Five Things You Must Use On Your New Blog
own a great blog, Blogs are serving as alternative to Static websites
for people, various businesses and companies, even Companies with static
websites still feel a need to own a Blog, this is because these blogs
are the surest means of keeping
their customers updated.
Having good stuffs to offer on
your blog should be your number one priority, once you have those
contents, then you can consider the next things to follow it up. These 5
features are what I am sharing with us in this post, since they are very
relevant and will help make your blog neat, navigable, professional, and also keep
your visitors coming back for more.
5 Things You must Use For Your New Blog
1. AN AWESOME TEMPLATE:
First impression matters, the look you give to your blog will determine if
your first time visitors should go ahead reading it, so you have to present
them a good-looking template, not just a cool layout but one that matches your category, or “niche”.
Honestly, I won’t bother straining my eyes to read a blog with an incredibly messed up “design”.
What To do: If you are on Blogger, You may try out the free templates at Premium Blogger Templates
or if you use WordPress, you may browse this Post which discussed 100 excellent free WordPress themes to choose from.
Overall, make sure you are picking the right look for your blog.
2. SOCIAL MEDIA PROFILES AND SHARE BUTTONS
According to Darren Rowse
of ProBlogger dot net, bloggers have to engage in Social Media and
Network, this doesn’t only help get you some traffic but also aid their
blogs in building good profiles for them in these communities. Such
social media consists of :
- Google Plus
- Stumble Upon
- Digg and many others
What To do:
All you need do is join the above Social Networks, be active on them,
grab their badges with their Share buttons and install them on your
blogs so you and your visitors can easily connect and share your stuff
with their friends in the Social networks.
As we can see, I have them right below every of my blog posts. 🙂
3. EMAIL AND RSS SUBSCRIPTION BOX
The sole purpose of this is to keep your readers informed about your Updates.
RSS: should give them updates and summary of your posts.
NewsLetters/Email Updates:
Your Readers are people and businesses who check their mails everyday,
the Email-subscriptions should send them your updates straight into
their inbox.
Only some bloggers see much reason to having this,
well, right now, as you have a new blog, there’s nothing more than
keeping your Audience, first your content has to be very useful, and
then you will need the Email and RSS Subscription option so they can be
getting more updates of what’s new on your blog right in their mailbox
through Feed Burners and Newsletters you send them.
What To do: Go to Feed Burner and make your self an account for your blog where you will be burning all your updates via mails and RSS (Rich Site Summary) for your audience.
Since Feedburner would be shutting down anytime in December, you may go for alternatives such as
– myFeedInbox
-RapidFeeds
and Nouri.sh
They also do well as Feedburner.
4. CATEGORIES
This
is a very important feature you need to include on your blog, your
first time visitors will need it to know what types of topics you
discuss on your blog, and the frequent visitors who come back will use
this to Navigate to other parts of your blog posts. In addition it also has good SEO benefits, search engines will be needing it to understand and index your pages faster.
TAGS
are similar to categories but tags carry plenty of keywords
containing your topics, hence your Categories are created from the MAJOR keywords which your blog is based upon.
Don’t get it twisted
in case you are on Blogger, TAGS are what is used to represent your
Categories, so make sure you select the main keywords, and arrange them
accordingly. You may have a look at my side bar to the right, hope you
saw my Categories.
5. RECENT POSTS
The final but not the least
We frequently see a Blog’s latest post title right on top of the others before going ahead to “Read More” about it…
Well, don’t be too sure, especially if it’s a very huge Blog with thousands of posts, like Mashable.com , if you don’t want to mislead your Readers, the Best thing to do is have a RECENT POST feature on the blog.
They want to know what’s New, and the only way you can show them is using this Recent Post feature.
What To do: To have this on your blog, WordPress users can simply search and install the Plugin but on Blogger, goto your Layout > Add Gadget >> More gadgets >> Scroll Down till you find the Recent Post Gadget and Choose it.
See? I also have it on my side bar.
Conclusion:
Though,
there’re so many others features your blog can have, but this are the
most important FIVES i would recommend for a New Blog. If you have some
Questions or more to add to the list, you may drop us your Comments.
Meanwhile if you found this post helpful, Sharing with others isn’t a Bad idea 😉