widgets and the blog software to add Related Posts, Recent Posts, and Recent Comments links.
People are naturally drawn to conversation and to see what other people have read. This is why popular posts and comments provide a natural curiosity to readers, and a logical placement of the category and links near the content provides an easy method of gaining more page views from your visitors.
If the business has a website and a blog, then it is necessary to interlink the two. Providing information via the blog is a great means of outreach and visibility, but the business goals still need to be met, and a blog must link back into the primary goal of the website, whether it is ecommerce, lead generation, or something else. The earliest version of the GM FastLane Blog had no navigation to the other GM websites or even internal navigation to get to additional articles or related content (see Figure 17-14).
a
b
Figure 17-14: An early version of GM’s FastLane Blog (a) contained no navigational links to additional content. The newer version (b) makes categories and navigation an important part of the structure.
Having an access link or navigation options to the main website allows visitors to get to the website’s information and access the sales and marketing information necessary to lead development. Most blogs default to being an independent entity and, as such, need to be reworked to some degree to allow for integration of the primary website. Otherwise, visitors will come and read the content on the blog, unaware that there is an entire website of information and the possibility of finding an answer to their question or a vendor that has the products they need.
CNET does this very well, by maintaining the main navigation on the header of the blogs but also by providing blog-specific navigation for each niche blog it publishes (Figure 17-15). The main navigation to the rest of the website is always available, and the focus is on the blog as an addition to the site, rather than being a replacement for the website.
Figure 17-15: The CNET Digital Media blog maintains both the main navigation for the website and the blog navigation in the design.
In a manner of speaking, businesses need to advertise their own websites on the blog. This is where attention-getting graphics as calls to action can place people into the