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Critique my blog?

R

russelldirect

macrumors member
Original poster
Apr 4, 2011
45
0
Berkeley, CA
I last posted about this back in August, before I moved across the country for college. I stopped blogging for about 2 months, but now I'm "back" and trying to post regularly with fresh content.

The site is linked in my signature. Not a fantastic name, I know, but I'd like to think it's at least distinctive.

When I last posted, I was using a Daring Fireball copycat theme. I've since moved on to an even more simplified theme, after reading posts like this about giving readers a better experience.

I only have one ad on the site. It displays near the bottom, after all the content (terrible for making money, but it looks nicer and I can't think of a better place to put one with this theme). I'd like to eventually monetize the site by following the lead of the top bloggers and having a sponsored post each week, but that won't really happen until I build an audience.

So after all that, a few questions. How do you all like the theme? Does it "work" with the content? How could I monetize the site now without hurting the experience or ruining the look of the site? Is the name okay, or should I try something else before I start getting too much traffic?
 
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Based on the writing, what would I be best served focusing on? I'm thinking tech and video games, but I'm worried that if I force myself into such a full niche I'll screw myself.
 
Decided to bump because I made some pretty big changes to the site. I've got another writer helping now, enabled compression in WP Super Cache to make things faster, and modified the theme to get rid of any references to comments or tags (I still have a few things to catch as far as comments go). I think it looks much more clean now, and the site loads way faster (Web Inspector says that I only had to load 114 KB!).

What do you think?
 
russelldirect said:
What do you think?
Click to expand...

What are you trying to achieve with your blog? If you aim to create a clean-looking, but ultimately not particularly useful or interesting blog, you've done a great job. If you want people to come back to your site regularly, post something worth reading. It's not even clear what your blog is about. If I wanted to read a bunch of random crap, I'd go on Twitter.
 
wow that's a skinny layout...i'd create a more responsive layout that would grow (to a certain point) depending on the browser width.
 
You're ad is not on the bottom anyways a good example of ad placement is on Waloshin.com.

And I agree with the others either increase your width of your theme or increase your text size.

And get rid of this
2n8wft.png
 
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waloshin said:
You're ad is not on the bottom anyways a good example of ad placement is on Waloshin.com.

And I agree with the others either increase your width of your theme or increase your text size.

And get rid of this
Image
Click to expand...

Yeah, I changed themes so now I have the ad in its current location.

I'll try to make the text wider, and I got rid of the meta thing.

Um, I really hate that kind of ad placement. It probably makes you more money, but I find it kind of trashy to put ads between posts like that.
 
russelldirect said:
Yeah, I changed themes so now I have the ad in its current location.

I'll try to make the text wider, and I got rid of the meta thing.

Um, I really hate that kind of ad placement. It probably makes you more money, but I find it kind of trashy to put ads between posts like that.
Click to expand...

Waloshin doesn't really know what he's talking about. Unless your site is getting thousands of hits per day, ads are more likely to keep your traffic low than to make you any money in the first place.
 
miles01110 said:
Waloshin doesn't really know what he's talking about. Unless your site is getting thousands of hits per day, ads are more likely to keep your traffic low than to make you any money in the first place.
Click to expand...
Completely agree. Unless your site is getting hits like crazy (comparatively) then go self-funded until it makes sense to use your exposure to monetize.

In the end, if you wind up making money, that's icing on the cake. You should be blogging for you. It's not a career.
 
miles01110 said:
Waloshin doesn't really know what he's talking about. Unless your site is getting thousands of hits per day, ads are more likely to keep your traffic low than to make you any money in the first place.
Click to expand...

Mr. Pink said:
Completely agree. Unless your site is getting hits like crazy (comparatively) then go self-funded until it makes sense to use your exposure to monetize.

In the end, if you wind up making money, that's icing on the cake. You should be blogging for you. It's not a career.
Click to expand...

Double agreed.

I use Google Ads on a website I run for a local ambulance service and it pays me on average $100 per year. They average about 800-1000 unique hits per month, most of them employees logging into the protected area to fill out company forms.
 
SandboxGeneral said:
Double agreed.

I use Google Ads on a website I run for a local ambulance service and it pays me on average $100 per year. They average about 800-1000 unique hits per month, most of them employees logging into the protected area to fill out company forms.
Click to expand...

I'm getting an average of a little over 100 hits per day. Would I be better off without the ads? I'm not even making as much as you are. :confused:
 
russelldirect said:
I'm getting an average of a little over 100 hits per day. Would I be better off without the ads? I'm not even making as much as you are. :confused:
Click to expand...

I would say leave them as long as they aren't distracting from your content. I think you have nothing to lose by keeping them. You might make a few bucks after a while. Who knows?
 
Nothing on the blog is really worth reading, to be honest. I get similar inane ramblings on tumblr/twitter, and even then I can access said ramblings of thousands of people.
 
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