The Six Blog Design Mistakes That Can Ruin Your Content Marketing Strategy

A successful blog is essential to good content strategy. It can teach people about your brand and help establish your content in the minds of potential customers. It can cause Google to regard you as an expert and send people to your site to answer their questions. And it can turn casual visitors into customers.

But even with the best content and distribution, your blog can still fail to gain traction. Why? Poor design. Mastering blog design can be complicated, but most design problems are pretty simple. So with that in mind, here are six design mistakes that can bring down even the best content marketing strategy.

Your Paragraphs are Too Long

Reading on the web is as much about scanning as it is about reading. Most people online are searching for information and they expect to find it fast. Burying that information in long paragraphs makes it that much harder to find.

The Solution: Chunk your paragraphs into bite-sized pieces and clearly mark them with descriptive headings so your readers can quickly find what they’re looking for.

Your Text is Too Small

Are you one of those people who likes to read small text? Or maybe you want a modern-looking blog with a lot of white space. Not all readers have perfect vision and even if they can read small text, they might need to strain to read it. That’s a losing battle when there’s an endless amount of content on the web.

The Solution: Increase font size. It might look enormous at first, but readers who aren’t straining their eyes are readers who are more likely to keep reading.

Your Text is Too Wide

Our thumbs are happy scrolling up and down on our cell phones all day, but left and right? Not so much. When the text on your blog is too wide for cell phone screens, readers are forced to scroll left and right as they search for the end of the line and then the beginning of the next. It’s enough to annoy your readers and get them to hit the back button or close your blog.

The Solution: Optimize your blog for mobile and make each line of text narrow enough to fit on screen without being too small to read (see above).

Your Formatting is Lacking

Another reason why readers might be turned off by your blog is its formatting. Not only will a lack of formatting make your blog look boring, it will also make it harder for readers to get a sense of what it is about and find what they’re looking for.

The Solution: Bring your blog to life and make it scannable by adding headings and subheadings, bulleted or numbered lists, and images and infographics.

Your Inline Content is Nonexistent

The web has always been about connections. In the past that meant simple links connecting websites, but nowadays, people expect to see videos and social media content right in your blog. Without it, your content will look as boring as a page in a 1,000-page book.

The Solution: Add relevant videos from YouTube, posts from Instagram and Facebook, and inline quotes to make your blog more connected and engaging.

Your Images are Bland

The last reason your blog could be tanking is because it lacks images, or if it does have them, they are so boring that they actually take away from the value of your blog.

The Solution: Using free stock images doesn’t mean that they have to be bland. Take the time to choose captivating photos that don’t scream “stock.”

Have additional content creation tips for company blogs? Let us know in the comments below!