Does All That Blog Bling Serve Your Call to Action?
Identify your blog’s target audience, your mission statement, and your call to action and every other decision you make about your blog marketing strategy gets easier.
When you know exactly who you want to reach, what you want to teach them, and what you ultimately want them to do, then every other choice — for the blogger — can be expressed in simplified questions:
- “Does X support more Y?”
- “Will adding Z to my templates | my workflow | my blogging schedule impact more Y?”
Beware the impulse to tweak your templates too much.
Being busy is not necessarily being productive. Prioritizing should not be dependent on luck, hope, crossing-your-fingers, or some other time-wasting — “I don’t, just cuz” action step.
Outside your article content, look at every piece of code, every link, every button, every blurb, every graphic you add to your blog’s template — and ask yourself:
- “Why am I adding X?”
- “What does X enable?”
- “Why does X belong here, in this exact spot?”
The list of considerations/ value judgements could be infinite, and will be determined by your Mission and your Call to Action. If any of your answers are:
- “Cuz I can.”
- “Cuz it looks kinda nifty.”
- “Cuz other blogs have one.”
- “I couldn’t really tell ya…I don’t have a reason.”
Those are powerful indications that “said blog bling item X” is NOT a priority; it should be demoted on your To Do list — if not completely removed from your list of blogging goals.
Certainly, you should be asking yourself these kinds of questions about everything “extra” you place in your blog template. Your template designer has already asked a lot of these questions about basic layout and made good decisions for you.
Most well-designed out-of-the-box blog themes have nailed the most important ingredients — “kitchen sink sidebars” are created by YOUR overly-enthusiastic experimentation.
Clean out your kitchen sink sidebar and wash all the scraps down the garbage disposal. Then get back to the writing and commenting you KNOW will build your blog’s brand.
Why do you think my blogs are still so plain jane and NAKED? I’m a CSS expert and a graphic illustrator — but I’m a writer and a marketer FIRST.
Slade Roberson is an intuitive counselor, ATP®, professional blogger, and the author of Shift Your Spirits, Automatic Intuitive Response, and the PageCoach Problogging Tutorial Series. Slade on Blogging shares behind-the-screens internet marketing, self-publishing, and blogging strategies with other personal development writers, coaches, and healing arts practitioners.
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