7 Blog Elements That Form First Impressions

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Do you know why Michelin uses a baby in their tire ads?

Solomon Asch is a psychologist who pioneered the study of impression formation. He conducted an experiment where a bunch of people were divided in 2 groups. Both the groups were asked one question.

Group A is asked:

John is envious, stubborn, critical, impulsive, industrious and intelligent. In general, how emotional do you think John is? (Circle your answer.)

Not emotional ~ 1 ~ 2 ~ 3 ~ 4 ~ 5 ~ 6 ~ 7 ~ 8 ~ 9 ~ Very emotional

Group B is asked:

Mike is intelligent, industrious, impulsive, critical, stubborn and envious. In general, how emotional do you think Mike is? (Circle your answer.)

Not emotional ~ 1 ~ 2 ~ 3 ~ 4 ~ 5 ~ 6 ~ 7 ~ 8 ~ 9 ~ Very emotional

The Results

Folks in group A marked John as a very emotional person. Most rated him as 7 or 8.

Folks in group B marked Mike as a not so emotional person. Most rated him as 3 or 4.

The Twist (if you haven’t found out already)

John and Mike - both were described using the same 6 characteristics! The only difference is that the order of the characteristics was reversed. The first characteristic for John is envious and the last one is intelligent. Where as the first characteristic for Mike is intelligent and the last is envious.

Because envious is an emotionally loaded characteristic, most people marked John as being emotional. And because intelligent is not emotionally loaded, most people marked Mike as not being emotional.

The first characteristic made all the difference!

The Power of the First Impression

Lead with your best foot forward. Because the first impression has a lasting effect on your readers.

People will make a snap decision about your blog in less than 4 seconds!

So you have to make a powerful first impression. Here are 7 elements that you should pay attention to improve the first impression your blog makes.

7 Blog Elements That Form First Impressions

1. Make sure your blog has a sharp colour combination.

2. Make sure you use good readable fonts.

3. Un-clutter your blog. Remove all the frivolous elements that don’t assist your blog readers.

4. Make sure the first screen of your blog looks fabulous. Work on your logo and header so that they match the emotion you want from your readers.

5. Spend more time on your headlines. Your headline will put the readers in the right frame of mind.

6. Use good looking images in your blog post. Because good images quickly create a positive mind frame.

7. Start your blog post with a bang. Don’t hide your main point in the middle of the post. Start with it.

3 Ways of Differentiating Your Blog

Chelm Justice for Blogging

Eons ago, there was a small town named Chelm somewhere in Europe. To bring order in the city, the people had elected an impartial judge. One day, filled with rage, the town cobbler killed one of his customers.

The cobbler was bought up in front of the judge who sentenced him to die by hanging. This was really bad news for the town. One townsman gained some courage to stand up and speak: “If Your Honor pleases, you have sentenced to death the town cobbler! He’s the only one we’ve got. If you hang him who will mend our shoes?”

a_?Who! Who?a_? cried all the other townsmen in Chelm together.

The judge thought for a while, nodded in agreement and reconsidered his verdict. a_?Good people of Chelm,a_? he said, a_?What you say is true. Since we have only one cobbler it would be a great wrong against the community to let him die. As there are two roofers in the town, let one of them be hanged instead!a_?

Action Summary:

• You have to differentiate your blog from other blogs. If you fail to do that, the public will never let your blog become famous. They will never fight for you. And when the time comes to remove clutter from their blog reading lists, you will be the first one to go. So focus on differentiating your blog.

Painless Differentiation

It doesn’t take a lot to differentiate your blog from the crowd. A little effort can take you a long way. Dennis Rodman differentiated himself from other basketball players by making just one simple change.

For years, Dennis Rodman was a first class basketball player putting up impressive rebounding numbers on the scorecard. But he didn’t receive much publicity and hardly any endorsement contracts. That all changed when he coloured his hair red. By being bold and different, he instantly stood out from the rest of his mates. And made a fortune for himself endorsing products.

Dennis Rodman: Before & After. Black boring hair hid him in the pack. Red exciting hair made him rich and famous!

3 Ways of Differentiating Your Blog

In an effort to prevent this post turning into a book, I’ll keep the bullet points brief. You should focus on just 3 things to differentiate your blog.

1. Blog Design

Your blog design creates your first impression amongst your readers. So if you are really serious about blogging, you shouldn’t go for a ready made theme that 100s of other bloggers are using. But instead, create or hire some one to create your own blog theme.

Step 1: Audit your competitor’s blog. See how their blog theme looks like.

Step 2: Then create a blog theme that looks different than theirs. You can come up with a unique theme by simply focusing on three main elements of your blog:

• Colours
• Layout
• Header/Logo

Eg: North X East blog on blogging has one of the best blog designs I’ve ever seen!

2. Content Chutzpah

Your blog content is divided in two parts. 1: Writing. 2: Supportive audio-visuals and images.

Differentiating your blog simply based on your writing is hard work. But you can do it by finding your own unique voice. Two tips to find your own voice is:

i. Exaggerate. You can only find your voice after you have experienced the extremes. Write a post with lots of adjectives. Write a post with lots of big words. Write a post with very unusual words in it. Try to write a poem. By experiencing these extremes, you will come to know what you are most comfortable with. And will create your own unique writing style. (Don’t publish your exaggerated posts if you don’t feel like it.)

ii. Read and emulate. I used to read the onion and then try to write an article in their style. I used to read Monday Morning Memo’s and immediately write my own blurb using their writing style. By emulating various masters, you’ll find your own voice.

Eg: Bloggrrl has a very unique voice of her own.

It is very hard to differentiate your blog simply based on your writing. But you can easily make use of snazzy audio-visual and images to differentiate your blog.

Eg: Gaping Void differentiated himself because of his cartoon cards

Eg: Kathy Sierra differentiated her blog by making cool use of pictures and graphs

3. Unique Selling Proposition (USP) Of Your Blog

What does your blog offer that no other blog offers?

Pizzas are made and sold since at least a few dozen decades. But Dominos could still sneak upon the market and take a huge pie out of it for themselves because they came up with a USP that no one else did. They offered something that no one else before them had offered: quick delivery.

How can you build up on your blog topic and offer something that no one else offers?

Eg: Chris Garrett has coined a new term “Authority Blogger” and created a USP for himself.

Make Your Blog Famous

In the comments section of this post, write down how you differentiate your blog. What do you do that makes you stand out? It could be based on the 3 differentiation points in the post above. Or it could be some other element that you focus on.

I’ll make a follow up post where I will feature your blog and how it differentiates itself!

Optimizing Your Blog Design Layout (Part-2)

In part-1 of Optimizing Your Blog Design, we saw why 3-column blog themes aren’t good for click through rates. And why you should go with 2-column blog themes.

In part-2, we will delve further into creating the perfect column layouts for your blog theme.

Question: Do you know why offline newspapers divide their pages into 4-6 columns?

Newspapers have been doing readability research since the past 120 years! And the research results have been unanimous.

1. Longer line lengths decrease the speed of reading.

2. They decrease readers’ comprehension as well.

3. And worst of all, the decrease readers’ enjoy-ability factor too.

Newspapers have found that any line that is longer than 3.6 inches in length reduces reader performance.

But why do longer lines reduce performance?

“The ideal line length for text layout is based on the the physiology of the human eye… At normal reading distance the arc of the visual field is only a few inches - about the width of a well-designed column of text, or about 12 words per line. Research shows that reading slows and retention rates fall as line length begins to exceed the ideal width, because the reader then needs to use the muscles of the eye and neck to track from the end of one line to the beginning of the next line. If the eye must traverse great distances on the page, the reader is easily lost and must hunt for the beginning of the next line. Quantitative studies show that moderate line lengths significantly increase the legibility of text.”

- Patrick J. Lynch and Sarah Horton

The optimal line length for newspapers is between 2 to 3 inches (depending on the font style and size.) But what about the length of text lines online?

Optimal Line Length For Blogs

In 2001, Dyson and Haselgrove conducted a research to determine which line length was the most effective for reading from screen. They gathered a bunch of students and tested them while they read comprehension and news paragraphs on the computer. And they found that

The best line length is 55 characters long!

Depending on the font style and size you use, your blog post column should fall between 50-70 characters in length. That is roughly 400-500 pixels in width.

Saying No To Fluid Column Width Themes

Many blog themes come with fluid width columns. Where the column width depends on the screen resolution and size. Designers like fluid column widths because they don’t leave a lot of white space at the sides.

But these fluid width themes aren’t a good idea because someone with high screen resolution will see very long text line lengths. Which reduces their comprehension as well as reading speed on your blog. So stick with fixed width themes. And improve your readers experience on your blog.

“Optimizing Your Blog Design” to be continued…

Benefits of Adding Category Menu to Blog Header

Yesterday, a campaign I had running with crazyegg.com came to an end.

Crazyegg is a tool that allows you to make your blog navigation better by telling you what people are clicking. It has a superb heatmap generation feature. Let me show you a cropped heatmap of just the header section of my blog.

The heatmap shows all the clicks made on the header.

Early readers may remember that 3 weeks back, this blog header just had the title in it. The categories menu was added later on.

Like most blogs, I had my Blog Category menu on the sidebar too. But I decided to move it to the header. And I’m glad I did that. Because:

11.47% of *All* Clicks Made on this Blog were Made on the Header!

Adding the blog category menu to the header has been a stroke of genius. As it helped me increase the “unique visitors : page views” ratio from “1 : 1.72″ to “1 : 2.1″. (Each unique visitor on average reads more than 2 pages on this blog.)

In normal language, readers now visit 15% more pages and spend more time on my blog because the category menu is in the header!

Action Summary:

• Signup for crazyegg.com to evaluate what your blog readers are clicking on.
• If you can, move your blog category menu to your header.

Optimizing Your Blog Design Layout (Part-1)

What does Jam have to do with Blog Designing? Read the post to find out…

Sheena Iyengar is a professor at University of Columbia and teaches a course on Organizational behavior. She once conducted a scientific research to gauge the effect choices have on people.

Iyengar set up a tasting booth with a variety of gourmet jams in the grocery store named Draeger’s in Menlo Park, California.

• One day, she displayed 6 varieties of jam in the booth.
• The next day she displayed 24 varieties of jam.

And then she counted the number of sales generated each day.

The Paradoxical Results

Most people would think that the more choices there are, the more people would buy. But Iyengar’s research proved otherwise.

• 30% of people, who stopped by the 6-jam booth, ended up buying one of the jams.
• While only 3% of people, who stopped by the 24-jam booth, ended up buying the jam.

Action Summary:

Don’t overwhelm your readers with a lot of options on your blog.

Don’t show them 23 different buttons of social bookmarking sites under your posts.

Don’t provide them with 299 links on the sidebar.

Reduce the options to improve the impact.

Saying No To Three Column Themes

Bloggers love three column themes. Because it provides them with space to put up all the goodies and widgets and plugins and sections. And show ads on top of that. But three-column themes usually kill your click-through rate. They overwhelm readers with a lot of choices. The result being: readers ignore the sidebar columns totally.

If you still want to go with the three-column theme, please make sure that your two narrow sidebars are not together. Make your wide content column separate both the sidebars.

But the best layout is a two column layout. Because it’ll force you to offer fewer choices and links to your readers. And hence, improve your click through rate.

Update: “Optimizing Your Blog Design” part-2 has been published…

Double Duty Business Cards

A week ago, I had new business cards made for this blog. But unlike most business cards, these cards aren’t boring. Most people won’t throw them away.

And why won’t they throw the business cards away?

Because these cards perform double duty. I’ve used both the front as well as the back side of the business cards.

1. One side works as all business cards are intended to work: it gives people contact details about me and this blog.
2. But the flip side is what keeps people hold onto the cards. Because there is an offer on the flip side for a free goodie!

You can take a look at them yourself:

Action Summary:

• Create double duty business cards for your own blog too. Use both the sides of the business cards.
• Offer a free report or a goodie or maybe even a coupon on the flip side of the business card. Something that prevents people from throwing the cards away. Something that su

Blog Author Vs Reader

If you’ve been visiting this blog regularly since past 25 days, you may have seen the constant changes to the blog theme. We have gone from a ready made theme to a custom theme with various features and functions.

The Problem With Designing a Blog Theme

What Readers Want:

• Good content without distraction.

What Bloggers Want The Readers To Do:

• Read the blog posts
• Navigate through the blog and read all my posts
• Subscribe to the RSS feed
• Forward the blog posts to various social websites
• Make comments
• Click on ads
• Buy me a beer
• Buy my products and services

All these to-do functions clutter the blog. Create distractions. Make the readers exit the blog. So I’ve been silently testing the best blog layout that optimizes readership as well as gets readers to perform all the various functions we bloggers want them to. Finding the balance hasn’t been easy. But I think we are 90% of the way there.

I’ll be revealing what you should do to create the most effective blog theme in my next post.

Colour Palette Generator

Yesterday, I spent some time designing the logo and the layout for this blog.

(Right now, I’ve uploaded the blog.txt theme. But its only temporary because it doesn’t have everything I need.)

I spent a lot more time than I should on picking up colours. No colour combination was good enough. I spent a lot of time with orange and black - but decided against it - because black layout with black text leaves a lot less colour on the blog.

Finally, I found this awsome tool that solved my colour problems in 2 minutes.

• I went to Steven DeGraeve’s “Color Palette Generator” tool
• Added a vibrant nature picture to it that I found from Google
• And the tool picked out the colours for me from the nature picture!

Here are the two colours that I picked out: