Note: The final list of nominees for the Pinoy Blog of the Month has already been finalized. Please wait for the official list later tonight tomorrow morning!

Did you know that out of the total amount of first-time visitors that your blog gets everyday, only a percentage of it actually reads your blog and comes back for more? First time visitors are those visitors who had just viewed your blog for the first time. The problem with this type of visitor is that, unless they have an initial interest in reading your blog, they won’t go into the trouble of browsing your blog to read it. Some of them would just look at your blog and would immediately leave if nothing interesting catches their eye. So, what should you do? The solution is to mark a good first impression on your first-time visitors. The moment that your blog is finished loading, the first thing that your visitors will see is the contents above the fold of your blog.

Our main objective is to make sure that the things that they will see would be interesting enough to catch their attention. In order for us to do this, we must take into consideration the following things: Overall Look and Feel Some bloggers believe that one doesn’t need to concentrate on a blog’s design and layout as long as they have good content for their visitors to read. This is true to some extent. The problem with this is that a lot of people tend to judge a blog by the way it looks and its design. Take me for example, if a blog is not easy on the eyes, with bright mismatched colors, cramped, and full of ads, you will never see me reading that blog. Take some time in fixing your blog’s design. It doesn’t need to look great, all you need to do is to make it clean and good on the eyes. Your visitors will thank you for it. Header Same thing as the previous one, it’s all about the look and feel. You could try putting up images that are related to your blog topic or any kind of image as long as it is eye-catching. Also, don’t forget to include the following things on your header:

• Blog Title - Make your blog title catchy and relevant to your blog’s focus. Make it something that would easily stick to someone’s mind so that they would easily remember it even after they have left your blog. But of course, it is not that easy to change a blog’s title which is why you could make use of blog descriptions.

• Blog Description – Blog descriptions are one-liners that describe what your blog is about. This would save your visitors the time from scanning your archives just to get the main gist and focus of your blog. There are a number of techniques on how to effectively catch the attention of visitors through the use of blog descriptions. I have written more about this on a separate article, which can be found here.

Blog Posts Having a small portion of the blog post visible above the fold gives the visitors a preview of what your articles are like. Always make sure to provide good and interesting content, so that when your visitors get to read your latest post, they would be more inclined to read your previous ones. Here are some tips that you could use on your blog posts for maximum effect:

• Post Title - Always make sure that your blog titles are catchy and interesting. My article, "Optimized Post Titles: Read Me! Read Me!", teaches bloggers on how to fully optimize a post title for your posts to attract more readers.

• Post Images - Images are one of the good ways of attracting a visitor’s attention. You could try placing any kind of image even if it is related or not to the topic of your blog post. Believe me, it’s a tried and tested formula. For more tips on placing images on blogs, go here.

Here are some other things that you might want to put above the fold: About Section – Tell them what your blog is about and the things that they will be reading. This will give your visitors more background about yourself and your blog. Feed Button – A well-placed feed button above the fold increases the chances of having more feed readers. You could use the conventional orange feed chiclet, or you could create your own. Navigation buttons – The navigation buttons should always be located above the fold. This is in case your visitors would like to navigate through your blog. The three important pages that you should have on your blog are the: about page, contact page, and archives page. Marking a good first impression is easy, the thing that is hard is to make them stay, but that’s for a different post. Hope this post helps! Happy blogging! For more tips about blogging, don’t forget to subscribe to my feeds!