- [Neil] Hey everyone, it's Neil Patel,
and today, I'm going to go over the ideal blog layout.
(upbeat music)
Now, before we get started,
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Now, many of you have a blog, you have a website,
you're writing content, but what's the ideal layout?
What you'll find is if you don't have the ideal layout,
sure, you can still get traffic,
but you won't get any conversions.
So I'm going to break down the ideal blog layout.
And let's first start with a blog post page.
So if you notice here with my blog post page,
I keep it really simple.
Some people like a whole page of just text and no sidebar,
but I would not recommend that
because if you do that, what you'll find is
you won't get as many conversions and sales or leads.
So the first thing you'll notice
is I have a scrolling bar that pops up at the top
and as you scroll, it sticks with you,
this is a conversion element.
And you can use hellobar.com
to do something similar for your website,
it's free to get started, and once you're on Hello Bar,
you can end up creating your own top bar,
you can have it look very simplistic, or you can have it
look more advanced like mine and more custom.
So I would recommend that you have a top bar.
Your top bar could collect a lead, collect an email,
could push a discount or offer
or push people to subscribe to your social channels,
or it could just push people into, you know,
it could just push people into a discount or a giveaway
or anything that you're doing like a Black Friday promo
if, you know, it's during the holiday time
or anything like that.
The next thing I would recommend
to do in your blog is always have a sidebar
because it gives you more call to action areas.
I would recommend a call to action on the top right,
that could be subscribing to your newsletter.
you can do that through tools like Hello Bar.
I would recommend pushing a product, pushing a service,
collecting an email, those are all options.
Then I would recommend the about section,
about you, about your company, if it's not a personal blog
and it's more of a corporate blog, that's fine too,
it could be about your corporation,
and then you all want to have a search bar
because you'll find a lot of people
search on your blog, just looking for content.
Then I would recommend another call to action,
to drive people to a product, service,
and when you're seeing these call to actions in my sidebar,
you'll notice that they're not exactly the same,
you'll notice that this one is a little bit
different than this one right here,
and if you scroll down, it's a little bit different
than the one on the very bottom.
The reason they're a little bit different
is you want to give multiple opportunities
for someone to convert, if you keep showing them
the same thing over and over again,
with the same exact messaging, it won't always convert,
hence you need to rotate it up.
So with the sidebar, then you got your next image,
the next thing I'd recommend doing is linking to your best,
most detailed posts that are getting traffic.
Within six months of doing this,
I know that sounds like a long time, but it really isn't,
you'll notice that these pages get more internal links,
and within six months they'll start ranking higher as well.
I do that as well with other areas too like tools,
and then I have another call to action
that scrolls with the user, as they're continually reading,
that way, it sticks there and they're more likely to use it.
You'll also notice that my social icons
scroll with the user, I think that's great,
and the reason that's great is by doing that,
you'll get more social shares.
You'll also notice this thing on the bottom left,
and you're probably like "What the heck is that?"
It's accessibility, and this allows me
to make sure that my website is compatible
for people who may be disabled or have hearing impairment,
and I get this through AudioEye,
and then the other thing that you'll notice too
is throughout my content,
I always start my post with the image,
it makes it clean, simple, I have breadcrumbs as well,
and then as you scroll down at the introductory paragraph,
I'll embed videos when it makes sense,
and then the other thing that I end up doing as well is
I may link out to subsections within the article,
I'll use headings that makes it easier to understand images,
to describe what I'm trying to do,
and then at the very bottom, as you scroll,
you'll see a few things, and one of them being a conclusion,
this post is quite long,
so it's going to take a little bit to scroll to the bottom.
I should have just used the side navigation bar.
I think I'm almost there though.
I should be step 13, and I'm still scrolling,
wow, all right.
All right, so you see here, conclusion as a heading,
I like wrapping up all my posts with a conclusion
because in many cases, people scroll to the bottom,
read the conclusion, then they scroll back up.
And then the other thing that you'll notice
is I have a comment section, so that's important as well.
And that's my overall blog layout, it works extremely well,
you can consider copying mine,
and then on the main blog page,
what you'll find is I have this little dropdown,
it's one of the most clicked areas
where it says I want to learn about,
and it has the list of my categories
because no one really clicks on categories,
but the moment you put it like this,
and then someone could be like,
"Oh, I want to learn about paid ads."
And the content will shift to that.
"Oh, I want to learn about SEO."
And the content will shift to that.
You'll also notice right here,
this one always stays still, why?
Because it's a call to action that helps me monetize,
it helps me generate leads.
So in your main blog page, I would recommend that,
and you can just stack them up
or you can have all your posts
and you can still link on your right sidebar, up to you.
You can have the pagination at the bottom,
some people do that, I do the infinite scroll.
It doesn't make too much of a difference
on what route you end up choosing,
but that's generally how I do my overall blog layout,
it works really well.
One other thing that you can consider doing that I do
is I use one of these breadcrumbs,
you know, you make categories so people can click on them
and then they can find all the posts
related to that subject as well,
but that's my overall blog layout,
and feel free and copy mine, it's really effective
for driving conversions for B to B, B to C,
this will work no matter what kind of blog you have,
and it also works really well
for getting more Google traffic.
If you have any questions, leave a comment below
and I'll answer it and try to help you out.
If you need help with your blog or your content marketing,
check out my ad agency, Neil Patel Digital.
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Thank you for watching.