New Blog Layouts Increase Page Views and Conversions


Following yesterday’s article about the new trend in blog layout and design, I want to point out that these new layouts can bring two tangible benefits: increased page views and increased conversions.

Some of the blogs leading the way with these new layouts are the business blogs and blogs that are run as businesses. One of these blogs is SmallFuel.com. It is not your typical blog design. For instance, SmallFuel lacks chronological archives by month or year. Instead, its archives are set up in categories — and not just any categories, but a grand total of just four carefully-selected categories.

fourcategories1.jpg

The site is remarkably uncluttered. That has the effect of making you pay close attention to those four categories. And there is a Store integrated into the site to sell the SmallFuel marketing system.

So I asked Mason Hipp, the President of SmallFuel Marketing, Inc., what his experience has been with his site and why he set it up the way he did:

We decided to integrate the blog so closely with the rest of our website for a number of reasons. Primarily, it eliminated the need for us to advertise our products on the blog. It also produces an entirely consistent image throughout the site. The design itself emphasizes important elements, and leaves out unimportant ones; for example, we don’t have monthly archives on our blog because they just aren’t useful enough to our visitors.

Since our customers include small businesses, the blog is where we start. The more value we can give them in the blog, the more likely they are to move on to one of our paid services.

One statistic we’ve found to be better than average as a result is our new visitor to subscriber conversion rate. Our blog converts about 2.6% of new visitors into subscribers, which we’ve found to be a lot better than the average of about 1.5%.

A statistic that I think highlights the benefits of easy and simple navigation is the average number of page views per visitor. Our blog visitors view an average of 3.3 pages/visit, which is significantly higher than most blogs (which tend to average about 2 pages/visit).

Another interesting topic of discussion is the fact that we’re running on ExpressionEngine, not WordPress. We made that decision because ExpressionEngine is much more extensible than WordPress, and allows us to run a store and full website on one platform (also as forums, a wiki, and many other integrations). While I would not recommend it for the HTML averse, for a web developer it is as close to perfection as I have found.

5 Comments ▼

Anita Campbell Anita Campbell is the Founder, CEO and Publisher of Small Business Trends and has been following trends in small businesses since 2003. She is the owner of BizSugar, a social media site for small businesses.

5 Reactions
  1. I do find the site to be really easy to navigate. I like the simplicity of only having to chhose between 4 categories. Tons of links on a site can get really confusing and makes me bounce quickly.

  2. That’s a pretty good setup to have people view the categories to check out your posts.

  3. I think I’m going to drop my monthly archives for the same reason. Where’s that average conversion data from though?

    BTW, the Carnival of the Capitalists is about to be posted.

  4. Thank you. this helped me a lot in my research on how to revamp my site. Got some work to do.