Here is a Case Study from Curata that show you how they redesigned their Blog for instant ROI (return on investment). This becomes a crucial considering the amount of time and money we put in our Blogs.. As you may consider as I do, My Blog is a business and it should be treated as such.
Curata goes on to list 4 things that you should look at to see if you need to redesign your Blog. Make sure you read the tips to see the obstacles that may occur if you redesign your blog.
And if you are looking to get Website Designs and and any other web work.. Wix has wonderful interface where you can do it yourself…
And Those of you who are not so techy, you can have someone do it for you at Fiverr.. I have gotten lot’s of work done for my Internet Business over at Fiverr… You should consider taking a look at Fiverr and what they have to offer. You will be surprised with the categories of work offered on Fiverr…. You can also take advantage of a 20% Discount on “ALL Work Done” when
you use this code: coupon code>>>> AFFX20 <<<<<
Enjoy your article below,
Raylon Williams
Why bother? Redesigning your blog should not only give it a sexy new look, it can improve everything from SEO to blog traffic to click-through rate. According to surveys by Akamai and Gomez.com, nearly half of web users expect a site to load in two seconds or less, and they tend to abandon a site that isn’t loaded within three seconds. Fifty two percent of users said that a bad mobile experience made them less likely to engage with a company. Seventy percent of consumers today learn about a company through their blog, rather than ads.
Business blogging is de rigueur now, and audiences decide a lot about a brand from its blog. So we saw a need for improvement. Two months after our redesigned blog launched, we’ve significantly increased blog traffic and time on page, faster load times and a decrease in bounce rate. (We’ll go into more detail on results later.) First though, we’ll walk through how we decided a blog redesign was the right call for Curata.
From blog traffic improvements to a better aesthetic, there are many reasons why you should or shouldn’t do a blog redesign. Here are the pros and cons we weighed before determining a blog overhaul was smart for Curata.
For reasons unknown, we hadn’t ever reached out to our blog subscriber list. While Curata’s blog had a subscription option, the list of subscribers had somehow never been emailed. We’d also never promoted the option to subscribe, or encouraged interested parties to do so. A relaunch was a great way to re-engage with this audience.
Looking at the pros and cons, we decided that with careful budgeting, time management, and an understanding of potential setbacks, the benefits far outweighed the drawbacks. So the Director of Content, Mitchell Hall, and VP of Marketing, Amber Stevens, developed a plan for redesigning our blog.
Here are the steps we took.
Our content director and marketing head set about establishing the necessary criteria for what we needed from the new blog. Here are some of the questions they asked when deciding on an agency:
Based on these questions, here’s the criteria Curata’s marketing team came up with for the agency that would design our blog:
From there, we pitched our reasons for the redesign, agency criteria, and goals to other stakeholders in the company. We wanted to make sure we weren’t leaving anything out. It’s important to keep other parties in the loop during this process. For us, the key parties outside of the marketing department were Curata’s CEO, Pawan Deshpande, and the head of engineering, Jeff Suarez.
A blog redesign is destined for failure absent a clear vision of what you want to achieve. So it’s important to figure out what the new blog should look like, its tone, and the functionality you want. There are a variety of exercises you can do to determine your blog’s voice. Here’s some we did:
Here’s what we came up with:
We wanted to strike a balance between corporate and playful by showcasing something unique/eccentric within the design/consumption experience.
Adjectives we felt describe the personality of Curata blog:
Once you’ve defined your blog’s personality, brainstorm with other stakeholders on how the redesign can better express it. Look at other blogs your audience likes to read, or that have an aesthetic you’d like to emulate. This will provide a clearer understanding of what the blog redesign means.
Curata’s key aims for our blog redesign were: A bolder design that made better use of white space. Using more and larger images. And most importantly, better displaying our content so that people could more easily find interesting things to read; stay on the site longer, and come back more often.
After making these decisions and developing a criteria for the agency we needed, we reached out to personal contacts at agencies, and narrowed our options down to two compelling bids at the same price. Ultimately we went with the agency that, in this case, had a little more flexibility with the final number: Fresh Tilled Soil. FTS were highly recommended, had a great creative portfolio, a knowledgeable team, the in-house skills to do custom development if needed, and they were flexible in meeting our needs with cost and timeline.
Schedule a meeting to go over what you want out of your relaunch from your agency. They should come back with several options for the new design. Here are some of the first design aesthetic options Curata was given:
We then scheduled a meeting with all internal stakeholders to go over the options and figure out what we liked and didn’t like.
Over several weeks of further iterations, we decided on a final color scheme, CTA, banner, home page layout layout, category page layout, and article page layout.
More users now access the web from mobile devices like smartphones and tablets than from desktops or notebooks. We knew our website didn’t offer a great experience for blog traffic coming from mobile. So we had to think about:
—Amongst many other factors. Mobile is an essential part of your design brief so the aesthetic and readability of your users’ mobile experience is as good as the desktop experience.
We continuously collaborated with Fresh Tilled Soil on a weekly basis to determine additional items we wanted addressed. There were constantly new action items we felt would be beneficial to our readers, as well as our content efforts. Here are some of our smaller goals, and the features we implemented to achieve them:
We wanted to draw attention to our relaunch, so we created a free giveaway campaign to increase blog subscriptions, drive more blog traffic, and re-engage existing subscribers. Then we used email, social, and a small budget for paid advertising to increase our blog subscribers by 35 percent. We also set up email notifications with a new design for when fresh blogs are posted.
A month after the relaunch, we looked at our blog’s performance to see how it was comparing against previous months. Here’s how we did:
If these results continue to compound over the coming months, our redesign can be considered a success. However, there are some things we’d do differently.
Post-launch, we worked with our vendor on additional issues we didn’t foresee and learned a few lessons. Some of these included:
Undertaking a blog redesign is a big step, and one to to be systematic about. We’re glad we went through this process, and very happy with the great job Fresh Tilled Soil did for us. We hope you’ve found this case study useful, and if you have any tips for undergoing a blog redesign, let us know in the comments. For more information on content marketing strategy, check out Curata’s eBook: The Content Marketing Pyramid: A Framework to Develop & Execute Your Content Marketing Strategy.
The post How We Redesigned Our Blog for Instant ROI [Case Study] appeared first on Curata Blog.
Source link of this Article
Best Regards,
Raylon Williams
What Is This Article About This article is about Free Online Software Tools for Small Businesses and a…
Content marketing and social media marketing are like muffins and cupcakes. You make them similarly,…
In today’s world, we now trust people like ourselves (or even random strangers on Yelp)…
"I just came across this email," began the message, a long overdue reply. But I…
Looking to Make Money Online Fast? List Building is One Sure Fire Way To Make…
I once had something that I thought I had taken care didn't happen. You see,…