Blog/Monetization Strategy

Think you definitely have some good plans in place right now. There is a great article on making money with a blog that I have referred to over and over again. Check it out.

How To Make Money With A Blog

Try blog ads when you start to get enough views. Like they are great for bloggers that want to make some extra green. Depending on the blog, you can try amazon. Also, I do not recommend sad sense. Well, that is unless you like to work hard for some pennies.

This is a solid plan, traffic is important and with time, try to generate it. Direct advertising will be an interesting option once you will have a good amount of traffic

Hey James,

I visited your site and can offer the following observations and suggestions:

1. While the overall design is nice enough, every page including the home page is filled to the brim with many distractions. Too many ads, links and "things" everywhere. I viewed an article and you have two good sized ads at the top of the article with a call to action to browse; something like that.

People get overwhelmed with too many choices. Most people have a hard time making a decision about one thing. Presenting them with a dozen choices reduces them to clicking on something. Then they go to a similar page with lots of choices and they click on something else or maybe leave the site. They become something like window shoppers and not buyers.

2. No business can be all things to all people. You want to be a one stop shop. Do you want to sell affiliate products or your own services? I gather you want to do both, but it seems the affiliate efforts are crowding-out efforts to sell your services.

3. Your site and each page needs to have one thing that is your most desired response. Do you have one in mind? Not two, either an affiliate buy or buying your service.

4. All those choices make people work which is the kiss of death. Figuring out what to look at or read from all the choices makes them think too much.

5. My impression from the site is you do not know what your visitors want or what they're looking for or even why they are there. You must know these things so you can create content and offer information that gives it to them.

6. I clicked on your articles tab. You use pagination, but I did not immediately know what to click on to read the rest of the article. I eventually clicked on the article title and that took me to the full article. Not all people will immediately know to do that, I'm guessing. So that is user unfriendly. In fact, your entire site is not very user friendly.

7. Your review article on some graphic platform thing is not a review at all. You have a short blurb and a picture that is a link. I did not click on it. Find out how to write a real review.

8. I checked out another article. I have to say you do not seem knowledgeable about how to write an article that is designed to do what good articles are supposed to do. Help the reader as much as possible. The information in this article seemed like, "So what." Here's an excerpt:

"1) Timeless – Trends and fads will always come and go but a logo must be able to stand the test of time. Will the logo you create today, be able to last for the next 25 years? If not, start over! Making your logo a timeless piece of art is a crucial component of logo design that most novice designers don’t think about."

OK, cool. But you do not offer one thing to help the budding logo designer create a timeless logo. Right? Hell, I'm not a designer and I realize or could have guessed the point you made in that paragraph.

That was one paragraph from an article. You could take that paragraph and write a whole article. That is assuming you really know how to create timeless logos.

Your site is not suffering from a lack of effective marketing or efforts on your part to execute your marketing.

Your site is suffering from a lack of knowledge on your part about how to develop an effective content strategy; how to write effective copy; how to create copy that will target your biggest market. That last point concerns choosing your target and focusing on them the most. Your reach is wide and your audience is diverse, and you cannot be all things to all of the markets (and demographics) represented at your site.

After saying all this, I would be remiss to provide constructive feedback without offering at least one solution or suggestion.

Go to Copywriting by Copy Hackers | Web Copywriting Ebooks and Conversion Resources for StartupsCopywriting by Copy Hackers and sign-up for her newsletter. You will learn much from her emails. I have no affiliation with the person or site. She is a great copywriter and is very generous with her knowledge about the subject and marketing. There are plenty of other sites and people, but off the top of my head I suggest her because her email series addresses the points I made, here.

I hope this has been of some help and good luck.

Ken

PS - Check this out:

http://www.quicksprout.com/the-advan...ing-chapter-4/
http://www.quicksprout.com/the-advan...ing-chapter-5/

No affiliation.