Five Reasons why You should use Your Blog as a Content Marketing Hub

Blogs are one of the most important aspects of your business; they are the base of your content marketing structure. Whether you are running a small business or a large enterprise, blogs play an essential part in your content marketing system because they deal with social media, search engine optimization and sales process.

Here you will learn 5 tips to make your blog as a content marketing hub.

1. Blogs works as your personal media:

A blog content which you write always remains yours. You don’t have to worry about the changes which are being made on other platforms like the changes being made on LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram. You can always use your blog to share any information, to give any message and your audience can read them anytime.

2. Blogs can be used as Social Media:

Blogs can be used as a Social Media because it allows social sharing, comments, guest posts. It also helps to build a targeted community. According to a research by Hub Spot, blogs are on the top of all social media for effective communication.

3. Blogs are very helpful for Search Optimization:

Blogs can be searched easily on search engine websites because of their structure. Blogs can be made search-friendly by focusing on specific keywords so that people can use search engine to find them.

4. Blogs help increase Sales:

Blogs are also very helpful to increase the sales volume of any company. By explaining how to use a certain product and by providing complete information to the customers, blogs can help companies in their growth.

5. Blogs are Easy to Incorporate and Manage:

A blog, at its heart, is a simplest form of content management system. Not only is this CMS easy to incorporate and manage, it is also fairly inexpensive. Free website makers like Glu7 and Wix offers you to create blogs.
You can check out their websites for further information.

How to Make Welcoming Changes to Your Site Without Troubling Visitors?

What happens if one fine day you get up, open your laptop and log in to you most-visited website, only to find that its whole layout has been turned upside down. How does it feel? Not good I know. In fact, you might be feeling betrayed right now.

Now what if you change the layout of your website? Imagine the agony of users who will now have to learn everything from the beginning. Moves like can often directly impact the brand’s loyalty online.

But there’s a dilemma. You can’t work with same layout you had in ’99 because a lot has changed since. Today, we have beautiful images, sliders and free website creation dashboards that make things as easy as dragging and dropping (try Googling GLU7).

At times, change does become necessary but you need to make the adaptation process smoother and easier for the visitors.



Changes for the Better
If you are offering changes to your visitors, be sure to focus your changes towards a better customer experience. For most visitors, that is the only thing that matters. If the tabs and menus aren’t accessible, it’s a deal-breaker for them.

Make the changes easy to stomach. Change the layout bit by bit. And while you are at it, try to give them awareness about upcoming changes and if possible, give them a sneak preview or a beta hands on of the layout. Brands like Yahoo, Google, and YouTube have changed their interfaces drastically over the years very smoothly.

So whether it’s CMS or a free site designing tool, always focus on visitor’s experience instead of projection and halo effect.

Get More Clicks to Your Site by Embedding Videos

Embedding videos to your site has tons of perks. It can get you more visitors. Integrating a YouTube or a Vimeo clip makes a website richer and fuller. People can retain visually assisted content easier than plain textual content. This means videos also help deliver the information or the marketing message clearly. 

And above all, a lot of people find reading text boring and prefer watching videos instead. So why not use the edge of technology and deliver the key points of information through videos?

Where to get quality videos?

There are two approaches to this question; you can either create your own videos or borrow some of the free to use/share videos from popular websites like Dailymotion, YouTube and Vimeo.

For best results, you should use a mix of both. Creating your own videos, uploading them on YouTube and then embedding them; and also embedding the videos created and uploaded by others. 

However, there is on crucial rule you need to memorize, and that is to never compromise on the video’s quality. There are still a lot of regions in the world where video streaming isn’t as fast as it is in United States, so this does make 240p and 360p versions of your video, a necessity. However, a huge portion of audience will be looking for 720p or higher resolution and will never compromise on quality. 

To make sure you don’t miss out on any of these visitors, keep all the possible qualities of your videos. 

How to integrate videos?

Integrating videos to a website is subjective. It depends on the interface and the content management system. Embedding videos is easiest if you are using a free websitebuilding tool. If you aren’t, you can either use the embedding option in your site’s interface or add it using source code if you are skilled enough.


So get your videos lined up, because to gain the competitive advantage in today’s online world, you need them now, more than ever.

Are Long-Scrolling Websites Good for Your Business?

I am guessing you are here because you have seen how great long-scrolling menu can turn out to be. You must have seen social media, news sites, blogs and other channels and you want to offer the same, seamless browsing experience to your customers. Good idea.

Long-scrolling interface is what I would call, a next-generation layout because it is the layout that not only caters to traditional desktop users, but also the ever-increasing base of mobile users.




Why a long-scrolling website?
As mobile users leave laptop and desktop users behind, the need for such a layout became more intense. But that is not it. Scrolling also offers other benefits. It offers access to more content with just a swipe; it saves the time of user and it encourages the user to spend more time on the site.



How to know if it’s right for you?
In a number of cases, you will this option to be the better one. However, there will be times when it will backfire. In short, it’s okay to this layout as long as:

- A big portion of your audience is of mobile users.

- Your site is based on the idea of social networking.

- You site offers content like news or feeds.

- Your site displays content in reverse chronological order.

- Your content doesn’t make excessive use of HD images and videos because that will make the wait exasperating.

- You update your content too frequently



So if the idea is to keep the visitor to stay like social media or news sites do, then it’s recommended to use this interface. But if not, then that’s not the end of the world. There are other great templates and layouts you can use. Try some from the ones already provided with your free website maker to get to know more templates.

Make Your Site Better Today With These Tips

Yes, free website builders have eased things up for amateur and inexperienced developers but an easy-to-adapt interface can only take them so far. There are too many ingredients that make up a good website, so just creating a lovely site is only a job half done.

Following are some tips with which you can improve the performance of your site and ensure maximum satisfaction from users’ end.


Things to do
Content is probably the most important element in any website because let’s face it – it is content that brings the layout to life. In recent years, use of crisp images, well-formatted textual content and management of the layout based on content’s length are some of the things to pay attention to.

Even when you are submersed in the content and the layout, do not lose vision of customer’s wants. Ensure the visitor finds the site easy to navigate, and if he wishes to place an order, it should not be a fuss to do so.


Things to Avoid
Visitors wish for smooth experience. Anything that keeps them from that experience is potentially a roadblock. Common errors from developer end include using a welcome-screen to hide the awful loading times; extremely long scrolling for relevant content and/or posts; bad formatting and overlapping of content, poor choice of images and backgrounds and last but certainly not least, the infamous hamburger menu.

As I have said before, the idea is to make the visit and the transaction as effortless as possible. With a competition so fierce, the margin of error becomes too thin. Regardless of whether this is your first website or not, and regardless of whether you are using Square Space, Wix or Glu7 to create your website, you should always take these elements into consideration.

How to Create a Website With Drag-and-Drop Dashboard

The entry of DIY website creators has eased the troubles of newbies and inexperienced businesses – firms lacking the expertise and resources to hire professional developers.

There are quite a few website builders out there, but the catch is, either they aren’t too user-friendly or effective, or they just charge too much for premium services. With these filters, very few website creators manage to earn the respect of users. Enter Glu7. This website creator goes head to head with big names like Wix and takes drag-and-drop approach for website creation.

Here are some steps that can help you master the basics of Glu7 dashboard.

Pick up a starting point

Newbies should start with any of the available themes. This will give you a head start if you have little knowhow about website layout and development.

Layout

After picking up the theme, you can now see a sample site on your dashboard. Feel free to play around with headers footers, body and the content. Select items from menu bar at the top and drag them down to add them. You can also edit the existing items on your page including styles, texts and images or remove them by clicking on ‘remove’ buttons next to edit buttons.

Clicking on the element allows you to edit that specific element via text, style and detail editors. You can also embed Vimeo and YouTube videos through ‘mediabox design’ tab in the menu bar.

Adding more pages

Surely your site is going to need more pages than one. To create more pages, simply click on ‘add page’ button on your dashboard. The name of the page can be changed anytime by just clicking on the icon besides the page’s name at the bottom-left corner.

General and other settings

You can also change the name of the site, integrate the site with Google Analytics, edit contact details and gain access to a lot of other general stuff just by clicking on the settings button.

The settings tab can be seen at the top-right corner of the dashboard. Clicking on it will open up a window which allows you to name the domain, edit contact details, and integrate Analytics along with tons of other stuff.

Publishing the site

After the site looks like the one in your dreams, click on the save button at the top-right corner to save your work. To publish it afterwards, just click on ‘publish now’ button on the screen that follows.

This is how easy it is to create your own site using Glu7. Please give your feedback about Glu7’s dashboard and whether you found it friendly or not.