To ensure that you succeed online, your web design must depict professionalism and it must be accessible by your market especially when they are actually searching for your services. This is the ultimate way of winning the trust of your market and growing your business.

So, how should you create your web design? Well, here are some powerful techniques that will allow you to create a winning web design.

Explore Your Competitors

Research and development is an important part of every business, because it helps you determine what steps you should take to effectively compete in today’s tough business world. It is also important when you are ready to create your business website.

You need to see how your competitors have created their presence online. The purpose of this exercise is not to copy anything, but rather to determine how you can come up with a better and more effective design.

Create Your Strategy

Once you go through the designs of several competitors, you now need to sit down with your designer and discuss how you can beat them in terms of professionalism and elegance. Your audience won’t be able to see you physically, so you will need to create an engaging atmosphere/design that will make them stay on your site.

If your target market will realize (after visiting your site) that they will get what they are looking for, they will surely spend some time on your site and eventually become your customers. Hence, quality design with quality content along with strategic placement of content will help you win the trust of your market.

Write and Organize Your Content Nicely

Now, as your content (along with the design) will help you win the trust of your market, you need to ensure that your content is powerful, benefit-oriented as well as visible. There is no need to hide your most powerful punch lines somewhere down. Make them visible to grab the attention of your market. Ensure that your copy can engage your visitors and eventually convert them into customers.

Create Simple Site Navigation

Make it easy for your visitors to browse your website. You must have come across dozens of websites where you felt lost due to excessive links all over the page. Don’t give the same feeling to your target audience because it can put anyone off. It’s not good to make it difficult for people to find your products. You need to make their lives as easy as possible.

Be Found Online with Your SEO-friendly Site

All the factors that we have discussed above will be useless, if your market is unable to find you. One of the best ways to reach your market is through search engines. If you reach them – right when they search for your products – your chances of converting them will increase significantly. So, ensure that you create an SEO friendly site to increase your visibility in search engines.

So, folks, based on experience, these are some powerful tips that will allow you to create an effective web design and grow your business.

It’s truly an art in that you can create something completely different from what I could create and we can both experience great success.

Today…let’s just be a community of friends.

Join and Share a Story from Your Blogging Journey

As you move forward on this journey, you’re going to go through a plethora of experiences. Some will be fun and some not so enjoyable. Some you’ll learn from and some you’ll simply be left bewildered. Some will leave you with a new friend and others will leave you reaching for a way to block someone from contacting you.

Let’s share our journeys together as I invite you to tell a story from your blogging experiences. It doesn’t matter if your story is funny, sad, or exciting. I want to invite you to use the comments section of this post to share and then to browse through the experiences of the other users and respond to their stories.

Let’s enjoy a group discussion. Let’s comment and respond to others who’ve commented. Today…let’s just be a community of friends.

I tried everything the gurus said I should try to make my blog more successful. And I mean I tried every idea out there, all at once. But it seemed to make little or no difference. I was trying to do so many things for my blog that my head was spinning.

Stop Everything and Truly Assess Your Efforts

Then I did myself a favor. I ceased all my frenzied activities and took a step back. Then I asked myself why I was making so little headway? Was I missing something?

I certainly was going in way too many directions at once to really be effective at anything. But my biggest problem was that I was focusing on the wrong thing. I sensed I needed a new focus.

I stepped back and looked at my blog with a dispassionate eye. Suddenly I had an epiphany. It’s not my blog, not really. It belongs to my audience, to the readers. Well duh? I knew that. But somehow it wasn’t translating into how I was trying to create a more successful blog.

I changed horses in mid-stream, I completely changed my tactics. I took some time to get creative and bring my efforts home. I stopped asking myself what I needed to do to create a successful blog. I formulated a new guiding question: What could I do to make my blog better for my readers?

My new mission in life was to make my blog as user-friendly and interactive as possible. After several months of creative experimentation, I’m finally seeing a payoff. More unique visitors, more visitors coming from search engines, more commenting, readers who stay longer which results in a lower bounce rate.

How does this benefit my potential readers?

It took time but it wasn’t really difficult to achieve. Now all my blog related activities are based on “How does this benefit my reader or potential readers?”

Here’s how it translated into action. First I took great pains to make it very easy for my readers to find what they wanted. The top section of my blog now includes:

• A clearly visible navigation menu on all pages.
• A List of the 5 most recent post titles.
• A drop-down menu for browsing blog categories.
• A search box for finding posts on their desired topics.
• Access to subscriptions via RSS reader or email.
• An invitation to follow me on Twitter.
• And a featured items section where I feature my readers blogs.

I feature a minimum of 3 bloggers on the top of my blog every month: my current blog carnival host, my top commentator for the previous month and my top Entrecard dropper for the previous month. There’s even a fourth spot that I can use for whatever I want.

All these things were a great start, but I felt I needed to do more. How could I make them a part of my blog and not just merely spectators.

I put my thinking cap on and here’s what I came up with:

• A monthly Blog Carnival that readers could host and or contribute to.
• A guest posting page with a form for submitting guest posts.
• A page with a form for suggesting topics and getting blog help.

Not only are my readers getting more involved, but I’m having a blast. It’s fun getting to know them and so rewarding to help them with their blog problems or craft a post from their suggestions. My blog is now a group effort.

Going the Extra Mile…Make it Personal

But I didn’t stop there, I also installed some useful plugins:

• KeywordLuv and CommentLuv to encourage and reward readers for commenting
• Subscribe to comments plugin so readers could follow commenting conversations.
• Top commentators plugin on the homepage with a dofollow link back to their blogs.

Recently I began using Twitter to focus on potential readers and their needs. Now I search for tweets from bloggers who have problems, blog issues and questions. Then I research until I find the answer they need and tweet it to them. I’m happy to say that I’m seeing more Twitter followers and it’s good to really be able to help.

Lastly, I decided to add a personal touch to networking with others in my niche. I visit and comment on colleagues’ blogs. I share and promote their posts and special projects whenever I can. I regularly link back to them in posts that I write. I even send them guest posts already written and ready to go . No one yet has refused one.

Now I’m a part of a very caring and supportive group of colleagues. Who knew there were so many amazingly giving people online? Especially surprising when they are suppose to be my competition!

Well there you have it. It certainly is amazing what a little creative user-centric thinking can achieve. I started getting more of what I wanted when I focused on what I could give instead. Could this be the Golden Rule of blogging? And all because I changed horses in mid-stream.

Well, that is all fine and well. Probloggers often have a lot of to say, most of their advice are really, really good tips.

However, I would actually argue against the most common advice out there, an advice that’s even featured as a blog article here on SiteSketch101 – to have your one and only niche!

Hmm, that sounds odd. Why is that such a bad advice?

Oh, don’t get me wrong. Having your own niche does provide for a stability that’s important, especially in the beginning when you’re trying to establish yourself in the blogosphere. To get readers to come back, it’s important to have articles that your targeted audience will find interesting.

On my own blog, my niche is simple and easy: web design. Articles about design, programming and social networks. A designer that stumbles upon my blog and subscribes knows exactly what he’s going to get.

But there is also a fine line between stability and predictability. My blog actually has a second niche – music! Occasionally I want to talk about my second favorite subject, which I am just as passionate about as web design.

Allow Your Readers to Rest With A Nice Intermission

Do you know what one of my readers called those articles? Intermissions. And that is a GREAT way to describe it! It breaks up the flow a little, allowing the reader some restroom from the usual slaughter of nerdy computer stuff.

You can even expand on this a little bit more, perhaps by making unexpected cross-posts. One good example of this is when I wrote a post about how you can use music effectively while working.

Finding your audience and your niche is important. But don’t feel like you have to be restricted to just that, especially if you’re struggling to find topics to talk about. Branch out a little! I’m sure you have other interests. And perhaps you might even haul in a bigger fish – like music nerds with an interest in programming.

Every time I go outside, no matter what time of day it is, no matter what I do, I can set a timer for about five minutes – by the time it rings, you can be sure to find me swatting a swarm of irritating mosquitoes.

What’s crazier, is that I’m the only one that they seem to attack. So while everyone else is out enjoying the sunshine, I’m jumping up every five seconds and slapping myself to death like a psycho while no one else seems to get bit at all.  Everyone’s got their spoons ready just in case my seizure-like movements threaten to make me swallow my tongue.

It’s becoming a bit of a joke that’s not funny – No one else gets bit because I’m the mosquitoes’ absolute favorite. When I’m around no one else has to use any OFF because they are so drawn to me.  Yeah, that’s great!

Then one day, as I was nursing my wounds with Benadryl, I had a thought – wouldn’t it be great if readers felt the same way about my blog.  It wouldn’t matter if there were thousands of others like it, there would be something special about my blog that draws them to it like mosquitoes to my skin.

Then it dawned on me how to attract readers!

I could get the very same response on my blog if I presented myself as a trustworthy, real and appealing person.  I could do that just by being myself.  It’s my unique body chemistry that draws mosquitoes to only me – in the same way, I could use my unique personality, personal experiences and my fresh perspective to do the same with my blog to attract readers by the masses.

The great news, is that you can do this too, by honing in on what makes you unique and then doing that on purpose when you write for your blog. Finally, all those weird qualities and quirky habits of mine can be used to my advantage.  Who knew?

The biggest asset to attract readers to your blog is YOU!

In addition to allowing your personality to shine through on your blog, try these other tips for attracting readers to your blog:

• Get a unique, well-designed theme
• Write great content that is aimed at helping others
• Network with influential bloggers
• Treat your readers like royalty (Even if you only have a few. Be sure to respond to comments and interact with them.)

Are you using your unique abilities and letting your greatest qualities shine through on your blog? I’d love to hear how you attract readers to your blog – what other tips could we add here?

I’ll probably fail on that last point but that’s because most of you can’t seem to find the right answer to this simple question: Do you want the truth or do you want to feel good? Successful blogging demands that you embrace the truth.

Respectful Disagreements Allow Truth to Flourish

I love the comment section of this blog just as you probably love the comment section on your blog. On a blog like this one, I’m confronted with a plethora of comments all ranging in quality and relevancy. Some comments are extremely well thought out and really get the mind moving forward on a subject. Some are absolutely ridiculous and I’m left wondering if the comment author even took the time to read the article. Still others are from intelligent people yet they’re expressing a view that I strongly disagree with.

I like those comments that express views with which I disagree because they create a platform for open dialogue with two sides of an issue being promoted. Today we’re going to grab a comment from a very good friend of mine…a comment that I strongly disagree with and we’re going to discuss this together as a group.

Geoff Crane, the author at Paper Cut Edge, asserts that one of the most powerful keys to successful blogging is sincerity. Let’s establish a foundation for today’s conversation by looking at Geoff’s comment.

I don’t know about others, but from my perspective blogging has to be something you do because you love to do it…If the desired end is solely to make money I think the blog will find itself stunted. People are pretty savvy these days and can see through the insincerity…You become influential because your message is worth spreading…that implies that the message must be motivated from itself rather than something base.
~ Taken from Geoff Crane’s comment on Your Mindset is but a Drop in the Ocean

I whole-heartedly agree with Geoff that in the pursuit of successful blogging “you become influential because your message is worth spreading” but I also ardently disagree with the final conclusion that the motivation behind your message must be solely based on a sincere desire to promote that message.

As the Joker put it, “If you’re good at something, never do it for free.”

Successful Blogging Demands the Hard Truth

People naturally desire feel-good answers. Instead of looking at the hard truth and the tactics that will really propel us onward to a more successful blogging experience, we seem to naturally gravitate toward the ideas that seem to jive with our good set of morals. I’m certainly not promoting anything immoral but just because something sounds like it’s the polite approach to something doesn’t mean that it’s the most effective.

It’s easier to justify failure when you hide behind a feel-good, redefined version of successful blogging. Far too often I hear people making statements like, “I don’t care how many readers I have. I don’t care how much money I make. I’m focused on building a small community at my blog.” That mindset is sickening. You can build readership, make money and have a community. Stop pretending that one of those goals will block the others. This is nothing more than a narrow-minded excuse for failure.

As I pointed out in my last article, you’re currently competing against over one hundred million other blogs. If you’re not at the top of your game, you and your blog are going to be nothing more  than a statistic. Blogging success requires something powerful to gather a real audience.

Successful blogging demands education, entertainment, and engagement….in that order. Any one of those ingredients is terrific but if you can learn to massively employ all three, you’ll quickly climb to the top of the food chain. Most bloggers focus a lot on engagement, a little on entertainment and nothing on education. In other words, most bloggers have it backwards.

The Envato Network is Built on Rockin’ Content

As I’ve searched the across the internet searching for the most successful blogs, I’ve noticed a trend. Those that are truly making bank online aren’t the ones that are just spewing opinions and engaging with their audience. They’re the ones that are providing information that you can’t seem to get anywhere else.

The Envato Network sports several blogs that are currently making $10,000 – $15,000 per month just in advertising…plus they offer premium memberships and other services. Check out the ad listing page for just one of their blogs: psd.tutsplus.com on BuySellAds.com. But if you were to stop by their blogs it would be for only one reason…to get the information they provide. Now that’s an example of successful blogging!

Nobody thinks of Envato as the network of sincere, engaging authors. They think of them as the go-to place to find the absolute best in tutorials, guides, and resources for the topics that their blogs cover. I’m advocating that we learn from their example. Stop chasing teddy bears and lollipops and start learning, studying and becoming the expert in your field that your community is really looking for.

Sincere, Uninformed Opinions are Less than Useless

In the online world, opinions are becoming of less and less value and that’s why we should be providing people with facts, statistics, information, documentation, quotes, etc…and not just uninformed opinions.

An opinion that is developed by a person who has no clue about the subject they are talking about isn’t worth hearing. Consider the following conversation:

Person 1: “How about those Chicago Bears? They did great this week.”

Person 2: “Yeah and the Chicago Cubs did well during their season this year.”

Person 3: “Wow, guys. That’s great. I really care about the wildlife in Chicago also.”

Person 3 then went on to start a sports blog and he spends his time wondering why he can’t build his readership.

Group Discussion

Let’s flesh this out together as a group. Am I being harsh? Perhaps. Or maybe I’m the one demonstating true sincerity because rather than spoon-feeding you the same over-promoted and underperforming concepts that are being spewed across the web, I’m risking offending you and losing you as a reader and I’m challenging you to read, study, develop your writing skills, and truly grow as a blogger and as a person. I’m challenging you to engage in a relentless pursuit of successful blogging.

If you take nothing else away from this article, remember these three words in this order: Blogging success demands education, entertainment, and engagement.

According to Blog Pulse, there are over one hundred forty-five million blogs in the world today.

That number causes me to make two observations. First, there’s no way they have any actual idea how many blogs there are. You simply can’t count 145,000,000 blogs. Sorry. You just can’t. Second, there a huge number of blogs in the world. Enough for them to estimate 145,000,000.

Are you seeing the big picture?

So then I have to ask you this question. You’re a blogger. You want to be a professional blogger, right? So that means that you probably have a broad knowledge of a lot of those blogs.

So how many are you familiar with? Would you say you’ve viewed 10% of them? That’s only about 14.5 million blogs. You don’t read that many? Okay. I can believe that. How about 1% of them? 1.5 million blogs? Surely you’re familiar with 1%. No?

We could continue to drag through this mental exercise and although it’s not entirely educational it can be transformational. It’s incredibly important for us to transform our mindsets to really take in the global perspective that is the blogosphere. There are 145,000,000 blogs in the world and even the most ardent blog readers are only familiar with 1,000 or so. That’s an incredibly small fraction of the whole. It’s something like 0.0068965%. It’s incredibly small.

What’s my point? Simple. If you’re a blogger, then you’re in a business where you’re competing against 145,000,000 others in a realm where less than a fraction of a percent of your potential audience will ever even find your blog…let alone enjoy it and return to it in the future.

Depressing? If you’re weak, it can be. Sometimes, though, it’s useful to be slapped in the face with a strong dose of the truth.

Two shoe salesmen were dropped on an island full of  natives. The first called home and a requested to leave since nobody there wore shoes. The second man called headquarters and told them to ship more shoes as fast as they can since everyone here needs a pair! Which salesman are you?

Your Mindset is but a Drop in the Ocean

Too many of you are approaching blogging from a totally distorted perspective. You honestly think that you’re going to make millions of dollars by simply grabbing a free or incredibly inexpensive theme, writing a few times a week and following all the ‘how to blog’ tips that you can find. Yeah…you and 145 million others.

We’re standing on the edge of the Atlantic ocean and challenging each other to see who can jump across it. You run and jump and land 10 feet from the dock. I laugh and assure you that I can jump across and pale your efforts. I run and launch my body 11 feet from the dock destroying your attempt but still coming nowhere near the thousand miles it takes to jump across the vast ocean.

We sit and discuss our techniques and work to improve our skills to gain an extra foot or two the whole time failing to realize that our efforts aren’t accomplishing even a fraction of the task before us. Both of our efforts are but a drop in the ocean.

You chase down articles like The 15 Best WordPress Plugins to use in 2010, 10 Tips to an Awesome, Eye-Jerking Post Title, 10 Powerful SEO Tips for WordPress Users. Articles like these are the perfect link-bait. They get retweeted, thumbed-up on StumbleUpon, Dugg, and voted up on Reddit. They bring in massive trackbacks. In fact, there are over 60 trackbacks combined on the three articles that I mentioned above.

Those articles that clearly define the blogging process in simple, step-by-step lessons are great for driving traffic and grabbing a little bit of extra Adsense revenue  at the end of the month

…but in the greater scheme of blogging, they’re worthless.

I’ll continue to write them because I would have to start hating money not to write them and they are moderately useful for beginners and for people searching for some of these subjects on Google.

Let’s be realistic though. These articles aren’t going to transform your blog into the mythical and coveted six-figure blog. In fact, they’re probably not even going to get you very close. They’re going to leave you staring at your $3.28 in Adsense revenue that you earned last month wondering what you did wrong.

You’re chasing them because your mindset is crippled. I think that if I took your brain and threw it on the edge of a razor blade then it would be comparable to rolling a marble across a four-lane highway. Wake up, friends, and see the big picture!

The Transformation Begins with You… Not Your Blog

If you look at the description on my Twitter profile, you’ll find that it begins with this simple concept that the entire world seems to misunderstand, “The transformation begins with you…”

You’re not going to make a powerful and influential blog by developing a powerful and influential blog but rather by becoming a powerful and influential blogger.
(And yes, I just used powerful and influential four times in this short paragraph.)

Pay attention to what I’m saying here. I’m not challenging you to transform your blog into something that people want to read. I’m challenging you to transform yourself into a blogger that people want to follow.

You’ve got to be the person who is worth more attention than your millions of competitors. You’ve got to be the person who stands apart from the crowd. As I’ve already mentioned, you’re not going to do that by grabbing up a free template and writing a few times a week.

So now let’s hash it out as a group.  Where do we go from here?

I say it’s laughable because the way they approach that cover story seems to be completely wrong. They try to claim that online search is slowing, but it seems that the opposite is true. In fact, how many of you have Google set as your homepage? Beyond that, isn’t it worth noting that almost all of Google’s income is generated from Ad sales via their Adwords and Adsense programs.

In fact, last quarter they profited over 2.5 Billions dollars giving them an effective annual profit of over 10 billion dollars. According to Business Insider, they currently have $27 Billion in the bank right now. Their profit is growing. Their ad sales are growing… all in the midst of a national…err…global recession. Imagine how they’ll be doing when the economy starts ticking higher.

The truth is that Google is innovative and we should be learning from them. They started out as a search engine and have developed into the GE of the online world. They’re now a conglomerate providing search engine services, advertising, online word processing, email,  shopping, blogging, rss feed processing, online library services, and much more. This company is constantly reinventing the wheel and developing new ways to accomplish new tasks.

I’ve always believed in paying cash for my vehicles. I really don’t enjoy being tied down to debt, but when Google launched their IPO, I was on the edge of taking out the biggest loan I could get against my vehicle and dumping it all into Google’s stock. I probably could have gotten about $10,000 on it. They launched their stock at $80 per share and now it’s been floating between $400 and $600. Why didn’t I just risk it all.

Google is innovative and they’re going to be around for a while. They’ve got what it takes to adapt to the changing online climate. The question is…do you?

Viva la Google.

… Maybe now I should open the magazine and see what they have to say in the article.

The power to promote ideas, websites, blog articles and products has always depended on the power of your network. The more friends you have sharing your material, the stronger your promotional efforts will be. The key across every social media platform has always been to connect with others and to help each other to promote their ideas.

As a part of the Dagaloo community, you’ve just exploded your network of friends. Instead of chasing people one at a time to develop these mutual sharing relationships, you can now kick start that process in a community devoted to intense social sharing.

Here’s the basic concept at the heart of this program: help another user by tweeting out a link to their content and in return another user will tweet out a link to your content.

Of course, there are a few more factors to it than just that as we have to work to eliminate spam and to reward people according to their actual influence on Twitter but at the basic core that’s it: share and be shared.

We limit tweets to only 1 tweet per 90 seconds so hopefully as you browse the site, you’ll take the time to find content that you’re truly impressed with to share with others. We also reward people with points based on their Klout.com score so the more that you take the time to engage with your friends and promote items that you truly believe in.

It is very important that you must have positive attitude while learning new things and follow few tips which will surely help you to improve as a blogger and keep you away from failures.

5 Tips to Learn Effectively From Professional Bloggers

Select your mentor:
You will come across lots of professional bloggers, but it’s up to you whom you want to make your mentor. Make sure that you select your mentor who works ethically and passionate about blogging. Selecting a professional blogger and following him should be done effectively because it may directly affect your blogging career.

Know what you want to learn:
Unless you are not clear what you want from your blogging career, you can’t expect from others to help you. Thus instead of creating confusions, make sure that you make yourself clear about what kind of help you are looking from professional bloggers or what things you want to learn from them to build your blogging career.

Apply the tips:
Professional bloggers always keep on giving useful blogging tips either through their articles or on social networking websites. So, try to read such useful stuffs posted by professional bloggers and implement them as soon as possible. If you will just keep on asking for tips from professional bloggers and don’t apply those tips, even professional bloggers will stop giving you tips.

Take feedbacks positively:
While learning new things, it’s important that to prepare yourself mentally that you will get both positive and negative comments. Thus while giving tips and helping you with blogging stuffs, professional bloggers might give negative comment/feedbacks to improve you. Take those comments positively and avoid doing same mistake again.

Build relationship:
Make sure to show gratitude to professional bloggers who help you to learn new things. You can do this by sending them a mail or just say thanks through social networking websites. Even you can help them whenever required, this will help you to build a healthy relationship with professional bloggers.

You can learn from more than one professional bloggers but learning will only be effective when you start applying given tips in your blogging career. Professional bloggers are more like teachers, they will explain you and give you homework and then see the results. Thus, try to give best results to them.

I am sure you would be having few more tips which will help us in learning effectively from professional bloggers. Do share your views with us.