Your Story
When I was at the Elite Retreat marketing conference, I sat down with PR & social media rockstar Chris Winfield and the first thing he said when he looked at Gym Junkies was “Whats the story here?”
I thought our blog was in great shape in regards to design, but after having it picked apart by most of the guys there, I knew I needed to make some changes. This is quite humbling to guy like me who thinks they know everything 
Chris recommended we feature Vic’s story on the blog as much as we could (especially since its a great story). I jumped on this right away and created a tab at the top of the blog that said “my story”.
After doing some testing with Crazy Egg, I found that page has become one of the most popular pages to click on in our site. Along with that, I think it really helps give new visitors an idea of what our blog is about in a quick way…
Add a My Story page to your site and let people know who you are and where you came from. You could also use a video to tell this story as well…
Personality
The old design on Gym Junkies had what I thought was a good design. It matched our hardcore image perfectly.
After talking to Stephan Spencer at Elite Retreat, he told me he thought our site looked “too corporate”. I was a bit surprised at this considering we havent even tried to sell any products yet (or take advertising)
His suggestion was to move our blog to a different domain, which had a more personal feel. I totally disagreed with him on this, as our blog is the main component of our site, and I dont think that would have helped at all.
However, I did take his advice and pump more personality into the site by adding a picture of Vic to the top header and featuring more video/audio/picture content on our site.
This is a HUGE tip for all bloggers. Make sure your blog looks like its one guy running a hobby site. Even if you’re making $30k per month, you dont want your readers to think this is some big corporate process with multiple people working on it everyday.
Let your personality shine through on the blog, and you’ll connect with your readers in a much deeper way…
Let me know is this helped you. leave me a comment below!
- Justin
{ 2 comments }
Extremely helpful Jus – hope you don’t mind me stealing, I mean borrowing, the MY STORY idea when I roll out the new version of my blog –
Yeah, the new changes to GYM JUNKIES are very impressive – Stephan was right on –
This post was a real eye opener and reminder for me to keep that balance – I have a lot of ideas on my mind with the new roll out, and this delivered some big-time perspective -
“JustinGoff.com baby!”
Justin, nice meeting you over at Fast Track. Also, a quality post here, I’ll give that a try.
Joe
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