During the past month or so, I have been reading a lot about The Alt Summit and have set a goal to attend one myself in 2014. I would really love to attend this years conference, but it just isn’t in the cards since I will have a 2 month old and the thought of focusing on anything but her at that time kind of scares me.
What I can do is improve my blog through The Alt Summit Channel. The Alt Summit Channel provides hour-long classes hosted by real bloggers and businesses that share their knowledge and expertise for improving your blog. Each hour-long class costs $15 and includes a question and answer period as well as the class itself. I’ve taken two courses in the past month and plan on taking a few more in the upcoming weeks.
Check out The Alt Summit Calendar for a full list of their events.
My first experience with The Alt Summit Channel was What Brands Think of Your Blog hosted by Natalie Bowman from Bing. Natalie was very knowledgeable and shared some of the first things that brands notice when they visit your blog. The first was appearance.
I was always told never judge a book by its cover, but brands totally do. They want an easy to navigate layout and to find content quickly. Brands are looking for your visual identity. Your Logo and Name, Color Palette, and Iconography are all important factors of those extremely important first impressions.
In January, I updated my header and have been working on sidebar banners. I love the color palette and iconography, but my logo and navigation need lots of work. I plan on updating the header/logo next January because I don’t want to change my layout so soon after the last update and I also want to take some time to build meaningful and useful content.
I feel that giving myself another 9 months to develop content will help me determine how I want the blog layout to be. Right now it’s a toss-up between a front page with photo links to different sections of my blog or sidebar buttons that take you to your desired destination with actual blog posts on the front page. It has been a struggle deciding on the layout so I’m going to take some time, draw it out, and really get the most bang for my buck when I sit down with a designer.
Also of great importance is the Design of your blog. Really understanding what goes above and below the fold of your page. You can think of the fold as a traditional newspaper layout. What are they showing you on the top of the front page when that paper is displayed at your local market and what makes you want to flip it over. Basically, it is the content on the top half of the paper that makes you want to read more. Putting your most important information above the fold and leaving advertisements to the bottom of the fold suggest that your content is king, not making money.
Of course, taking beautiful photographs and having great photos on your blog helps in the overall design. This is something I know from taking my own shop photos for the Whatsername Jewelry online store. Pictures really do sell a product and everyone wants to share pretty pictures on Pinterest, so do your best to take high quality photos to share on your blog and take a class if necessary.
That should be another goal of mine, take a photography class. Putting it on the list…and done. Another goal for 2014.
In addition to your logo, layout, and photography, brands also tend to avoid link farms, deals and coupon sites, and sites that have a banner over their header. You can read more about link farms here, but basically a link farm site does not produce any real content of their own. They simply link to other sites for their content and do not produce anything original on their own.
Sites that display a banner or advertisement over their header appear to be interested in one thing, making money. While it would be nice to make hundreds of dollars or thousands of dollars from sponsors or affiliates, content is really important and showing that your original content means more that a few dollars really speaks volumes so be careful when you embed ads into your posts or have pop-up ads that continually come up. It can be a real turn-off.
I thought I was going to be able to share all of what I learned in this class today, but I barely scratched the surface. I will continue this at a later time and work on improving my appearance until then.
Have you attended an Alt Summit Conference or taken an Alt Summit Channel Class? I’d love to know what you thought and hear your suggestions.