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Make Money Blogging

What you can Learn from a Redesign

You’ve started your blog and things are going well, but there are just a few things you wish you had done differently in its design. The fact is that redesigning a business blog is inevitable.

Maybe it is that your own personal skills have increased, allowing you to incorporate better design elements or change the overall structure of the blog. Maybe your business has started to change its focus or product/service offering. Maybe you just want a fresh look. Whatever your reasons for changing your blog’s design, there are several things that you can learn from redesigning your blog that will help you “evolve” the blog to new levels of profitability.

To do this, you will need to create several different designs, at least two in addition to the original, and use something like Google Website Optimizer to effectively analyze the various designs.

Categories
You will be able to see whether including “Categories” is beneficial to you at all. Some readers find that simply scrolling by category can take too long to find an interesting post and prefer to use a “Search” feature, others may adore the category listings and you may want to feature your categories more prominently.

Most popular widget
Being able to include a most popular posts widget in your blog can really increase traffic, because it shows the consensus. However, you may make the decision not to include it if you are trying to encourage more site interaction.

Converting traffic
If your business model is predicated on converting traffic, it is important to see which elements are hitting the mark for you and which are not. This can allow you to remove extranneous sales copy and result in more perceived validity to your blog.

Top commentors
Some blog will benefit highly from having a “Top Comentors” ranking, others not so much. If your blog is geared towards encouraging dialogue, you may want to focus on this element. If not, save the space for something else.

Comment subscriptions
This is a feature that can be wildly popular or a waste of space deending on your blog. Redesigning your blog will help you to see whether a comment subscription feature benefits you or if it is better to simply omit it.

Questions and answers
Questions and answers is an important element for many blogs, and you may want to evaluate its relevance for your blog. Questions and answers allow your readers to ask a question directly to you and provide you with an easy avenue for response. It is very easy for a reader’s question to get lost among a sea of comments. Sectioning off questions and answers can be very beneficial, but if the concept is not appealling to your readers, it may be better to leave it out.

Social media
Social media buttons are very popular. Retweeting and wall posting are rapidly becoming de rigeur on many websites and blogs. You may find that incorporating this element into a redesign is a smart idea. It may be a good idea to work more on their optimal placement that the issue of their inclusion.

RSS feeds
Using a feed egenration service is a great way to draw your readers to your blog and to let them know that a new blog has been posted. You may also want to incorporate RSS feeds from industry news into your blog so that your blog can be more of a “first place” the reader looks, rather than a side-thought. In performing a redesign, you can see whether this is a good element for you to include, the optimum placement, and the scope of the offering.

Contact page
Lastly, pay attention to your contact page. As your blog gets more popular you will end up receiving a ton of spam. Make sure that you do not have contact information that you do not want publicized or spammed, such as your address, your phone number, or your chat/IM (i.e. skype, AIM, Gtalk). It may be better to encourage interaction through the blog itself or social media. By trying different designs, you can see which is the more effective.

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