March 21st, 2008 
This is a guest post written by Mike Smith from BlogThemeMachine.
If you would like to write a guest post and see it on Click Consultants please email us with the post at clickconsultants [at] gmail [dot] com. We will then let you know if we would like to use your post or not. Thanks.
So, you write custom content, but your website design is plain, dull and uncustomizable? This is the number one issue I’ve seen with affiliate marketing lately. You get your quick website up and running, flood a bunch of PPC traffic to it and hope it sticks. Guess what? If you website design doesn’t give the feeling of “quality” your traffic will notice. It’s not 1990 anymore, so why are your websites looking like it? Ok, so maybe they don’t look like a blast from the past, but why would you consider using free templates or wordpress themes when 1,000,000 other websites have the exact same template? Odds are, your website niche is being covered by 10 other websites with the same exact theme. Doesn’t really do much for your custom written content now does it?
There are a laundry list of reasons why your website design can kill your profits and I wanted to touch on the 5 biggest in this article. I’d suggest studying this post closely and see how many of these items can be checked off your list on any website you run. If you can think of more, feel free to leave a comment and discuss it with us.
1. Most People Do Judge A Book By It’s Cover!
Yes, regardless of what anyone tells you, your book is judged by its cover alone. Your first impression is supposed to be memorable. Why would you waste your chance of giving off a positive vibe with an outdated or overly simple / overused website design? Most visitors are surfing through the search engines, or clicking ads on websites in hopes to find what they’re looking for, and if your website looks nothing like the content they’re searching for, they will instantly leave. For example, if your template is
a basic red/black/white business style layout, but you’re affiliate marketing is aiming towards a dog-lover crowd, you’ve missed your target instantly. You need something fun and pet related to grab the visitors attention for longer then 5 seconds.
2. Your Article Titles Are Laid Out Horribly!
This is more along the lines of the number above, but if your website article titles are laid out in regular blog format, and you do not have a section that the visitor can quickly overview, they’re likely to leave. Also, if your blog titles are the same size as your website text, but only colored differently, this makes skimming the page extremely hard, and your visitor will definitely leave. Grabbing the users attention is more then just with your header image or cool ‘web 2.0 graphics’. It’s all about creating a user experience and giving your visitor the ease of navigating your website easily.
3. Your Free Template Offers Limited Ad Placement!
So you’ve got the titles done to grab your visitors eyes, but now you’re stuck with a template that offers limited ad placement. sure you can toss up 5-10 ads on the page to make sure every area is covered, but wouldn’t you agree that proper blending of advertisements gets better Click-throughs compared to a bright blinking ad right in the center of the page? Your free template is built to offer certain layout size, certain space for ads, and limited room for improvements. Some ads won’t fit on certain free templates, while others have the total opposite ad space of what you’re looking for. Instead of making your ads work with specific
templates, why not make a template work with your ads?
4. Cheap Templates Do Not Invoke Trust!
Your visitor sees a cheap, free template and will immediately feel like they’re on another MFA website. Alternately, if you’ve got a custom design for your website, it will give the visitor a sense of comfort that they’ve come across a website that is actually built for their needs. If you come across a website that looks exactly like the one you just left, would you find it to be trust worthy? Especially if the website you just left was horrible?
5. Lacks Room For An E-mail Newsletter Sign Up Box!
If you’re in the business of marketing to your visitors through email, and sending out newsletters with ads, sponsor links and so on, why would you want a free template that doesn’t even offer a highly visible place for this? And if you do get your template to fit this in, 9 times out of 10, it could probably be placed much better and in a way that doesn’t seem out of place and spammy. Click Consultants is a perfect example of a great placement of the rss subscriber sign up box. Directly in the top middle of the page. The choice of where you want to have the sign up box wouldn’t happen with a free theme.
Again, I don’t know how important it is to stress this, but if your website is full of custom content, why don’t you have a custom blog design to go with it? Take a second and look over your current website. Could any of these things be hindering your profits? If you were to hire someone to design a new layout for your website, would it increase your profits? I bet it would.
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Mike Smith is a blogger and likes to create custom blog designs for a living. You can view samples of his work at Blog Theme Machine. If you find yourself agreeing with any aspect of this article, make sure you write Mike and find out what he can do to help you increase your profits.
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