10 Simple Steps to Gaining Repeat Visitors and Customers Through Your Blog

One of the best ways to get repeat visitors to your blog is if it has a professional look and feel to it. When you see an "amateur" looking blog, is that one that you remember and make a point to visit again? Not really.

I know you might not be some professional blog designer, so you might be worried about being able to make your blog look good. Don't worry, it's not as hard as it seems to get a professional blog. I designed my own blog, and trust me, when I started, I was the farthest thing from a computer geek as you can get. I think I'm allergic to HTML!

Here are just a few tips that just about anyone can implement into their blog, not in any order of importance:

1. Create a nice opt-in form. If you just have one of the basic forms from Aweber without any tweaking, it can be a little plain and boring. Take a few minutes and play around with Aweber until you come across a design you like.

2. Keep away from screaming colors! Look at any blog that you would consider "professional" looking. What color schemes do they use? My all-time favorite blog is katiefreiling.com (well besides mine of course ;). Look at the colors that she uses! Her blog has a clean, professional feel. My favorite color is purple, and it almost hurt to have as little purple as I do on my blog, but I think overall, it has a professional feel to it!

3. Easy to follow layout. Many bloggers believe that the more "stuff" you have on a blog, the more professional it is. However, this just leads to more confusion for your visitor. Another mistake is when a blogger has 20 tabs to different pages. Most people won't take the time to read through that many tabs, and will ultimately not click on any of them! There's the famous acronym K.I.S.S., Keep It Simple, Stupid!

4. Put your signature at the bottom. Go to http://mylivesignature.com and you can get your own customized signature! I think this gives a more professional look because all big time businessmen put their signatures on their emails and letters, so we can do the same with our blogs!

5. Use cool pictures. I make it a point to find one relevant but interesting picture for all of my posts. This way, my posts aren't just boring lines of text! Plus when you post it on Facebook or something the picture shows up instead of just your descritption. This brings attention to your blog post. Just don't go overboard with the pictures because you don't want to distract visitors from the message itself. Remember, K.I.S.S.

6. Avoid typos. I know, I know, I have typos on my blog. That's because I SUCK at spelling! Overall, I think I do a pretty good job of keeping the typos to a minimum, and I know that my posts aren't full of them. The one thing that turns me off faster than anything else from someone's blog is when they have tons of nonsensical sentences, misspellings, and blatant punctuation errors. If your objection is that you're just not good at grammar, there are several ways around that. Write your post in a Word document first because it will correct your spelling and grammar errors for you! Then, have a friend proofread your post for you! You'll be able to keep the mistakes to a minimum.

7. Get a good header! This is the very first impression that people have of your blog when they come to visit so it needs to be good! I suggest having a nice picture of you, a headline that is usually your name, and a tagline that has something to do with what your blog is about. Don't make it too flashy, just professional and a little fun.

8. Careful with your sidebar. I've been doing a lot of thinking about this. Some blogs have sooooooooo much stuff in their sidebar that it's hard to tell what you want people to look at. I'm thinking of cutting mine down to the bare minimum. This is because you want people to focus on your contact me and opt-in form. I decided to make a tools and resources page instead to promote my best products, and cut down on the flashy banner ads.

9. Have good structure. This is important because it looks amazing when you have good structure. What I mean is that everything is clearly defined. You have a header, you have a sidebar, and you have each individual post with their own box. Make sure that you don't have your entire post listed, that is what the "more" bar is for.

10. Have a video next to your opt-in form. This video should do two things. Welcome people to your blog and tell them what they are going to get from it. And, more importantly, an invite to get your offer and what exactly are they going to get from it.

These are just a few of the simplest ideas that you can implement right away that will help transform your blog into a professional website! You'll have more return visitors and you'll have more credibility amongst your peers as well! If this all sounds crazy for you to do or you just don't have time to make your blog look professional,take a look at the resource box below.