Technology is bringing a lot of changes in the way people engage online. For bloggers, we see new trends developing in email marketing, web design, and content marketing. With visitors, we see a new search pattern developing, changing from general search phrases to more long tail keywords including LSI (latent semantic indexing). With blogging platforms like WordPress, it’s even easier to get a website up and running. I’ve put together a tutorial where I purchased a domain and setup a WordPress website in 4 minutes. However, these easy to setup blogging platforms DO NOT mean that you have to forget the main elements of a user friendly website.
More emphasis has been put on elements that produce the highest user engagement. It’s NOT enough that a visitor simply just visits your website and reads your content. You need to ensure they create some sort of conversions through social sharing, commenting, and purchasing your product.
Increase Infographics
We are at a point that people are looking for information quickly. They are NOT limited on resources so if visitors don’t find what they are looking for, they’ll leave, jumping to the next posts. The key is to get the information they are searching in front of them quickly, but producing the same quality as lengthy text content. There was a time images were used to allow people to understand the content better. However, now infographics are popping up everywhere and there’s a good reason why.
First, they are very easy to create, using tools like piktochart.com and https://infogr.am/ starting as low as $18/mo. With such a low price, people are actually taking advantage of these tools, creating more infographics than ever before. Neil Patel adds an infographic to his blog every 1/3 posts and they get shared by over 200 people on social networks. Infographics are a quick way to get the point across because you can pretty much divide different elements, easily adding graphs, text, charts, etc. Next, they tell a whole story and many people are ready to share them immediately. They look good within social networks and if you scroll to Pinterest.com, you’ll notice 90% of the content shared are infographics.
Going forward, start utilizing infographics to keep users engaged on your page. Help them find what they are looking for quickly.
Publish More Video
This trend started to really pick up in 2013 and will double going into 2016. The Internet is a great way to engage people all over the world. Whenever I publish anything on my blog, I have people from everywhere in the world visit my pages. However, the only thing challenging entire user engagement is the language barrier. Many people don’t speak or understand English as well as other parts of the world, especially in North America. However, adding videos is a great way to decrease the gap between people because it provides a complete different way to grasp the content. Videos are a great way to show people how to complete a task by having them follow through. Some of the best videos are “How-Toâ€, helping people solve a common problem.
Next, videos are also easily accessible as they can be added to your website and even YouTube.com. If your web server can’t handle the load of a large video, then pointing people to YouTube.com can still get your video in front of people.
Add Personalized Widgets
Many people make the mistake of adding universal widgets to their blog. These widgets are perfect for the common blogger but if you want to stand out and create your own identity, it’s time to start personalizing your widgets. Don’t just add a widget and let it do everything for you because you’ll only get 50% of the results this way. If you’re focusing on a very precise niche and have a marketing campaign in place, then make sure you tweak widgets so they display EXACTLY the type of relevant content you want in front of people. This is not difficult because many developers already see the trend taking place.
If you do a quick search within WordPress for widgets, you’ll notice many of them give you complete control, allowing you to add/remove categories, posts, pages, etc. This way, you can pin point your strategy through your widgets, making sure you keep user engagement as relative as possible.
More Emphasis on Mobile
Mobile usage is increasing each year and application installations are doubling. Both are a clear sign that people love to browse on their mobile phones. You have to make sure your website is mobile-friendly to avoid losing any visitors as a result of poor blog display on phones. WordPress has already taken the initiative by introducing mobile-friendly themes and plug-ins that can be added to existing websites, transforming them into a mobile friendly site. However, there are a few things to keep in mind when transforming your site…
First, focus on what’s important like removing clutter, easy navigation, and converting your opt-in forms to be mobile-friendly. Next, you should make sure web colors are tweaked for both desktop PC and mobile phones. Because of limited display space, it will be a good idea to remove banner ads that will create clutter for visitors skimming through your content.