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This is Review #3 of my Birthday giveaway. This time it’s John who left me a comment on my post. Ironically, he found my blog through BlogRush but since then his blog has been banned from their network (as have many other blogs but that’s a whole other story). As you can see, I don’t have the BlogRush widget on this blog anymore because it just wasn’t bringing the kind of traffic I would like to see and it was taking up valuable real estate.
Anyway, back to the blog review. John has his blog hosted on Blogger. My first suggestion would be to spend the 7 bucks and get your own domain name. Then spend 10 bucks on shared hosting. You can still use the blogger CMS is you want. Personally, I like WordPress because it has a ton of plugins which can really make your blog snazzy and more functional.
Secondly, as with many bloggers in the “make money” niche, I see this mistake all the time. When I land on the blog, everything I see above the fold is ads. Most people will just hit the back button in a hurry. I would suggest putting content first and ads second. This niche is very hard to crack unless you have a unique perspective or you have successfully made money so that you have the credibility to teach others how to do it. But having said that, there’s nothing wrong about blogging on how to make money.
Thirdly, design matters. Get a better blog template. Don’t use something that is generic. Make your blog memorable.
Fourthly, have an “About Me” page. I like to find out more about the blogger whenever I land on a new blog. One of the first things I look for is the About Me page. If you have one that’s interesting and engaging, I am more likely to remember your blog and come back to visit it again. Tell people why you started the blog, what your experiences are, a little bit about yourself, put funny pictures, whatever. The thing is to make it interesting and memorable.
Here are some other tips I wrote a while back on the pitfalls that new bloggers face.
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3 Responses
John T.
October 27th, 2007 at 11:27 pm
1Hi Hock,
I must say I’m really impressed with your review of my blog…it’s great to get some serious feedback on it. Maybe somewhat like yours started as a few years ago, I started it really just as an experiment to see what blogging was like, and here I still am using the same one a year later.
I plan to put all of your advice into practice eventually because everything you said seems to make good sense.
I do actually already own a domain name, although I’ve never publicised it due to not being sure I’ll continue to use it. I think I could do better than the name http://www.computer-income.com to match my blog, but that matches the name it has on Blogger, so I went with it.
As for the ads appearing on the top fold, this is a result of following the guidelines of Joel Comm in his ebook on AdSense, which obviously represents a difference of opinion to yours. However, I’m willing to give your philosophy of saving the ads for further down the page a try for awhile to see if that helps.
Once again, I really appreciate the thorough review you gave, and I will certainly use your advice because you seem to know more than just a little about doing some serious blogging, so thanks alot for the moment in the spotlight!
John
vjack
October 28th, 2007 at 7:48 am
2Who would you recommend for domain registration and shared hosting?
Hock
October 28th, 2007 at 4:19 pm
3John - you’re welcome. I look forward to hearing about your results after you’ve made some changes. The key thing is to build readership and to do that, you have to focus on good content.
vjack - For domain registration, I use GoDaddy and Namecheap. For hosting, I can recommend Hostgator.
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