With hundreds of thousands of different blogs on the Internet, it’s not easy being original – especially if you’re entering a popular niche. However, the following six guidelines will help you make the best of it and give you some ideas on how to stand out from the crowd.
Create a Unique Logo
A logo is the most attention-grabbing and recognizable aspect of any brand. It helps distinguish you from the rest of the competition, and it’s essentially a foundation that you’ll be building on.
A good logo should be fairly simple, one-of-a-kind, but it should still catch the eye of your website’s visitors. Humans are highly visual creatures, which means that a symbol is much more memorable to a person than anything that you might say or write out.
Furthermore, once you decide to start advertising, logos can be placed on pretty much anything – clothing, packaging, social media websites. They’re small, attractive, and extremely versatile.
Pick Colors/Fonts
After designing your logo, you need to decide what your website’s color palette is going to be. The rule of thumb is that it should contain only the colors already present on the logo itself. There shouldn’t be more than three of them since that can make the website look overly complex. Also, the font is supposed to be easy on the eyes, especially since you’re making a blog that has a lot of reading involved.
To get an idea of what your interface will look like, you can use Figma – a collaborative interface design tool that can build fully functional prototypes and help you fix any irregularities before launching your blog officially.
Use Canva To Design Visual Content
Graphs, pictures, gifs, and other types of visual content are much better at passing information than bland walls of text. Canva is an all-in-one platform meant to help you create attractive, useful content, whether you’re a professional or a beginner.
The drag-and-drop aspect of it is great if you’re looking to get things done without investing too much effort. A wide variety of pre-made templates are readily available and categorized into over 20 different groups, with which you can have an infographic or a GIF ready in a matter of seconds.
If you prefer a bit more customizability, don’t worry – that’s available too. In fact, Canva has a lot of similarities with Photoshop, which means that your creative side won’t be left unsatisfied.
Include Calls To Action
Writing intriguing content is only half the job done. You need to then motivate your leads (visitors) into moving forward with their actions in order to successfully convert them into a sale.
To be more successful with this, you need to include calls to action all throughout your articles. However, they have to be placed smartly as to not ruin the overall flow. If you’re discussing a specific problem in the main text, then your call to action should be a solution to the problem (ideally, something that you’re selling). This way, the reader will actually have a reason to do what you’re suggesting to them.
Most people place their calls to action at the top of the page and at the footer, but it’s up to you to fit it into the flow.
Investigate Your Competition
To become recognizable, you have to be better than other similar blogs out there. This means doing an in-depth analysis of the competitors, both on the surface of the blog and regarding their future plans. While the former is simple, the latter will have to be done with the help of a very powerful tool by the name of Spokeo.
To be able to use Spokeo at all, you’ll first have to acquire the competitor blog’s phone number or an email address. These pieces of contact information are usually left by the creators on a dedicated page on the blog, which is where you should look first.
Then, you’ll use either the reverse phone lookup or the email search functionality, after which Spokeo could give you a whole bunch of information – including the social media pages of the blog’s owner. It’s up to you to look through it, find useful posts, and design your strategy according to their plans.
Add Videos
Not unlike previously mentioned visual content, videos are an irreplaceable way to enhance the readers’ experience and break the monotony associated with bland walls of text. While they are more complex to create, they can show your full commitment. Videos can also be used to explain a difficult concept, in cases where words can’t be used to their true extent. You don’t have to film videos for every single article, but it can be very useful to include them every once in a while.
