After working on so many people’s blogs it has become apparent that whilst there are many, many things that can be improved (including on my own) there are a few basics:
1. Don’t monetize too early. Do you see any adverts on my blog? No. Why? Because I don’t have enough traffic to make much money anyway, I don’t want people to be put off by a lot of adverts, it looks more professional and it looks neater. Which leads me onto…
2. Reduce clutter. I’m guilty of this myself, but reducing the number of images (and adverts) and animation on a homepage can make a site look more attractive, and professional.
3. Give someone somewhere to subscribe to your RSS feed via email. Again, I don’t do this on this site (I just offer the RSS at the moment), but I will when I get around to it. Feedburner currently only offers a daily email (though once the Google integration is finished they promise to offer more options), Feedblitz can be configured to be hourly, daily, weekly or monthly for free (ad-supported), and Aweber can also manage this along with other nice email management features for a fee.
4. Write more content. I receive emails all the time asking me “How can I make more money?” and I look at their site that is full of adverts and has a post once every 8 or 9 days. If you blog is aimed at making money by simply being a blog (unlike one like this which is alongside a business), then you need to get more traffic in order to make more money. It’s called the “magazine model” – you make more money the more people who visit you site. In order to get this traffic you need to post quality articles, often. For more information, check out Yaro Starak’s free Blog Profits Blueprint eBook.
There are obviously countless more examples that can be done to improve a website. If you’d like a professional review of your blog or website, please contact me and we can have a chat.
