Make your Blog Look more Professional: Do these 6 things!

If you are blogging for your business or for your personal branding, you’d like to be taken seriously. 

To do so, you need to make your blog look professional. 

Otherwise, you won’t inspire trust and your audience will avoid buying from you. 

So, to make sure you have a professional blog, I recommend you to do these 6 things:

N°1: Choose your Colors wisely

In color theory, the choice of your colors in your graphics and designs is very important. Your visitors’ blog perception will change depending on those.

Mismatching colors is often associated with amateurism. 

Most web designs start with the “achromatic”, literally: without colors, use of white background and black text. That is what I am using for my blog post because it makes it easy to read and people are used to reading black on white text.

If I’ll be writing with a light color, my entire blog posts would be tough to read, right? 

So please avoid this.

It might be better to stay basics if you are not good at design or maybe ask some design friends to help you do a color palette for your blog.

A color palette in digital is a collection of colors that will define your graphic charter. Just search here and you’ll find lots of examples of color palettes.

So, I would suggest using sober colors if you are not very good at matching colors. But use flashy or special colors for your call-to-actions (CTA) like your button “subscribe”, “read more”, or your outbound links. 

Like on my blog, I am using a dark cyan for links and a pastel green for buttons. 

Use the color emotion guide

Colors can spark a variety of emotions, here is a list that can help you:

Yellow = optimism, clarity, warmth (Nikon, McDonald’s…)

Orange = friendly, cheerful, confidence (Fanta, Nickelodeon, Amazon…)

Red = excitement, youthful, bold (Coca-Cola, CNN, Nintendo…)

Purple = creative, imaginative, wise (Yahoo…)

Blue = trust, dependable, strength (Facebook, IBM…)

Green = peaceful, growth, health (Greenpeace, Tropicana…)

Grey = balance, calm, neutral (Apple, Yin and Yang…)

Use colors that work well with your theme

Your blog topic might influence a lot your colors’ choice.

 If you are having a blog about growing your plants at home. You might want to have an aesthetic choice of colors, using light colors, beige, shades of greens, etc. 

If you have a make-up blog, you might need more vibrant colors and eye-catchy ones. But let’s say you are promoting natural and vegetal make-up. You might want to have similar colors as the plants one. 

And as you understand already, the use of colors will completely affect how readers will perceive your blog.

Take a look at this very famous blog: theminimalists.com. Because their blog is about minimalism, they stuck to their idea and chose colors that reflect minimalism: white and black.

Ok, white and black are not colors, but you see what I mean.

Their graphic charter resonates with their blog topic and that’s what you should do as well.

Another example, as some of you know, I have a travel blog that I created after my vlog channel. There, we decided to use warmer and flashier colors because that is what defines us more, so using yellow and orange tones.

You can visit it here: 2frenchinmanila.com. 

We are using a lot of blue as well as it goes well with yellow. As you can see below.

Use the color-wheel

When using colors, you must limit yourself. It is recommended to use 2-3 colors and maybe some tints or shades of those, if you need.

Plus, you need matching colors and for this, you can check the color-wheel.

It will help you understand which colors go well together. You probably already know some color associations that go well because famous brands are doing them in real life.

So, below are some examples:

• Blue with Yellow
• Green with Red
• Pink with Grey

You can use this website to see what colors are matching well: https://www.sessions.edu/color-calculator/

If you are not a graphic designer or do not have a very great taste in design. My advice is not to put too many colors. In design, simple works the best.

N°2: Use easy to read Fonts

The use of fonts is essential to your blog. If it’s about your headings or your normal text, make sure you are using easy to read fonts.

No one wants to have a hard time reading your blog post because you used a fancy font. Don’t forget we’re lazy on the internet, we want to get the information right away.

Check the most-used Google fonts

Make life easier for your visitors and they will reward you. To do so, you can use the most-used Google fonts for blogs. 

It will indicate to you which fonts readers prefer and will help you not to lose them with fancy ones.

Here is a list:

• Helvetica
• Roboto
• Open Sans
• Lato
• Oswald
• Arial
• Montserrat
• Calibri
• Futura, etc.

Focus on easy-to-read fonts and your blog posts and keep the fancy ones for your artworks or illustrations.

Know the difference: Serif vs. Sans Serif

One choice to make is to know if you are going to use Serif fonts or Sans Serif ones, or even both.

Check below the difference:

• The first one is a well-known serif font:Time News Roman. You can recognize serif fonts with the stroke or line attached to the end of their letters. Like in the red-circled F.
• The second is sans-serif: Arial. As you are noticing there are no tails attached at the end of the letters, it is a more basic style.

Personally, I prefer using sans serif fonts as they look more modern and convey simplicity. But then, for your own blog, it depends on your own style.

N°3: Work on your Blog Post Style

Your blog post style is as important as your content. Let me explain.

In tip n°2, we said that you must choose easy-to-read fonts. That’s because netizens are lazy on the internet and you want to make life easier to anyone who’s reading your blog.

So, more than just your font, you should work on how you are displaying your text.

First, your font size should be good enough. The letters should not be too small to avoid visual fatigue for your readers. But it should not be too big, you are not talking to children. 

Second, avoid writing long sentences and jump to the next line as much as you can. 

Remember that writing a blog post is not about writing a formal essay: One paragraph equals one idea doesn’t work with blog posts.

Some bloggers even use line breaks for each sentence. See below, an extract of an article of Neil Patel, one of the most influential bloggers:

He uses line breaks for every one or two sentences, not more!

Use Spaces and Find Best Practices

So, check out what other bloggers display their texts and get inspired with it.

See also how they are using headlines and blanks to create spaces in their blog posts.

The goal is to make it light and easy to read. 

A quick example, will illustrate that well. On the internet, would you prefer reading a paragraph like this:

“Blogging is about content marketing: a strategic approach that allows you to provide relevant and valuable information to your audience. Which is why you’ll have to create specific and informative articles. If your content is nicely structured, and well done. Meaning, it answers the problem that a reader was trying to solve in the first place. And the more you’ll be useful. If you are just doing your auto-promotion, (except if you’re a celebrity), don’t wonder why your blog isn’t working.”

Or here the same paragraph with spaces:

“Blogging is about content marketing: a strategic approach that allows you to provide relevant and valuable information to your audience. 

Which is why you’ll have to create specific and informative articles. 

If your content is nicely structured, and well done. 

Meaning, it answers the problem that a reader was trying to solve in the first place. And the more you’ll be useful. 

If you are just doing your auto-promotion, (except if you’re a celebrity), don’t wonder why your blog isn’t working.”

Which one did you prefer reading? I am sure you did not even read each word in the first paragraph.

Because that’s how it works. 

We are not here to waste or time and have difficulties reading. We are here to get information in a more pleasant way than reading a school lesson.

N°4: Include Images in your Blog Posts (and Never Forget Featured Images)

To make your blog look professional, you must include images within your blog posts. 

There are several reasons why you need them: your sayings might be better illustrated with a picture than words as the saying goes. 

It also gives spaces and pauses to your articles. 

Plus, it also helps your SEO. Pictures on the web have what is called “alternative text”. By filling it, you’ll be helping Google robots to better identify the content of your photos. 

Which will help your SEO ranking.

The images you’ll be adding in blog posts will also determine the style of your blog. If you want to add infographics, pictures with captions, drawings, etc. 

This will again affect how your readers will perceive your blog. 

With infographics, you might be able to clarify some ideas to your readers and better explain a particular process that you are talking about.

One last thing, make sure to add a featured image. It is the most important image of your blog post because if someone shares your article on social media, this image will be displayed next to the blog excerpt.

And if the image is good enough, it might trigger more readers to click and read your blog posts.

Here is an example of how a featured image with a blog post excerpt looks like on my blog.

Note that the featured image, also called the thumbnail, is probably the first content your potential readers will see.

Make sure it is catchy and relevant to your content. 

But don’t forget copyrights, you cannot use any picture you want on the internet. So, if you need advice, check this article to find free to use pictures for your blog posts.

N°5: Aim for Great Visitors Experience on your Blog

Running a professional blog means that you are always thinking of improving your visitors’ experience.

How you are displaying things on your blog should be essential. So, make sure it is easy to navigate on your blog. 

Your navigation menu must be clear. Visitors should not be confused when browsing on your website.

If you are not sure about what to put on your menu, check my blog or assess other websites.

You will easily find out their best practices. 

I suggest getting an about page so that interested readers can easily know you or your brand more.

Also create a contact page where people can easily reach you. You don’t want to miss business opportunities because it is so hard to contact you. 

I am sometimes finding blogs where it is like impossible to reach the blog owners. There are no emails or phones written. 

And I know how it can be very frustrating for a brand to have a hard time getting in touch with you.

To have a professional blog, think of it like a business. 

The easier your customer can reach and interact with you, the more they’ll be satisfied and the more your sales opportunities will increase.

So, don’t neglect your visitor’s experience.

N°6: Own your Blog

The last piece of advice I am recommending you to make your blog look more professional: is to own your own blog.

I mean to get your blog on a self-hosted platform where you have full control of your website and where you own your blog domain.

It is a minimal expenditure, but very worth it to have your own domain if you want to be taken like a serious blogger.

By having your own domain name, you’ll be able to look professional when someone is looking for your blog on the internet. 

Look below, I am only paying $4 per month and I have a running professional blog with a SSL certificate and my own blog domain:

By doing so, your audience will know that you did not use a free platform such as wordpress.com, blogspot, wix, etc. 

This will help you claim that it is your own brand and that you are a serious blogger that invested in your website.

So, the question you need to ask yourself is, if you haven’t invested in your own blog, why would other readers do it?

If you want to transition your personal blog to a professional one, you can download this guide and this will help you: Exclusive Resource: Set Up a Professional Blog.

For the hosting service, I am using Bluehost because it has great support and I have never encountered any issues with it. But feel free to do your due diligence and check which hosting might be better. 

Now that you know all my tips to make your blog look professional, I invite you to start applying those principles in your own blog as soon as possible.

I’ll probably write a part 2 of this article as there are still lots of ways to make your blog more professional: we will talk about favicons, partnerships, media features, training, services, etc. So Make sure to stay updated by subscribing to my newsletter and know when I’ll be uploading future posts about blogging.