1. header
2. navigation buttons
3. about
4. sidebar
5. contact us
6. post area
7. opt in box
8. category listing
9. affiliate ads

These are necessary to make your blog effective in marketing your business.

Let’s start with the header. It must be readable and have a simple but classy design. It must not be cluttered looking. The header also is a “branding” tool. It gives your visitor a “flavor” of your business and what it represents.

Navigation buttons should be easy to read and also not “cluttered” looking. One way of detracting from your blog is to have too many navigation buttons. Most “magazine” style blogs have around 20 navigation buttons. This gives visitors too much to think about on your blog and they will go elsewhere. So be frugal with navigation buttons.

The about page/navigation button is leftover from when blogs were personal in nature. The about page is still important, especially for small to medium businesses because they give a “down home” description of the business and some background of how it started and the featured products.

The sidebar is very important because it breaks up a “boring” design and offers many different widgets for the blog visitors to view.

Contact us is obvious. There has to be an easy way for a blog visitor to get hold of the blog owner and what better way than a simple contact form to fill out. The blog owner usually receives this contact information to their email inbox.

Post area is the lifeblood of the blog. Here is where the valuable content that serves the blog visitor and the search engines at the same time.

Opt in box is just as important as the post area. It is usually located in the upper right corner of the blog and solicits the blog visitor to enter their name and email information so the blog owner can keep in touch with the visitor. In most cases, it is used to give valuable content to the subscriber and opportunities to sell the subscriber on products and services to them.

Category listing is important because it summarizes at a glance, the kind of content within the posting area. It saves the blog visitor time to immediately find what they are looking for in your blog.

If you are interested in monetizing your blog beyond what your business provides at your physical location, you can add affiliate ads on your blog that advertises products and services from other companies that complement what you have. When the visitor clicks on your affiliate link and buys something off of the affiliate site, you make instant commissions.

So, you can see that all the elements listed above are important when designing or laying out a blog. Adding all these elements will guarantee success of your blog!

This year’s theme is “culture and technology” and it was a great topic to speak about. I enjoyed talking about how culture, whether Native American or any other culture can continue to evolve into something wonderful and useful in our current time that we live.

My talk involved getting the attendees to become aware of the advances that our technology has achieved and that the future of this technology is in their hands. Many of the attendees are in the age group 13 to 21 years old. They already are using technology in their lives….whether it is the “smart phone,” or desktop computer, or MP3 player, even the iPad. They are members of the most popular social network sites like Facebook and Twitter.

Technology should be fun and fulfilling to each individual. I am very fortunate to be able to discuss with the attendees how valuable a tool that technology has become.

“Moving forward, I wish the best of the Native Americans who participated and hope to see them develop into the technology leaders of tomorrow.”

What better way to raise your revenue with simple recontact with your current customers to either remind them of an upcoming sale you are having or introduction of a new product you have and give them first dibs at purchasing.

You are “leaving money on the table” if you are not regularly following up with your current customers. As marketing guru Jay Abraham said, “you are doing a disservice with your customers if you are not constantly staying in touch with them and selling them more of your products and services they truly deserve.”

Jay goes on to say that as a business owner, we have an obligation to our customers to sell them more products and services because we are their trusted advisor and that is the capacity in which we serve them. Pretty heavy material here! This article on Jay was written years ago but still rings true today.

Yes, it is important that we go after new customers on a regular basis, but we need to be aware of the current customer list. It could mean just making a phone call to say hello or send an email to remind them of your business.

Another thing that we work with our clients is going over the “non-active” customer list. How many of you have a very old customer list that you haven’t bothered contacting for months even years? Did you know you are losing money just by not “reactivating” these customers?

Here’s an experiment; send out an email blast to your “non-active” customer list with news of your latest product sale. End the email with asking if they want to stay on the list, you will give a substantial discount on that new product. If not, tell them that they can unsubscribe by clicking on the unsubscribe button at the bottom of the email, which will already be there since most reputable email autoresponder companies include this.

Even if you got a 4% return from subsribers wanting to take advantage of the discount and stay on your list, you just raised your revenue by quite a bit just by doing a simple task of sending out email to the non active list. What would that mean to your bottom line profits this year?

For autoresponder services that are excellent at helping you in this task we use Aweber. Check out this service below: