BLOG DESIGN STRATEGIES

OVER THE SHOULDER

TRANSC R I P T I O N

Blog Design Strategies

Hey! What’s up, everybody?

Brian Dean here, and in this video I’m going to show you some blog design strategies.

So, these are basically ways that you can get more out of your blog and your blog content by tapping
into a few very simple, but very powerful, design strategies.

So, let’s just dive right in.

The first one I want to show you is to include a sign up form on your homepage.

In fact, you can make your entire homepage a signup form. To be clear, we talk all about building your
email list, and I show you exactly how to set all this up in a later module, but for now, one thing you
can try is adding a form to the above the fold area on your homepage.

So, for example, at Animalz, which is a content marketing site, they have a really nice looking, in my
opinion, above the fold area that pitches their newsletter and get and makes you want to sign up.

I have something similar to that on the Backlinko home page, and it converts really well.

Like I said, we’ll cover everything you need to know about building an email list in Module 4, including
details on how to set this up, but in the meantime, you can just add a form and a call to action on your
blog’s homepage, if you don’t have it, and that can increase your signups quite a bit, because most blogs
have, you know, a blog feed on their homepage. I used to have that, and I can tell you from experience
that this converts a lot better.

One thing that actually convinced me to try this was whenever I went to a social media site, signed out,
even something like Twitter, which is more open, you can just see tweets, you don’t need to be friends
with anybody, it’s a very closed homepage. Right? You basically have to sign up if you want to get ac-
cess to the content.

2
OVER THE SHOULDER TRANSCRIPTION BLOG DESIGN STRATEGIES

So, I realized that your blog can do something similar.

They can still get access to the content if they want, if they dig around for the actual blog page, but
it’s basically sign up or get out. So, if you’re comfortable doing that, it’s something worth trying.

You can also do a combination, like Animalz does. So, the entire above the fold area, almost perfectly,
is the signup form, and then you can scroll down and get access to that blog content, which is like
a best of both worlds situation.

Speaking of the blog page, so if that’s a little too extreme for you or if you have a forward slash blog,
or forward slash whatever, or a sub domain, blog.yoursite.com, and that’s where your content is, I also
recommend putting a form above the fold there. It doesn’t have to be as extreme, as big as on your
homepage, because if someone went to your homepage, saw a big sign up form, go to your blog, see
a giant sign up form, and you make it that hard for people to find your content, it probably does more
harm than good, even though you can get some subscriptions from doing that.

So, I recommend this kind of like small form that’s above the fold. It doesn’t have a very strong pitch,
just like sign up for traffic tips, but it’s enough that if someone’s interested, it makes it easy for them to
sign up.

Now, let’s get into the blog posts themselves.

So, those are just ways to get some email subscribers really quickly.

Another thing you can do just to make your blog post more readable is to use a big, clear font.

This sounds so simple and it sounds like an obvious piece of advice, but I’m surprised at how many
blogs that I visit where it’s just hard to read. In this day and age, as I like to say, hard to read equals
won’t read. So, if your content isn’t really easy to read, people are going to go somewhere else and read
something else.

So, this is from Groove HQ blog.

You can see that they use really big, serif font, which means they have ... It’s kind of hard to describe.
Basically, the font is more detailed. It has these little nuances that make the characters easier to read.

3
OVER THE SHOULDER TRANSCRIPTION BLOG DESIGN STRATEGIES

You don’t necessarily have to use that, sans serif fonts, as they’re called. They’re also pretty common,
a little bit more modern. But, anyway, the point is that the font is really big and easy to read.

If you want another example, you can go to medium.com or core.com.

They have both put a lot of time and effort into measuring readability of different fonts, and in my
opinion, the fonts look really nice and are easy to read.

Now speaking of fonts, it’s one thing to have it easy to read.

Big is good. Contrast is good.

So, black on white’s always better than black on gray, or black on red, or whatever. You also want to just
try big fonts. Big fonts just are so easy to read, and they don’t necessarily look bad, because so many
sites are doing it. It doesn’t have this jumbo look that it might have used to.

So, if you look at NerdWallet, you can see that the headline here is just massive. Right? This is probably
like 24 point font or something crazy like that, but it actually looks good. If you go to their sub-headers,
it’s the same story. These are giant sub-headers. Their font of their body font isn’t that big, but it’s clear
and nice, I think, but the subheaders are huge, because they know that most people reading content are
skimmers. Right?

Most people don’t necessarily read every single word of a post, but they can skim, get the big points
from the sub-headers, and then read each one if they want to learn more.

Moving on, we have a tip that I’m trying to put more into Backlinko’s design, and in fact we’re working
on a redesign now that will put this into practice, not as extreme as this.

That lesson is to use a simple design.

The less you have on your blog, the better. Less is more, so buttons, and banners, and awards, and
mentions, and all this stuff, and links to your social media, it’s just a distraction from your reader
from the main stuff, which is your content and then your secondary goal, which is to get them to sign
up for the email list.

In my opinion, James Clear at JamesClear.com has a fantastic blog design.

4
OVER THE SHOULDER TRANSCRIPTION BLOG DESIGN STRATEGIES

It’s as simple as you could imagine. It’s basically black on white, like this is his blog. It all looks like
this. You might say that’s too simple, and that’s fine. It’s to each his own. It’s your design. You should
make it how you want it to look.

But it’s just a good lesson to keep in mind that maybe you don’t want to go this extreme, but other
things you can take away from your blog that would still make it look good and help people focus on
the content more, like maybe removing stuff from your sidebar or removing the side bar all together,
this is stuff that we’re exploring right now.

The next strategy is to include lots of visuals and screenshots inside of your posts.

Now, depending on your niche, screenshots might not make sense, but you do want to include visuals
whenever possible.

I would recommend actually using more than you might think is normal. I’ve recently started adding
more than we used to. We used to have maybe like 10 or 20 for posts. Now, we have about 40 or 50.

The reason for that is just because people are just used to visual content now. You know, look at
a platform like Instagram. People are used to learning from visuals, watching videos.

Text is still big. There’s a place for text for sure, but it needs to be supplemented with lots of visuals
to help tell your story and help illustrate important concepts. SEO blog, so it’s a lot of screenshots of
rankings, and tools, and things like that, but depending on your niche, you may have different types
of screenshots.

But the important thing is, you can have a lot of texts, like here. There’s nothing wrong with just having
text for awhile, but you also want to sprinkle in lots of screenshots and try to add a little bit more than
you might expect, than you might be comfortable with at first.

If you’re like us, you’ll find the results are better. We’re getting better time on site, more engagement,
more of everything from adding more screenshots.

In addition to screenshots, you can also get things ... I don’t really have a good name for them yet, like
a cool name, so I call them custom visuals.

Basically what they are are visuals that we have a designer make that explain a concept.

5
OVER THE SHOULDER TRANSCRIPTION BLOG DESIGN STRATEGIES

So, for example, I could just explain Skyscraper Technique 1.0 and 2.0 in text. Right? But I decided
to make this simple, little visual to compare the two side-by-side. It looks nice. It’s cool. And it’s just
another visual you can add, and it doesn’t ... It’s not fancy, or expensive, or anything. You know, this
is basically like an image, an image, and a little table of text.

So, these are like tables, and visuals, and things, can make your content better. If it explains a concept
that people find tricky, they’ll actually use the visuals on their blog and link back to you, which is a nice
bonus.

So, the next design strategy is to have a unique look and feel to your blog.

So, when I first started Backlinko, I just basically looked at blogs that I liked and just sent them to
designers and was like: “Create something like this.”. There’s nothing wrong with that if you’re just
getting started, but eventually, if you want your blog to really grow, I recommend getting a unique look
and feel, like Backlinko right now I would say has a pretty unique look and feel. The colors, that layout,
the design, there are any other blogs that really look like it, so it has that instant feel of something
different.

Help scout, I should say is a great example of that.

I actually don’t even like their design. It’s way too cartoony for me and for B2B I think it just looks silly,
but it does have a unique feel. This kind of image, you don’t see it very often, and maybe that’s why they
do it, because it’s so rare in their B2B space that it stands out. But it’s very consistent, and it does look
unique to their blog.

So, the next strategy is kind of related to the visuals we talked about earlier, but to use stock photos,
and if you do use them, there are non-cheesy stock photo options out there.

So, a lot of industries, there aren’t screenshots or necessarily opportunities to include a bunch
of visuals, so they use stock photos, but the problem is these really cheesy looking stock photos from
like iStock Photo that’s just ... You know what I’m talking about, cheesy stock photos.

If you go to a site like Healthline, in my opinion, they have beautiful stock photos that just look real-
ly cool and different. Look at these like images. They’re stock photos. All right. They didn’t go to have
someone take these, but they look cool. They don’t look cheesy. In fact, they’re kind of beautiful.

6
OVER THE SHOULDER TRANSCRIPTION BLOG DESIGN STRATEGIES

So, I would recommend, if you do stock photos, spending a lot of time on making your stock photos
beautiful, and different, and non-cheesy.

There are tons of places to find stock photos. I don’t have one in particular to recommend. It’s more of
a guideline that when you look at a stock photo, be like: “Does this look like something from iStock
Photos from 2005, or does it look really modern, like someone posted on Instagram?”. If so, you probably
have a good stock photo.

Last but not least, we have another look and feel that I kind of like.

This one looks different than your usual blog layout. It’s three by three, instead of just single. It has also
non-cheesy stock photos. This is from Lattice.com, L-A-T-T-I-C-E. I just think it looks unique, like if you
landed here, you’re not going to mistake it for another blog.

Almost at the end here. One more strategy I want to show you is to humanize your blog.

So, if you’re a single person blog, it’s pretty easy to humanize your blog, but you can really crank it up
to 11 by putting your face all over the blog, if you’re the only author and it’s just your blog.

Marie Forleo’s a master at this. When you land on her site, not only does it look unique, but you can tell
it’s her site, like it just has her everywhere. Every picture is of her, and there’s nothing wrong with that.
It’s not being a narcissist to do this. It’s not saying you’re self-absorbed. It’s that if you want to stand out,
you need to show yourself on your blog.

It really is a great way, an easy way to help your blog stand out. You don’t want to look like some big,
faceless blog. You want to look like a person is behind it, and Marie Forleo does a great job at that.

Now, if you run a multi-author blog that has multiple people contributing, you can still do this to
a certain extent, obviously not as much.

But, for example, at NerdWallet and a lot of other blogs I’ve seen do this lately, instead of just like having
the name or not even having the name for the blog post, they actually have a picture and an author,
a link. You can go learn more about the person.

Sometimes even in the sidebar they’ll have, you know, “This is by June Casagrande.”, I guess you’d say,
and a little bio.

7
OVER THE SHOULDER TRANSCRIPTION BLOG DESIGN STRATEGIES

“She’s been interested in personal finance since 2001 ... a you can learn more about her.”. Adds that
little personal touch to your blog content.

As you can see here, you can do it even for a multi-author blog.

So, that’s it for a blog design strategies.

Like I said, in Module 4, we have more stuff on building your email list, but a lot of this stuff you can
implement today. It doesn’t have to be perfect. It can make your blog better, easier to read, and convert
more visitors into subscribers.

So, that’s it for this video, and I’ll see you in the next one.