In my last post I stressed the necessity for visitors to your blog to take action in order for you to make money blogging. No action, no money.

But how do you get more people to take action?

One way to get more people to take the action you wish for them to take is to make sure they see your offer by utilizing the “hot zones” on your web pages.

A hot zone is simply an area of your web pages where users are likely to look and act. Hot zones for a particular website can be found using a service like Etre.com or through looking at a click history for your web pages.

Let me give you an example so you can see how a heat map looks.

Here is a screen shot of a website containing a large banner for Virgin records:

But look at a visual heat map of the page shows no one viewed the ad—our brains have figured out, after millions of web page views, to ignore banner ads:

On this web page the viewers focused most on the upper left as well as the content just below the banner (which contained “goal content”—content the web users were actually seeking.)

[To view the entire 2 minute video showing how hot zone maps are created, click here.]

What does this tell you about your site? After tens of thousands of heat map studies, site owners have developed several keys to generating more clicks:

1. Locate areas you want to make sure users see (and act on) in the upper to mid left, in the top 1/4 to 1/3 of the page.
2. Locate your most desired action links as high on the page as possible, but beneath horizontal navigation buttons.
3. Seamlessly integrate links you want clicked into the goal content of the site.
4. Do not use borders to separate content from advertising.
5. Where appropriate, integrate advertising links into your navigation.
6. Use interesting graphic images above or to the left of links you want to have clicked.
7. A message you want read needs to be scannable—able to be read as a whole rather than individual words.
8. Include action statements in headline form within your content.

Put these eight tips to work and you will see an increase in clicks and income from your blog.

Tomorrow: Amazon’s Heat Map Study.

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