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7-Figure Small with Brian Clark
Confessions of a Pink-Haired Marketer
Copyblogger FM: Content Marketing, Copywriting, Freelance Writing, and Social Media Marketing
Get More Clients With Smarter Email Marketing
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Members Only
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Site Success: Tips for Building Better WordPress Websites
StudioPress FM
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The Digital Entrepreneur
The Missing Link
The Showrunner
The Writer Files: Writing, Productivity, Creativity, and Neuroscience
Youpreneur with Chris Ducker
Zero to Book
Copyblogger FM: Content Marketing, Copywriting, Freelance Writing, and Social Media Marketing
hosted by Darrell Vesterfelt and Tim Stoddart

The Strategy Behind the Copyblogger Redesign

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Previous Episode:7 Ways to Create an Email Marketing "Snowball Effect" More Episodes Next Episode:Steven Pressfield and the War of Work

All Episodes:

March 30, 2020

The Advantage of Email Marketing, Featuring Nathan Barry of ConvertKit

March 15, 2020

How to Write Content That Resonates

March 9, 2020

How to Conquer Your Fear of Selling, with Leah Neaderthal

March 2, 2020

How to Build Remarkable Products to Grow Your Business, with Ramit Sethi

February 17, 2020

What You Should Talk about on Your Podcast, with Tara McMullin

February 9, 2020

How to Win at Search in 2020

February 3, 2020

How to Turn Pro as a Freelance Writer

January 27, 2020

Marketing Segmentation and Personalization with Brennan Dunn of RightMessage

January 20, 2020

Podcasting Still Matters, with Pat Flynn from Smart Passive Income

January 13, 2020

The New Look Copyblogger in 2020

January 8, 2020

New Year, New Copyblogger

October 23, 2019

The Self-Reliant Entrepreneur with John Jantsch

October 2, 2019

Consistency Will Take You Further

September 25, 2019

The Past, Present, and Future of Online Learning

September 16, 2019

How to Get More of the Right Things Done

September 9, 2019

Why the Future Is Still Email

September 3, 2019

What’s Next for
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August 26, 2019

How Smart, Nimble Companies Are Using Webinars Today

August 19, 2019

The Clarity Method: A Conversation with Tim Brownson

August 12, 2019

Digital Business Trends and the Latest on the Rainmaker Platform

August 5, 2019

4 ‘Naive’ Business Principles for Enduring Success

July 8, 2019

How to Write an Epic Blog Post, Part 3: Polishing and Promotion

July 1, 2019

How to Write an Epic Blog Post, Part 2: Getting It Written

June 24, 2019

How to Write an Epic Blog Post, Part 1: Thinking and Research

June 17, 2019

3 Almost Magical Headline Ingredients for More Traffic, Engagement, and Shares

June 10, 2019

Lessons Any Business Can Learn from an Impressive Influencer Marketing Fail

June 3, 2019

13 Ways of Looking at a Headline

May 27, 2019

The 7 ‘Bad’ Habits of Incredibly Successful People

May 20, 2019

Writers: How to Move from Making a Living to Driving Revenue

May 13, 2019

Choose the Right Frame to Boost the Power of Your Content

May 6, 2019

How Copywriting Teacher Belinda Weaver Reenergized Her Email List for Massive Engagement

April 29, 2019

3 Reasons Why Really Good Writers Sometimes Can’t Find Great Clients

April 22, 2019

3 Slightly Embarrassing Emotions that Drive Effective Copywriting

April 15, 2019

Get 10 Content Marketing Boosters in 20 Minutes

April 8, 2019

Becoming the ‘Chief Empathy Officer’ of Your Copy and Content

April 1, 2019

One of the Most Important Marketing Decisions You’ll Ever Make

March 18, 2019

What Nobody Wants to Hear about Content Marketing

March 11, 2019

Getting Your Big, Scary Projects Finished: A Conversation about Growing Gills

March 4, 2019

When Is It Time to Bring in a Professional Copywriter?

February 25, 2019

Using Content to Systematically Move Prospects Toward a Purchase

February 18, 2019

Understanding the Lifecycles of Your Website, with Pamela Wilson

February 11, 2019

5 Ways to Manage a Stress-Induced Creative Slump

February 4, 2019

3 Ways Strategic Content Can Drive Measurable Business Outcomes

January 28, 2019

The Social Media Platform Every Content Creator Should Be Using in 2019 (Nope, It’s Not Facebook)

January 21, 2019

Real Talk about Generating High-Quality Content

January 14, 2019

A Conversation with Paul Jarvis about Staying a ‘Company of One’

October 29, 2018

The 3 Plus 1 Foundational Elements of Effective Persuasion

October 22, 2018

5 Essential Copywriting Techniques from Copyblogger

October 15, 2018

5 Ways to Recover Your Professional and Creative Confidence

October 8, 2018

5 Stinky Sardine Secrets to Make Your Content More Fascinating

September 24, 2018

The Mindset ‘Hack’ that Frees Your Creativity and Makes You Happier

September 18, 2018

How to Kill Your Sales and Mess up Your Business: Lessons from a Used Car Salesman

September 4, 2018

The 7 Things Writers Need to Make a (Good) Living

August 27, 2018

Are You Making These Social Media Marketing Mistakes?

August 20, 2018

Fix These 7 About Page Mistakes for More Traffic and (Possibly) Better SEO

August 13, 2018

7 Ways to Boost Your Creativity

August 6, 2018

A 10-Step ‘Checklist’ for Your Content Marketing Site

July 30, 2018

The 3 Keys to Publishing Strong Content … Even If You Aren’t a ‘Great’ Writer (Yet)

July 23, 2018

Fix These 3 Points of Failure to Get Better Results for Your Content

July 16, 2018

Big Changes at ConvertKit: A Discussion with Founder Nathan Barry

July 9, 2018

3 Skills to Master to Become a Marketing Badass this Year

June 18, 2018

The Quiet Power of Conversational Copy

June 11, 2018

5 Rules of Thumb to Relieve SEO-Induced Stress

June 4, 2018

How to Use the GDPR to Make Your Business Stronger than Ever

May 14, 2018

‘Good Karma’ Selling that Works: A Conversation with Tim Paige

April 30, 2018

How to Get More Comfortable (and Effective) at Selling

April 23, 2018

Privacy and Permission in the Wake of Cambridge Analytica

April 16, 2018

Seth Godin and How to Create Change

April 9, 2018

Email? Chatbots? Social? How Are We Supposed to Reach People?

March 26, 2018

The Double-Edged Sword that Can Make (or Break) Your Content

March 19, 2018

Make More Progress by Getting (Gently) Out of Your Comfort Zone

March 12, 2018

Are You Doing Content Marketing Wrong?

March 5, 2018

Storytelling for Modern Content Marketing (Part 2 of 2)

February 26, 2018

Storytelling for Modern Content Marketing (Part 1 of 2)

February 19, 2018

10 Quality Factors Search Engines Need to See on Your Site

February 12, 2018

A Simple Content Strategy to Make Your Site Massively More Useful

February 5, 2018

How to Avoid a Heartbreaking Business Failure

January 29, 2018

Hey Writers: Let’s Get You Paid What You’re Worth

January 15, 2018

5 Keys to Making Your Content More Shareable

December 18, 2017

3 Observations on Trends (but not Predictions) for 2018

December 11, 2017

3 Tips Now to Build a Strong Foundation in 2018

December 4, 2017

The 3 Success Factors that Help Writers Earn a Great Living

November 27, 2017

How to Recognize a Great Content Idea

November 20, 2017

How to Cultivate a More Meaningful Gratitude Practice

November 13, 2017

Advice for Poets, Advice for Killers

October 30, 2017

Face Your Business Fears on Halloween Week

October 23, 2017

How to Make Smarter Decisions about Your Website

October 2, 2017

A Series of Unfortunate Content Events

September 18, 2017

The Evolution of a Successful Copywriter

August 28, 2017

7 Ways to Improve Your Marketing by Harnessing the Power of Evil

August 14, 2017

Smart Questions from our Brilliant Audience

August 7, 2017

Does the Web Have Enough Patience for Your In-Depth Content?

July 31, 2017

How to Write (Much Better) Blog Comments

July 17, 2017

Which Works Better: Positive or Negative Content?

July 10, 2017

How to Attract the Exact Customers You Want

July 3, 2017

How to Create Stability and Success as an Artist

June 19, 2017

Two Powerful Resources for Life-Changing Growth

June 12, 2017

How to Turn All that Marketing Advice into Action

June 5, 2017

How to Develop a Compelling Marketing Idea in 4 Steps

May 30, 2017

Getting Over the Fear of Selling

May 22, 2017

Talking Community and Digital Business with Tara Gentile

May 15, 2017

Plagiarism, Self-Deception, Bad Sandwiches, and Other Interesting Disasters

May 1, 2017

Professional Writers: Find Out How to Get Certified by Copyblogger

April 17, 2017

The Painful Core Lesson Taught by 3 Astonishing Big-Brand Fails

April 3, 2017

5 Mindset Habits that Actually Work

March 27, 2017

On Grammar, Usage, and Not Being a Great Big Jerk

March 20, 2017

Creative Strategies for Content Writers

March 13, 2017

A New Ultra-Easy Resource for Creating Excellent WordPress Sites

February 20, 2017

Thriving Freelancers and Clients from Hell

February 13, 2017

Politics, Content Marketing, and the 2017 Super Bowl Ads

February 6, 2017

Copyblogger Book Club: Winning the Story Wars

January 23, 2017

3 Content Marketing Strategy Fails (and How to Fix Them)

January 9, 2017

The 2017 Content Excellence Challenge: Your January Assignments

December 19, 2016

Bad Writing Advice: The ‘Post Truth’ Episode

December 12, 2016

Get Ready Now for a Creative and Productive 2017

December 5, 2016

The 4 Pillars Every Online Business Is Built On

November 28, 2016

Orbit Media’s Latest Survey of 1000 Bloggers

November 14, 2016

Have You Already Missed the Podcasting Gold Rush?

November 7, 2016

Getting More Traffic, Links, and Shares to Your Content

October 31, 2016

5 Quick Wins for Content Marketers

October 24, 2016

Announcing: An Intriguing New Tool for Collaborative Content

October 17, 2016

A New Book to Make Content Marketing Easier

October 10, 2016

Behind the Scenes at Copyblogger: Our New Email Approach

October 3, 2016

The ‘Obligatory’ Structure of Effective Content

September 26, 2016

7 Powerful Content Strategies Borrowed from Advertising Masters

September 15, 2016

How to Handle Demographic and Psychographic Segmentation (without Looking Like an Idiot)

September 8, 2016

Ethics, Professionalism, and Good Manners for Content Marketers

September 1, 2016

3 Questions that Can Haunt Creative Professionals

August 25, 2016

How to Give and Get Exceptional Testimonials, Part Two

August 18, 2016

How to Give and Get Exceptional Testimonials, Part One

August 11, 2016

Are You Leaving Money on the Table with Weak Headlines?

August 4, 2016

Content Marketing for Nonprofits

July 28, 2016

The One-Two Punch that Creates the Most Successful Copywriters

July 21, 2016

Pokémon Go: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

July 14, 2016

5 Suggestions When You’re Writing About Controversy

July 7, 2016

Announcing: A Breakthrough Educational Collaboration between Copyblogger and U.C. Davis

June 30, 2016

How to Break Past the #1 Conversion Killer

June 23, 2016

The New Age of Marketing Automation: Powerful, Simple, Cost-Effective

June 16, 2016

How to Make a (Really Good) Living as a Freelance Writer

June 9, 2016

Self-Publishing, Side Hustles, and Doing It All: A Conversation with Linda Formichelli

June 2, 2016

A Process for Content Marketing Success

May 26, 2016

Content Marketing Best Practices: Getting Email Opt-Ins

May 19, 2016

Behind the Scenes: Adventures in Advertising

May 12, 2016

Trump, Apple, and Facebook Advertising: Content Marketing News for May, 2016

May 5, 2016

Sally Hogshead and the Art of Fascination

April 28, 2016

Behind the Scenes at the Rainmaker Digital Company Meeting!

April 14, 2016

Social Media News, Social Media Constants

April 7, 2016

Strategies for B2B Podcasting, with Clark Buckner

March 31, 2016

Content Marketing Success Stories: Fitness Powerhouse Examine.com

March 24, 2016

Behind the Scenes: An Inside Look at the Rainmaker FM Redesign

March 17, 2016

Our Latest Advice and Resources for Digital Business Owners

March 10, 2016

Should Content Publishers Adopt Google’s New AMP?

March 3, 2016

7 Ways to Get Smarter with Social Media Listening

February 25, 2016

Content Marketing Shout-Out: Orbit Media and Andy Crestodina

February 18, 2016

The Tactic You Should Steal from Copyblogger

February 11, 2016

Content Marketing News for February, 2016

February 4, 2016

Email Marketing: The Misunderstood Powerhouse

January 28, 2016

The Secret Weapon Behind Great Websites: The Role of the Content Editor

January 21, 2016

Behind the Scenes: The Relaunch and Re-Imagining of Copyblogger.com

January 14, 2016

Trends and Predictions for Digital Commerce: A Conversation with Brian Clark

January 7, 2016

2016 Content Marketing Resolutions

December 28, 2015

The End of The Lede, The Beginning of Copyblogger FM

November 10, 2015

Constraints Can Be Blessings (Plus 2 Other Essential Lessons Jerod Re-Learned This Week)

November 3, 2015

Long or Short? The Content Length Question Answered, Once and For All

October 27, 2015

The Simple Publishing Hack That Gives Old Content New Life (Plus 3 More Tips)

October 20, 2015

The Surprising Truth about Earning a Profit from Your Content

October 13, 2015

How to Move Your Audience From Infatuation to Love

October 6, 2015

3 Things Your Audience Wants You to Know about Useful Content

September 29, 2015

Revisiting Authenticity: What It Is, What It’s Not, and Why It Matters

September 22, 2015

Publishing Lessons from Dave Pell, the Most Fascinating Email Newsletter Writer in the Business

September 15, 2015

Why Content Creators Should Kiss Their Programmers

September 8, 2015

Finally — A Podcast about the Superiority of Written Content

September 1, 2015

Hot Seat: Grilling Jerod on Using Audio Content to Seed a Content Arsenal

August 25, 2015

How to Optimize Your Headlines for Content Discovery with Vinegar (Before You Die of Cholera)

August 18, 2015

5 Stories That Explain Jerod Morris (Plus One Massive Marketing Lesson)

August 11, 2015

Lede Potpourri: A Big Idea, Talking About Demian Behind His Back, and Lessons from #PM15

August 4, 2015

How to Attend an Industry Conference Like a Boss

July 28, 2015

Getting the Most Out of a Conference When You’re There to Promote, Part 1

July 21, 2015

How Much Does the Modern Content Marketer Need to Know About SEO?

July 14, 2015

Are Podcasters Digitally Sharecropping Without Realizing It?

July 7, 2015

Celebrating Our 101st Episode (with a Special Guest Interviewer)

June 30, 2015

Why The Phrase ‘Leaders Are Readers’ Should Die

June 23, 2015

Why You Should Think Outside the Box About Online Courses

June 16, 2015

The Proper (and Safe) Way to Republish Old Articles

June 9, 2015

How to Grow an Audience on LinkedIn by Repurposing Content

June 2, 2015

Key Takeaways from Three-and-a-Half Hours with Henry Rollins

May 27, 2015

Rapid-Fire Takeaways from Authority Rainmaker

May 19, 2015

The Proper Way to Grow an Audience on Medium

May 12, 2015

The Introvert’s Guide to Launching a Successful Podcast

May 5, 2015

The One Quality All Popular Podcasts Share

April 28, 2015

Proof That Grit Is the Only Way to Reach Your Potential

April 21, 2015

Do We Celebrate Failure Too Much?

April 14, 2015

Choose Yourself Part 2: James Altucher Fights Back

April 7, 2015

Should We Fear Content Shock? (Or Could It Actually Be a Good Thing?)

March 31, 2015

Should You Really ‘Walk in the Direction of Your Fear’?

March 24, 2015

Is ‘Choose Yourself’ Good Advice … or New-Age Phooey?

March 17, 2015

Is Authority Earned or Bestowed?

March 3, 2015

Dan Pink on How to Succeed in the New Era of Selling

February 24, 2015

Here’s How to Answer the Most Important Question in Life (and Make a Living from It)

February 17, 2015

Sally Hogshead on How You Can Unlock Your Natural Ability to Fascinate

February 10, 2015

How to Learn from Your Successes

January 27, 2015

How to Learn From Your Mistakes

January 13, 2015

Lessons Learned from Conducting Two Monster Audience Surveys

December 16, 2014

Adaptive Content: A Trend to Pay Attention to in 2015

December 2, 2014

The Most Important Lessons You Should Have Learned in 2014

November 18, 2014

How We Built Our Careers Online (And What You Can Learn From It)

November 4, 2014

Interview with Brian Clark: How Customer Experience Maps Help You Develop a Smarter Content Strategy

October 21, 2014

How Empathy Maps Help You Speak Directly to the Hearts of Your Audience

October 7, 2014

How to Ignite a Feeling in Your Audience

September 23, 2014

Are You Overlooking This Cornerstone of a Smart Content Strategy?

June 26, 2014

How to Curate Knowledge, Turn it Into Wisdom, and Build Your Audience

June 19, 2014

How Successful Writers Curate Ideas

June 13, 2014

The 5 W’s of Link Curation

June 6, 2014

Why You Should Curate Content (And How to Do It Right)

May 30, 2014

How Freaks and Misfits Can Succeed in Business: A Conversation with Chris Brogan

May 23, 2014

The 2 Reasons People Don’t Click on Your Buttons … And How to Overcome Them

May 16, 2014

Chase Customers, Not Clicks

May 9, 2014

How to Be Authentic

May 2, 2014

How to Close With Style

April 25, 2014

The Best of Seth Godin on Copyblogger

April 17, 2014

How to Choose Arresting Images for Your Blog Posts (And Why You Should)

April 11, 2014

Removing Blog Comments: The View So Far

April 4, 2014

How to Use Internal Cliffhangers

March 28, 2014

Hangout Hot Seat with Brian Clark

March 21, 2014

How to Tell a Seductive Story

March 14, 2014

How to Create Exquisite Subheads

March 7, 2014

How to Write Killer Bullet Points

February 28, 2014

How to Write Damn Good Sentences

February 21, 2014

How to Use Persuasive Words

February 14, 2014

Michael Stelzner on Capturing Emails and Committing to Quality

February 7, 2014

How to Nail Your Opening

January 24, 2014

How to Write a Magnetic Headline (in Under 15 Minutes)

May 18, 2012

Seth Godin on When You Should Start Marketing Your Product, Service, or Idea

May 11, 2012

How to Attract an Audience by Integrating Content, Social, and Search

March 30, 2012

Why You Should Build an Audience Before You Build a Business

March 16, 2012

How Chris Brogan Built His Content Platform

March 9, 2012

Jay Baer on How to Turn Interested Prospects into Lifelong Customers

March 2, 2012

A 30-Minute Copywriting Course from a Master of the Craft

February 24, 2012

The Path to a Legendary Copywriting Career

February 17, 2012

5 Tips for Affiliate Marketing Beginners

February 10, 2012

Why Not Sell Physical Stuff With Digital Media?

February 3, 2012

Whether You Call it Blogging or Not, Online Content Still Rules

January 27, 2012

Answers to the 3 Biggest Email Marketing Questions We Get

January 20, 2012

How to Newsjack Your Way to Free Media Exposure with David Meerman Scott

January 13, 2012

Steven Pressfield and the War of Work

November 18, 2011

The Strategy Behind the Copyblogger Redesign

November 11, 2011

7 Ways to Create an Email Marketing "Snowball Effect"

November 4, 2011

Warning: If You're Not a Privacy Nut, You're Losing Sales

October 28, 2011

The 3 Kinds of Writing That Builds a Business

October 21, 2011

The Art of Seductive Writing: A Conversation with Robert Greene

October 7, 2011

Why Content Marketing Doesn't Suck

September 30, 2011

Are You Weird Enough to Succeed at Content Marketing?

September 23, 2011

What Works With SEO Right Now and Why No One Does What You Want

September 16, 2011

Are You Flushing Your Marketing Down the Social Media Toilet?

September 11, 2011

Seth Godin on Blogging, Business Books, and Creating Content that Matters

September 2, 2011

The Return of Copyblogger Radio …

June 10, 2011

Answered: Your Most Burning Content Marketing Questions

June 3, 2011

How to Get All the Clients and Customers You Can Handle

May 20, 2011

Is Content Marketing Worth the Work?

May 13, 2011

How to Write Nearly Undeletable Emails

May 6, 2011

Is the Online Gold Rush Over?

April 22, 2011

The Art of Enchanting Online Marketing with Guy Kawasaki

April 15, 2011

The Market for Something to Believe in is Infinite: An Interview with Hugh MacLeod

April 8, 2011

How to Constantly Create Compelling Content

March 25, 2011

The Content Marketing Question You Need to Answer … Now

March 18, 2011

Good SEO is Simple. Really.

March 4, 2011

Did Social Media Kill the Marketing Star?

February 25, 2011

How to Write (and Execute) a Simple but Powerful Business Plan

February 17, 2011

How to Kick Groupon to the Curb and Become a Local Hero

February 3, 2011

Convert … Or Die

January 27, 2011

Attention: Is Your Headline Getting Any?

January 20, 2011

How to Craft Landing Pages that Work

January 13, 2011

Why Every Smart Business is in the Media Business

January 5, 2011

2011 Content Marketing Predictions

December 15, 2010

Tim Ferriss on How to Reinvent Yourself with Blog Marketing

December 8, 2010

The 6 Elements of an Influential Web Experience

December 1, 2010

Your Staggeringly Unfair Marketing Advantage

November 17, 2010

How to Get Some Action

November 10, 2010

The Foundation of All Marketing that Works

November 3, 2010

Introducing Copyblogger Radio

November 18, 2011

The Strategy Behind the Copyblogger Redesign

Applying web design to business goals is a serious business.

A few weeks ago — through the hard work and formidable talent of Rafal Tomal (our Lead Designer) — we launched a redesign of copyblogger.com.

There’s been a good bit of discussion around it, and a lot of good questions.

What’s changed? Why did we change it? And the big one — how is it all working out for the business?

Let’s answer those questions, and a lot more about the business end of design, right now …

In this episode Brian, Sonia, and I discuss:

  • Why redesign the site now? Why do it at all?
  • The 3 major goals of the Copyblogger redesign
  • Specific conversion stats, including one that hit 92%
  • How to think about design as it relates to business
  • The specific thinking behind each element of the design
  • The evolution of Copyblogger from blog to multi-million dollar business

Hit the flash player below to listen now:

The Strategy Behind the Copyblogger RedesignRobert Bruce
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The Transcript

Please note that this transcript has been lightly edited for clarity and grammar.

________________

Robert Bruce: If you guys could redesign anything in the world, what would it be?

Sonia Simone: I would redesign rainbows and unicorns so I could extract more profit from them.

Robert: Hey, don’t hate on unicorns just because they choose to be invisible to you.

Robert: Wherever and whenever you are, welcome to the final episode for 2011 of Internet Marketing for Smart People radio. I am Robert Bruce and I am distinctly honored to be joined today by the irrepressible, the undeniable, the irresponsibly intelligent Sonia Simone and Brian Clark of Copyblogger Media.

Guys, we’re going to be talking about design and redesign, but we’re not coming at this from a designer’s perspective but from a conversion and overall business perspective. A couple of weeks ago you redesigned copyblogger.com. Why did we do it?

Strategic redesign from a business perspective

Brian Clark: Well, I will say that Rafal did an incredibly beautiful job on the actual design aspect of it, of course he always does, but I think he even outdid himself this time; at least that’s my opinion. I don’t know what you guys think. But from a business perspective, it was time.

We’re coming up on six years since I started Copyblogger in January of 2006, and during that time we started as a blog that launched essentially a new product line of business every year until we got to 2010 where we merged all the companies together that I was involved in, swapped out one and Brian Gardner came on with Studio Press and that was the beginning of Copyblogger Media.

At that point is when I wanted to do this redesign, but it was too soon because we had not yet released Premise, which was the third part of our online marketing trinity as I like to call it.

So it’s been planned for quite a while, but essentially we were a blog that launched businesses and now we’re a business that is powered by a blog, and I think the site needed to reflect that effect because there were just tons of people who subscribed to Copyblogger who just didn’t really get what we would do.

And of course we would mention our products in the content stream and we’d get comments like, “Oh, I didn’t know you guys did this.” So we clearly had a marketing problem as a company because a lot of people who visited the site and/or subscribed to Copyblogger just didn’t really have an idea of what we actually did as a company. And our products obviously are very tightly integrated with what we teach.

Our philosophy is we’re educating you for free so that you can get the most benefit out of our tools. So that was the business reason behind the redesign and like I said, it had been at least a year coming.

Robert: Yeah, and that’s the overall goal. Before we get into kind of what’s the early verdict here on some of these changes, do you want to talk about any specific sub goals that we had?

The 3 major goals of the Copyblogger redesign

Brian: Yeah, the number one goal as I kind of eluded to in the overall purpose was awareness. Awareness of what Copyblogger Media does as a company. And that kind of fueled every element, from the home page to the new post pages, to the way we assembled our landing pages, etcetera. So number one was awareness. You can’t buy a product if you don’t know that it exists.

Number two was to increase traffic to our product sites, and number three was to continue building our e-mail newsletter list for Internet Marketing for Smart People because the course had been doing very well; we had tried various things over the previous year, including this radio show, of bringing attention to the free 20 part course, and we also tried some other strategies where we had an under post box that was a teaser for the landing page for the course. And that had worked well and I wanted to see if we could do even better with that.

So really, those are the three goals. Awareness of products, more traffic to product sites, and more sign ups for Internet Marketing for Smart People.

Robert: Alright, so let’s move on then, and this is still early days, but what’s the early verdict? Are you willing to share any specific stats on how some of those things have been working out?

The results: increased product awareness and traffic stats

Brian: Yeah, sure. Just anecdotally, a lot of the feedback that we’ve gotten on the site through comments, through Twitter, Facebook, etcetera has been even more positive than I thought it would be. I think mainly from a lot of people because they are marketers, they’re interested in what we do as much as what we say and the reason behind it, and that’s of course why we’re doing this show.

So I thought I’d get more complaints because people sometimes don’t like change. Very minor in that regard; because essentially here’s the gist of the matter – the content experience with Copyblogger for the vast majority of people has not changed at all. In fact, some people out there don’t know we’ve even redesigned the site. Because they read by RSS or they read by e-mail, and you don’t have to visit the site if you don’t want to; if you don’t want to leave a comment or browse the archives or whatever.

So for most of our 155,000 subscribers the content experience hasn’t changed. From a social media standpoint, people come to Copyblogger from, Twitter, Facebook, Google+ to content pages. That’s what gets shared by the overwhelmingly vast majority. People are sharing posts, they’re sharing our tutorials, they’re not just saying, “Oh, go check out Copyblogger” and linking each other to the homepage. That happens occasionally but very rarely in the grand scheme of things.

And then finally, the only couple of comments I got were, “Well, I like to go to the homepage and just see what’s going on.” And they weren’t really complaints because they would sound kind of silly. You know, I’m like, “Update your bookmark to blog.”

We didn’t take anything away, we moved what would have been the old homepage layout to a brand new page called “blog”, and it’s in the top navigation. It’s actually more extensive than the old homepage was as far as the number of posts that are displayed because you can do that when it’s not your homepage.

So number one for me was we’re not changing anything about delivering the content that we do; in fact, we’re delivering more content in more formats than ever before in history and I’m very proud of that six years later. We also have to do what makes sense as a business and I think everyone who’s listening to this is interested in strategies and tactics that makes sense for the business.

So that being said, the content experience was still sacred. I think we managed to preserve that. The number one goal of awareness of the products, absolute home run. You can’t miss them, really and again, it’s really the evolution of both the site and us as a company.

If you recall, someone we’ve always looked to as inspiration – 37 Signals started off as a design firm with a blog that turned into a very popular blog that turned into a software company. Our homepage doesn’t really look like the 37 Signals homepage other than the placement of the product lines, right?

I think they have four, we’ve got three up there. I think that’s just a no brainer. I don’t see that as copying anyone because what alternative is there if you really want to create awareness of, “Hey, this is what we do.” Because a lot of people will come into a content page to comment or from Twitter or however they come in, and then they just click to the homepage to see what’s going on.

So it’s an ancillary exposure that I think is beneficial for everyone because again, the products are tightly integrated into what people come to Copyblogger for in the first place. That was a no brainer; I didn’t really have any doubts about that. The interesting thing I wanted to see and we’ve waited to have this show until I could get some meaningful feedback, but traffic to the products sites from Copyblogger has gone up 30% and it didn’t gradually happen. It happened the day the new redesign started.

Sonia: Pretty amazing.

Brian: And has continued since that time. It’s amazing. What’s even more amazing is because I’m not really worried about conversion at this point; again, awareness and traffic gets people aware that the products are there, they’re from us, and here’s what they do, here are the features, here are the benefits, all that kind of good stuff.

But the amazing thing is that the conversion rate has stayed the same. So what does that mean? That means more traffic, same rate of conversion, more conversion; more sales. So that to me was a pleasant surprise. I would have been fine if that didn’t happen right away.

Other interesting statistics; bounce rates stayed the same and time on site for Premise went up four seconds and, for Scribe, went down one second. So basically, everything has stayed the same except there are more people there, which is nothing but a positive outcome.

Think about design in relation to the evolution of your business

Sonia: I think that one of the things this redesign can show people and can teach people is that evolution from your primary identity being a blog to your primary identity being a business, and it’s just something I’ve seen a lot of people talking about. I’ve been talking about it a lot in whether it’s social media conversations or when I go out and give a talk, I think that blogs in general; we’ve come to an evolution in our understanding that there’s nothing wrong with a blog that’s just a blog.

That’s great if your goal is self expression or your goal is to let the world know what your cat had for breakfast. That’s fine; go for it. But the idea, how can I make money with my blog has kind of fallen away as we’ve started to understand that the question is how can I support my business with my blog. How can I make money with my business and use my blog to help out with that. And so this is a very natural evolution.

I think if we had tried this – Brian, what would you say – if we tried this two or three years ago I think it would have freaked people out.

Brian: Yeah, and it really wouldn’t have worked just because of the strange way that all these lines of businesses were created. But Copyblogger was mine and it was a launch platform, it was not the business, right? The very first year Chris Pearson and I launched Tutorial, which was a video site that was kind of riding the wave of the excitement about YouTube, that was pre-Google acquisition.

In six months we sold it for six figures. Pearson disappeared for a while and had fun and then I moved forward and partnered with Tony Clark in 2007 to launch Teaching Sells. In 2008 Pearson showed back up and said, “I need money.” We launched DIY Themes.

In 2009 Shawn Jackson and I launched Scribe. 2010 was really the big consolidation year, right? So we have Scribe, Premise is in development, I leave DIY Themes, Gardner comes over with StudioPress and again, that was basically my philosophical differences about what a theme framework should be, and I think it worked out well for everyone. We’re all still friends, everyone’s doing their thing.

Anyway, so at that point you had a consolidation of all these individual businesses that I had launched off the blog, which again, it’s a platform, it wasn’t the business. We had four different businesses, then you merge them together; we have one company, the blog comes into the company, and then all of a sudden you realize, “I have a completely different animal here.”

But that’s exactly what I wanted because I knew that once I had this team and the platform integrated with the products, then we could really start getting ambitious. Which, I know that drives some people crazy because they’re like, “Wait, you haven’t gotten ambitious yet?”

But yeah, this is what I do. I don’t have hobbies. It wouldn’t have worked logistically or probably even perhaps from a community standpoint because we were so heavily identified with blogging, but again, 37 Signals did it three years ago.

Robert: How’s the conversion looking on the Internet Marketing for Smart People course?

Strategies for dramatic subscriber growth and enhanced performance

Brian: Yeah, so that was the third primary objective and again, we started the radio show and kind of tied it together with the course because we talked about things that are relevant to the course and the course, of course, is comprehensive and better organized and free and all that good stuff.

So we really started to see an increase in subscribers a year ago, and then I experimented with removing the Genesis box as we call it from underneath each post. I said, “Copyblogger runs on Genesis.” There’s another one there now, and I replaced it with a teaser for Internet Marketing for Smart People that drove people to the landing page. And that boosted subscriptions dramatically. I mean, we started seeing dramatic growth in subscribers between the two strategies.

And so again, I had been planning a new homepage for product awareness and traffic for quite a while, and somewhere along the lines I said, “You know, the second part of that page should be the signup. I wonder if that would work as well as under post or better” because that allowed me to then go back and advertise one of our flagship products, which is Genesis, obviously, that Copyblogger runs on the Genesis framework.

So that was the thinking behind the experiment and for the first two weeks, conversions that were already enhanced from the previous strategy went up 92%. And it’s leveled off to right around 50% now. So it’s not only performing better than the last approach, but it’s performing substantially better. Because again, this is a good way to think for anyone out there; you think everyone is aware of what you’re doing or what you sell or what you offer, from great free stuff to great paid products, but they don’t. They don’t know.

We battle for attention just to get our content viewed. The stuff that’s circling your content often gets ignored, so you have to try different things in order to just make people who are interested. It’s not that they’re not interested; they just literally don’t see. Sonia, you may want to expand on that because we like to think everyone pays attention to our every word, but we’ve been at this too long; we know better than that.

Sonia: Yeah, I don’t know how many times I’ve said to myself, “Well, I don’t know if I should say this again because geez, I’ve said this like 20 times; people are going to get annoyed with me.” And then you sort of put it out there and people say, “Whoa, that’s amazing. I had no idea.”

And you’re like, “I’ve seen a comment from you every day for a year and you didn’t know that?”

Brian: Even your most engaged people; you can’t take it for granted.

Sonia: And that’s just the nature of the world we live in; we’ve got a lot of messages, and so we need to not be afraid, too. But you know, the other lesson I think running through that is you can definitely look at what somebody else is doing and say, “Hey, that’s cool. I’m going to try it out.” But nobody can tell you, “Here’s how to present your business to the public on the web.” I mean, we can give you best practices or ideas that work, but you have to try some stuff.

So I think a lot of people hang back and they try and think, “Well, I’m going to wait until I take this course or I get that piece of advice or I hire a consultant to tell me the perfect way to set it up.”

That’s exactly why WordPress is such a smart framework for a business website because it lets you try stuff and tweak stuff and experiment with your navigation; experiment with what’s going on in your homepage, experiment with where you’re putting calls to action and keep kind of moving stuff around and watch what happens rather than thinking,

Well, there’s one perfect way to do it and I’m going to wait to find that out or I’m going to hire a web designer to build me a static HTML site for five grand that’s going to cost me $500.00 every time I make a change.

That’s where most businesses are, even in 2011.

Brian: That’s a good point about the flexibility of WordPress because, going back to your earlier comment, three years ago if you came out with a homepage like this; I mean a lot of people were kind of floored by it because again, Rafal did such a great job and it’s certainly a different approach, but I don’t even know if it would be possible three years ago, but it would have freaked people out.

But really, WordPress is involved way beyond blogging software. We build all our sites on WordPress and Genesis. We can build anything with it at this point and I think we’re really just getting started with what we can actually do to make it more flexible and more integrated to where you don’t have conflict between various plug ins or worry about the fact that this great free plug in that a developer released for free is going to break and be unsupported in six months because he got all the links he wanted and doesn’t care anymore.

WordPress has come a long way, that’s in part to the core developers that make the underlying product, but also I think the evolution and maturity of the premium marketplace where people are seeing true needs as real publishers and providing solutions.

What kind of race are you running?

Robert: Alright, I want to get into the why of some of the specific elements of this redesign; go step by step down the homepage and talk about what these things are and why we chose to do them and present them the way we are.

But before we do that, there’s something else you should care about it; something else you should know. This show is brought to you by Internet Marketing for Smart People, which is the premiere online marketing course that is delivered straight to your e-mail inbox. This course takes the best of Copyblogger and systematically structures it for maximum understanding and chewability.

Sonia, you wrote an amazing lesson that drops in at number 17 for this course, and that lesson asks the question, “What kind of race are you running?” Can you give us a brief preview of that lesson and just a little taste of what folks can expect when they sign up for this course?

Sonia: Yeah, and that came out of me sort of wandering around this space of people who market their business online and in many cases, run and deliver their entire business online. And there are kind of two flavors.

There are sprinters and there are marathoners, so that’s what kind of race are you running. And you can have a little grocery store, you know it opens up every week, Monday through Saturday, or a Halloween store that’s opened four weeks before Halloween and they stay opened until October 31st and then they close. And so the online world makes this a much more workable business model.

So there’s the business like Copyblogger; we’re opened 365 days a year, we have products available and for sale all the time, we’re always bringing in new people. It’s very much kind of a steady, day in, day out, what you might call a traditional business.

There are also people who are in the game more for short bursts, and so this is what’s sometimes called the launch model, although launches are good tools for both kinds of business. But it may be in your business that you want to work your tail off four months a year and trust me, you’re going to just about kill yourself that four months.

It’s not like, “Oh, I’m going to send out three e-mails and then go back to the Lamborghini.” I mean, it’s work. But some people like to sort of – this is a little bit of the Four Hour Work Weekconcept. You bundle your work; you do it in intense, brief periods of focused activity and then you take long breaks. And so, you kind of need to know about yourself. Do you want to be a marathoner; do you want to show up every day? Or do you want to be a sprinter?

And some of the things that the lesson talks about is each one of those types can learn from the other and can make your business better and actually more enjoyable. So, that’s kind of that lesson in a nutshell.

Brian: Sonia, you need to write The Four Month Work Year, because we know people who do that. I don’t know anyone who works four hours a week, sorry Ferris.

Sonia: Including Tim Ferriss.

Brian: Especially Tim Ferriss. Tim works harder than all of us, and that’s saying something.

Sonia: As he’ll be the first to tell you.

Brian: The Four Month Work Year, I like that.

Sonia: Yeah.

Brian: Anyway.

Robert: Alright, if you guys want to get on the bus here and pick up this course, this free 20 part course which sounds like is soon to be a 21 part course and get the rest of what’s waiting for you there, just head on over to copyblogger.com, scroll down to the middle of our brand new homepage where you’ll see the headline “Grab our free 20 part internet marketing course.” Drop your e-mail address into the little box there and we are going to take care of the rest.

Okay guys, let’s get into the why of this new homepage and look specifically at each element. We did a basic overview of the homepage; all the different parts of it. So let’s just start and let’s get granular here. Let’s start with the nav bar.

The specific thinking behind each element of the design

Brian: Yeah, so we went with a much more streamlined top navigation bar. Over the years of Copyblogger it has been much larger and it always had a red accent. The feedback from my wife was, “Oh, that’s too radical to take away the red bar.” Of course, red’s her favorite color so I’m like, “Yeah, we’re getting rid of that.” And there’s an evolution that’s probably going to continue here, so this is actually a baby step because it’s not like we changed the color scheme or something radical like that.

So we made a thinner top nav; the navigation itself adds the new blog page. I think some people got the wrong impression because we made it after about and software, but again this is an evolution as a business. The blog itself has more content than ever.

So below that, and we kind of talked about the reasons why here, but to me anyone who has been following Copyblogger understands completely why you have that top line headline. I mean, we preach headlines more than anyone and yet all this time when we were a bloggy blog looking site, we never had basically a top line headline statement of what the business actually offers.

Robert: That is one big headline you are not going to miss.

Brian: Absolutely; that’s kind of the idea. And then of course, the three product lines, design, traffic, and conversion with the corresponding product – you know they’re there. You can’t miss them. Click through traffic has shown that traffic has jumped substantially from the site overall.

Now, we did not break down homepage versus interior pages, we’ll talk about that in a second. So we’re only tracking at this point overall traffic from Copyblogger to the product sites, which is really all we care about because we’re not necessarily concerned with where you come from as long as Copyblogger is doing a better job or making you aware of the products.

So you can jump off there on one or more visits to the homepage. If not, you scroll down and you’re like, “Well, where’s some content?” Again, with our goals, not only is the free 20 part course incredibly valuable, incredibly well regarded; we get a lot of nice feedback. I know Sonia, you get it directly. People e-mail you and tell you how much they’re getting out of it.

So corresponding between our business goals and actually providing organized, cohesive and comprehensive head start in internet marketing, because again, when you’re a blog and you have reverse chronological ordering, which is typical, you don’t know where people are jumping in. And we’ve seen this over the years over and over again where people are like, “I don’t get this” and even though we cross link, a lot of people won’t follow the links.

So the original thinking behind designing the course was, “What do you need to know so we can teach you more?” Right? And so there was, to me, a perfect congruency on the homepage between value for people and something that’s one of our business goals, which is to have more people educated with the fundamentals so that we can actually teach them more, and hopefully you’re in a position to use our products at that point.

So that was the idea behind putting the course second, as opposed to the next section which are the Copyblogger tutorials. If you remember the old design, for the first time they had moved into the classic red bar that was always in the header. So instead of just a design element, that red bar was designed to draw attention to our tutorials.

You know, we have a ten part Copywriting 101, I think Content Marketing, Sonia, is seven parts. We have the 28 page SEO Copywriting Report, a new tutorial on e-mail marketing. So anyway, these are our cornerstone content. That’s literally what we call it. It’s the foundational elements about what the site is about, and this is in addition to the 20 part course that kind of brings it all together.

So despite the emphasis on products, the homepage is not only still emphasizing content, it’s doing it in my opinion in a – and this is at least what I was trying to accomplish – in a way that says,

Hey, if you’re kind of scattered about what in the world all this is about, here you can follow this kind of a path to get yourself a fundamental body of knowledge so that some of our more advanced topics all of a sudden make sense to you.

So that was the idea behind positioning tutorials after the course. So if you’re already signed up for the course but you need a refresher, say on keyword research, right, or landing pages, then it’s right there, easily accessible. That this point there’s no opt in required for any of those tutorials, so it’s just all out there and freely available.

And then finally below that is where we feature the latest articles from the blog under the heading Online Marketing Advice. I don’t know if anyone noticed this other than you guys, but the homepage that launched on day one was changed by day two.

Robert: Several times.

Brian: Several times, right. Poor Rafal man, I drive him crazy. He likes to brag about how many revisions Clark gave him on various sites. Premise was the all time leader. Yeah, I think he almost quit.

Robert: It’s a badge of honor.

Brian: But yeah, there was this featured content area and then below it there were some more vertical recent content, and we’d broken it into popular articles and regular and I was just like, “Oh, this is a disaster.” It seemed like a good idea, and this is a great thing about not being tied to your design ideas, at least for me, because it seems like a good idea and then I see it and then I start thinking about it in the context of our audience and I’m like, “This is not good. This is just confusing.”

So we scaled it down just to the five most recent featured articles from the blog, which has automatic navigation but also manual navigation on each side. And then at the bottom the link to more recent articles takes you directly to the blog. So basically, it’s not a long scrolling page, but it basically covers with just a few strokes of the finger on the track pad, you can pretty much get the best of the best. You can get the most current content, you can get the course if you haven’t started it yet, and you can get the two books worth of content there under the tutorials.

Sonia: Yeah, I think you’re right.

Robert: We talked about this before, I think it was a few weeks ago, and this is in regard specifically to the top navigation bar. You’ll see links there to Facebook, Twitter, and RSS feed, but those things are a lot less prominent; our social networking outposts are a lot less prominent than they used to be.

Brian: Right. Probably the biggest change there is, and again, that is uniform throughout the site, but the biggest change that makes a difference, I think is when you talk about the interior post pages.

Robert: Yeah. Let’s do that, and for folks listening, if you’re on Copyblogger right now if you go up to that top nav bar just click Blog and let’s go over some of the elements here. The top navigation bar, like you said, is the same on these interior pages, but we see something very different. It’s a different take from the homepage on the next section down, “Our WordPress Solutions.”

Brian: Yeah. I would not want to dominate content pages or even the blog page with that big headline in the products. I mean, I could see perhaps a less elegant marketer doing that, but I just thought it was obnoxious. So what we did was create – again, Rafal did a fantastic job – it’s essentially kind of a unique sub navigation that has the text “Our WordPress Solutions” offset from below the Copyblogger logo with an arrow. And again, it points simply at buttons that say “Design, Traffic, and Conversion” with the respective product logos, or I guess they’re actually the icons.

Robert: Yeah, the favicon.

Brian: Favicon, right. It’s kind of like that approach to it. So it’s there, again it’s creating awareness, but it is very unobtrusive compared to other approaches, and from there then it starts to look like the old blog and post pages, except I think it’s much more elegant. Rafal should be on the show. He’s so humble that he wouldn’t’ say anything.

Copyblogger is more user friendly and has more content than ever before

Robert: We’ll talk to him, if I can drag him on here, we’ll talk to him about specific design elements from the design perspective. But right now we want to cover the business stuff, and one thing I’ll notice here is, for folks who have said maybe content is now taking a back seat on Copyblogger – totally untrue for a number of reasons that you’ve already covered, but when you hit this blog page we’ve increased the number of posts that are immediately available to anybody.

Brian: And more than that, the individual post pages themselves, when you’re actually reading a post, it’s so much more user friendly, the sidebar is less distracting. You do have a new approach to the general opt in to the blog at the top of the right hand side and again, that’s just critical. The positioning of that is perfect for eye tracking, the way you scan a headline from left to right. Your eye is drawn to the yellow. You have the social proof that we have a lot of people who are subscribed to Copyblogger.

I really like this concept that Rafal pulled off because I only gave him minimal instruction, but I said basically, generally, this is what I want and he just magic – it’s there. But I really like what he did. So it has that yellow part with the arrow above the actual opt in box where it says “Free Updates”.

So it’s similar to what we had before as far as the way it operationally works, but the yellow… It’s interesting because a long time ago we had a yellow sticky that was part of the original Copyblogger design way back. This is a different take on it, but it serves the same function. It’s an eye magnet and it contains an important message. It used to say the tagline; now it really just kind of reflects that we’ve been putting out good stuff for six years and that’s why 155,000 people or more now.

One thing – we made that number static because we switched from FeedBurner to FeedBlitz and it doesn’t work exactly the same way that we had it coded before and I’m just like, “You know, I’m not really worried about it. Just put over and if it’s substantially higher at some point we’ll change it.” I used to obsess about that number being real time, but I think we’ve earned the right at this point. Maybe I’m getting lazy, but I don’t think so. I think it serves its intended purpose.

Sonia: Yeah, and I think a lot of site owners will get stuck with that; where they have a live ticker and then FeedBurner or whatever your provider is goes down and then all of a sudden you have zero readers.

Brian: Yeah, that can be maddening and it started happening all the time with FeedBurner. Not the reason we moved, but it certainly doesn’t help.

Robert: Yeah, under that we have basic search form and an easy link – you know, go back to the archives, this takes you back to an archive page. But then we see the tutorials; those top end pillar content tutorials show up again in that sidebar.

Brian: Yeah. So we made the search box easier to find. Before it was a little bit lower down the sidebar and people would complain that they’d accidentally try to search in the e-mail form.

Sonia: I do that sometimes. I used to have problems with that.

Brian: The way it’s designed now, I would hope that would be impossible, but who knows? But it’s right there for you and Archives used to be a top level navigation, if you recall, and once we added Blog to the top level navigation that was enough. I didn’t want anything else up there. So usability wise, Archives being featured directly under the search box seems to be congruent to me. It’s actually a different way to search, by category and date instead of by keyword so I thought that was logically congruent.

And then yeah, right Robert, so you’ll see the tutorials from the homepage featured in a prominent spot on the sidebar, which is the way they used to be way back before we put them in the red bar on the top navigation. I thought when you feature them on the homepage, that putting them in a prominent place on the sidebar, the combination of those is probably more apparent to people than just the one location in the red sidebar. So that was my thinking there.

Robert: Yeah, and then we see our old faithful – this hasn’t changed much, if at all – the Popular Articles underneath Tutorials.

Brian: Right. So really, I think they end up about the same spot in the sidebar.

Robert: I think so.

Traffic leaks can leach important users away from your site

Brian: But what we took away, which you eluded to earlier, was we had our Twitter account with a link to Twitter and then below that we had “Give us a Like on Facebook”. Both of those social media mechanisms sent people away from the site. Now, I kept it that way because I thought it increased Twitter followers and Facebook likes, which is something that I wanted to take a look at. I remember Shawn Jackson, our CFO expressed concern. He was like, “Oh, isn’t that going to kill…”

And I’m like, “I don’t know; we’ll see.” But it was Derek Halpern, who I’ll give credit to; he’s like, “Clark,” you know how he talks. “Clark, you gotta take off that crap off your e-mail opt in. You’re killin’ me over here. You’re sending your traffic off. What are you doing?” Literally, that’s what he said.

Sonia: There were probably more swear words, but yeah.

Brian: Yeah, there might have been a few. That was a pretty bad New Jersey accent, too. But yeah, and I was like, “Yeah, I know you’re right.” I was like, “Well, when we do the redesign we’re going to take them down and see what happens.”

So not only do I think the sidebar is just so much cleaner and more usable, but Twitter followers are joining at the same rate and Facebook likes are pretty much the same, too. It doesn’t have any effect because when you think about it, your Twitter strategy for followers should come on Twitter. You’re providing value on Twitter, so we upped our content sharing on Twitter, mainly of other people’s stuff, not ours.

We’re producing the same amount of content ourselves. So we’ve upped the amount of content that we’re sharing because people follow you when they see you mentioned in someone else’s stream that they already follow. That’s the best way to get Twitter followers, not from your sidebar.

Now, during the early days of Twitter I ran Twitter contests, I just flat out asked people to follow us on Twitter. Sure, do some posts that also attract attention, but don’t drive people to Mark Zuckerberg and the Twitter boys from your sidebar when you really want them to subscribe, right?

And you don’t know if they’ve subscribed or not, so it’s a traffic leak, as Halpern would call it. So he was right about that, it hasn’t affected anything on the social media side, but it certainly gives us a much cleaner and much more focused sidebar. We’re focused on the value we offer on our site as opposed to sending people away to follow us somewhere else.

Robert: “Hey Clark, you gotta take care of those traffic leaks.”

Brian: Yeah, that’s what he said.

A simple and elegant footer says a lot about a business

Robert: Okay is that right? Okay. One last element here – well, there are a few things. We could obviously talk about this for a long time, but I did not want to miss the footer, which is something that kind of gets thrown away a lot of times and I like how Rafal did this. It’s similar to the past design in a couple of elements, but it’s very, very clean and yet it’s also another opportunity after somebody has gone either through the homepage or through a lot of the content on the site to see what we do as a business.

Brian: Yeah, it’s interesting because there are several people, including some of our good friends and business partners who use the footer real estate to just throw a ton of stuff in there.

Robert: Yeah, it got popular for a long time.

Brian: It’s like, overwhelming and I’ve never been a fan of that. I just don’t think that’s what the bottom of the page is for. So yes, Rafal did retain his very elegant restatement of the logo in I’d say it’s probably the same exact height – no, it’s actually a little bit taller than the top block area nav.

But yeah, so it’s just Copyblogger on the left and then you have the obligatory copyright notice. And people have been looking at footer lengths for year and year and years, especially in WordPress because that’s where attribution usually goes for themes and other things. So yeah, it says “Powered by Genesis, Scribe, Premise, and Synthesis for WordPress” and it’s just really simple.

Robert: Text only.

Brian: Text only, more of a statement of fact than anything. But really, if someone’s scrolling down and looking at that right lower level, they want to know what you’re using to run your website and we happen to be in the business of producing things to run websites on WordPress. So I think it’s very simple and elegant, but it probably has a positive effect when people are like, “Wait, what is all that stuff?”

Robert: Okay, any final thoughts on the redesign of copyblogger.com?

Brian: Well, we’re watching, learning, and testing as we go, as anyone should. So what we’ll do is probably do a show in the spring and revisit the results with hard data, but also talk about the tweaks that have been made in the interim because as Rafal knows, there will be some.

Robert: He’s waiting; he’s listening to this right now going, “Ugh.” Alright you guys, let’s get out of here. To all of you who have made it this far with us, we give you our great thanks. This has been the final show of 2011 and yes, whether you want it or not, we will be back next year to bring it to you again.

In the meantime, if this show has done something to you or for you we’d love it if you got over to iTunes and leave a comment or a rating there.

Thanks everybody truly, and we’ll see you next year. Ms. Simone, Mr. Clark; today you have truly begun to ring the bells of holiday cheer. Thank you.

Sonia: You are insane.

Brian: You really are.

Other listening options:

  • Click here to download the mp3 | 52.5 MB | 45:45
  • Click here to subscribe via iTunes
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The Show Notes:

  • Internet Marketing for Smart People Course (free)
  • The New Copyblogger.com
  • The Copyblogger Blog
  • Designing with Genesis
  • We left the building with Girl Talk …

About the Author: Robert Bruce is Copyblogger Media’s Chief Copywriter and Resident Recluse.

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Comments

  1. Gregory Ciotti says

    November 18, 2011 at 8:45 AM

    Rafal killed it with the latest design!

    Glad to hear you guys discuss this, I had a few questions that got answered, good stuff.

    Reply
  2. Hashim Warren says

    November 18, 2011 at 9:23 AM

    What gave IMFSP the 90% boost – the placement under the post, or the placement on the homepage? I couldn’t quite understand that.

    Reply
    • Brian Clark says

      November 18, 2011 at 9:26 AM

      On the homepage. We switched from under post to the homepage and got a 92% increase in opt-ins.

      Reply
      • Hashim Warren says

        November 19, 2011 at 2:00 PM

        wowser. That is huge.

        Reply
  3. Diana Guerrero says

    November 18, 2011 at 10:11 AM

    Looks pretty clean. Nice to hear about the traffic funnel difference. We’ve been penciling out a redesign for about six months now. Same thing, bringing the brand back to center and then funneling to the product/service sites.

    Reply
  4. Faizan Elahi says

    November 18, 2011 at 11:27 AM

    The new design is absolutely wonderful ! Brilliant work !

    Reply
  5. Joe says

    November 18, 2011 at 11:32 AM

    Love the clean look of the home page.

    Suggestions:

    Consider having your Design, Traffic and Conversion boxes expand on rollovers to make it even cleaner.

    No body copy or video? What happened to engage?

    The 4 tiers are disengaging. I would think the course signup and tutorials would work better on a sidebar.

    New article scroll is awesome.

    Joe 😀

    Reply
  6. Darren says

    November 18, 2011 at 12:33 PM

    Nice work. The site loads extremely quickly. Glad to hear its meeting its design goals.

    Darren

    Reply
  7. Doug Francis says

    November 18, 2011 at 2:58 PM

    Wow, I recently changed to the Streamline Theme and grappled with plenty of the things you just discussed (of course I had all of those discussions/debates in my own head). I need to thank “Gardner”, as you call him, and the StudioPress team for the design.

    I have always run into real-estate-website-gurus who did not approve of my “education approach”, but the blog has really helped support my business engaging actual customers. Then it is up to me to sell their homes or help them buy one. To date, 46% of my closed sales originated from my blog.

    Reply
  8. Rafal Tomal says

    November 18, 2011 at 4:53 PM

    Great show, as always. I’m glad you pointed out a few strategies behind the design.

    As a graphic designer, I would probably did a few things differently but that would be only my point of view. You, as great marketers and copywriters, know your audience very well and gave me some tips how to make this design really working. That’s the point here… Create a nice looking base website and then tweak it again and again to improve the conversion. I’ve learned a lot while redesigning the Copyblogger site.

    As Brian said, I’m too shy to say anything publicly, so forget about it 😉

    Reply
    • Robert Bruce says

      November 18, 2011 at 5:00 PM

      Oh, we’ll see about that RT. I’ve got your Skype man, how’s your February looking 😉

      Reply
  9. Des Walsh says

    November 18, 2011 at 9:53 PM

    Very helpful interview. Thanks for sharing the thinking behind the new design and navigation. The explanation about the tiny social icons made complete sense and as well as guiding me in some impending redesign has dispelled a recent dilemma for me about whether to advise one of my clients to have the big, bold social icons in their new site design on which they asked me to comment.

    Would you care to share the name of the font you use for Copyblogger? And does it come standard with the Genesis framework? Very attractive and readable – of course you know that :).

    Reply
    • Rafal Tomal says

      November 19, 2011 at 1:35 AM

      The font used on the home page is called “Rokkitt”. It doesn’t come with the Genesis framework but it’s available for free on Google Web Fonts: http://www.google.com/webfonts#QuickUsePlace:quickUse/Family:Rokkitt

      The sample Genesis child theme (http://www.studiopress.com/releases/sample-theme.htm) has already a code to load Google web fonts. You just have to replace the font name.

      Reply
      • Des Walsh says

        November 19, 2011 at 3:51 AM

        Thanks Rafal, much appreciated.

        Reply
  10. Astro Gremlin says

    November 18, 2011 at 11:57 PM

    Change can be good, especially if it proceeds according to a rationale plan. Copyblogger has a huge following and worth doing it right.

    Reply
  11. Amro Awad says

    November 19, 2011 at 5:58 AM

    I trully like the new design. It’s very clean. I think simple works better than advanced designs.

    Reply
  12. Martyn Chamberlin says

    November 20, 2011 at 10:38 PM

    I was one of the 3 people who kept refreshing the page on the first day. I’m glad you removed some of the jQuery slicks and content on the home page. It’s now both revolutionary and palatable.

    Great show! You’ve nailed Derek’s accent. 😀

    Reply
  13. Jennifer Fontaine says

    November 22, 2011 at 10:03 AM

    When you say in this podcast you “had a different view of what a theme should be,” what is your view on what a theme should be?

    Have you talked or written about this before? If so, can you share the link?

    Thanks!

    Reply
    • Brian Clark says

      November 22, 2011 at 10:08 AM

      My view is the Genesis Framework / child theme approach.

      Reply
      • Jennifer Fontaine says

        November 22, 2011 at 11:20 AM

        But why Genesis? How is it different from others?

        Reply
      • Jennifer Fontaine says

        November 22, 2011 at 1:18 PM

        Sorry, I’m new. 🙂

        Just read the info on your site, didn’t realize it was your product.

        Reply
  14. naijadotcom says

    November 23, 2011 at 8:25 PM

    You have a wonderful team to work with,glad you redesigned and yes please share whats your view on what a theme should be.

    Reply
  15. MySocialMediaMentors.com says

    November 25, 2011 at 10:32 AM

    Thanks for sharing the strategy behind that copyblogger. It helped us learn more about it.

    Reply
  16. Aman Basanti | Age of Marketing says

    November 26, 2011 at 6:45 PM

    Guys, well done on the redesign – I think your goal to move from ‘a blog that products’ to ‘a business powered by a blog’ has been achieved beautifully.

    I’m a big Copyblogger fan and have been following your evolution for a while. Your success has been amazing. It shows what’s possible on the internet.

    Reply
    • Aman Basanti | Age of Marketing says

      November 26, 2011 at 6:47 PM

      That was meant to say ‘a blog that *sells* products’..opps

      Reply
  17. Daniel says

    December 7, 2011 at 10:51 PM

    This seems to be the way things are done these days, as far as website design is concerned.

    The emphasis seems to be on clear, easy to navigate site pages, minus the clutter.

    The 90% plus opt in increase due to changing the opt in box position from under posts, to the home page, is quite remarkable.

    Also, going by memory, the new site theme choice does look better. This option seems to look much clearer.

    Reply
  18. Johnny B. Truant says

    December 8, 2011 at 11:35 AM

    My favorite part was the Derek Halpern impression.

    Reply
  19. Dannie says

    December 23, 2011 at 9:55 AM

    This would have been even better as a webinar with visuals.

    Reply

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