Every year brings new opportunity. Some of us overwhelm ourselves with tons of goals to accomplish, while others curiously have no goals. Yakezie.com’s main goal is to continue challenging publishers to be the best in their niche. If you win, we all win as the quality of content gets raised across the PF and lifestyle space. The other goal is to simply provide a forum where folks can hang out and trade ideas. A supportive Network encourages us to stretch beyond our comfort zone.
Ever since my old partner Chris left when his company got bought by Google 2011, I’ve been flying by the seat of my pants making sure Yakezie.com works. As someone who was not tech savvy, I’ve done a very poor job at keeping everything from breaking. The upside is that I know more about the back-end than I ever thought imaginable given I’ve been forced to learn.
Over the next couple months, you’ll probably experience many broken links, a slowdown in load time, and the occasional crash. Apologies in advance. These issues are all for the sake of simplification. Sometime in 4Q2013 or 1H2014, I plan to take Yakezie.com in a new direction. We’ve got a fantastic resource of bloggers here and I’d like to create something for the greater good.
In the meantime, I’d like to share with you some recommendations for what publishers should do to make this year and every year a better success.
FIVE ACTIONS EVERY PUBLISHER SHOULD TAKE
* Re-write your About page. Chances are high that the last time you put any significant effort into your About page was when you first launched your site. If it’s been over a year, spend a good hour elaborating on your About page to reflect the latest you. In addition, make sure you add the latest privacy, disclosure, and disclaimer statements. They are very important as your site grows in exposure.
* Run through Google analytics. Figure out what your 20 most trafficked posts were for the last 12 months. These 20 posts will give you a good idea of what you are good at, interested in, and rank well for in search. Sometimes we discover we are square pegs and not circle pegs after analyzing the data. No thyself in order to grow.
* Identify who you want to be when you grow up. There will always be a bigger and better looking publisher out there. It’s up to you to identify which sites embody your aspirations. Feel free to take the best of what they do well and make something unique. Without goals, it’s hard to formulate to the right steps to progress. Observe what that bigger publishers are doing and try to do it better.
* Remove non essential plug-ins. There seems to literally be a plug-in for everything on WordPress, just like there seems to be an app for everything on our mobile phones. Deactivate as many non-essential plug-ins as possible. Try and get the number of plug-ins below 20, if not 15. Plug-ins cause rampant errors and are also gateways for hackers. This is where hardcoding and simplicity prove advantageous.
* Create a value proposition. With over 500 million blogs on the web, competition is stiff to say the least. You should consider writing a value proposition post in order to address what makes your site unique. Do you have particular insights into the real estate market given you were once a mortgage broker? Did you spend the last 10 years managing money and therefore have opinions regarding active vs. index funds? Are you a CPA who can talk efficiently regarding taxes? It’s very important to write from experience because there are enough authority writers who write from experience. Readers can tell if you are faking it.
BABY STEPS
There’s no need to do everything at once. In fact, most of us don’t do anything until we are sufficiently agitated to change. After WordPress 3.5 came out, my server started crashing incessantly. Bugs such as missed scheduled posts and losing my post formatting in visual editor became so annoying that I decided to do something.
If we can focus on several of the most important things, we can make tremendous progress if we last long enough. Baby steps will turn into giant leaps if we persevere.
Readers, what are some things you are doing for the new year to make your site(s) better? Below is a fun calculator that shows how much you can save if you cut out XYZ .
START A MONEY MAKING BLOG
It’s been around six years since I started Financial Samurai and Yakezie and I’m actually earning a good passive and active income stream online now. The online income stream has allowed me to pursue other more interesting things, such as consulting for various financial tech startups, traveling around the world, and spending more time with family.
I never thought I’d be able to quit my job in 2012 just three years after starting Financial Samurai. But by starting one financial crisis day in 2009, Financial Samurai actually makes more than my entire passive income total that took 15 years to build. If you enjoy writing, creating, connecting with people online, and enjoying more freedom, see how you can set up a WordPress blog in 15 minutes with Bluehost. You never know where the journey will take you in 2015 and beyond!
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I definitely do not use Google Analytics to anywhere near the extent that I should. Identifying my most popular articles will be a great start. Thanks for the tip.
Same here, I browse Google analytics and webmaster tools once in a while but only recently have started taking it more seriously. About the plugins it is interesting to run a speed check as well as validate WC3 errors with and without certain plugins to see how much they slow you down or add coding errors.
Pauline, which speed check system do you use? Yakezie.com is slow because of these chron jobs that run for the belts points and metrics updates on the Yakezie Network list. Need to do some testing. Thx
I like Pingdom’s page speed tester. Also, what cdn do you use. Email me and I’ll give you a tip I learned that made a huge difference when it comes to your CDN.
Funny you mention the About Page because I just re-did The College Investor last week and made it more “About” than it had been. I also included the staff writers on it so that readers would understand what they’re really getting.
I’m going to hit up the About pages on my other sites here very soon, but it does take a little time to get it right.
Totally with you on the “baby steps” part. I also agree on the about page. I’ve updated mine 3 times already, and will probably do so again shortly – now that you’ve reminded me again. ;)
You are ‘spot on’ about the ‘about’ page. And do you know what is funny (peculiar not ha-ha) – I know that a large proportion of my serch trafic land on it (done the Analytics thing, you see) and I still have not done anything on it for ages. Off there now!
Great to-do list Sam. I’ve got 3 things to tackel. 1) The About page needs refreshing 2) Need to create a value prop. and 3) I need to figure out how to be Jeff Rose. And that’s about it.
tackle*
Identify who you want to be when you grow up. – Still working on this one. ;)
Great suggestions. I especially like the one about Google Analytics and will be doing just that :)
Borrowing your “Best of” idea forced me to take a look at my statistics. I looked it before, but it was a while ago. 2013 is a year of change for me, I am writing longer articles and hopefully higher quality. My goals are the same, but I am more committed to make it happen this year. My approach is more focused and I am starting to see some positive results.
Great to hear Larry. I’ve definitely noticed the increased length and quality of your posts. Keep it up!
Awesome post, a lot of people (including myself) seem to forget to updated/ re-write their ‘about us’ sections, thinking that things about yourself don’t really change that much! How more wrong could you be?!
My about page could use a little sprucing up, but things really haven’t changed that much since I wrote it to really bother with it just yet. I’ve been thinking about my value proposition lately; I still haven’t quite figured out what it is.
My question is how exactly do you fit it in?The way I’m seeing it, a value proposition post is going to be very different in tone and substance than posts that actually produce value. For over 2 years now, my food blog has been so laser-focused on providing kitchin tips and easy recipes that when I try to write about anything else, even if it is food related, it comes out awkward.
Sam, these are great tips. As for plugins, I have my blog under wordpress.com. I do not think I have any plugins so is the an advantage over using wordpress.org type blogs?
I’ve been meaning to update my about page for months now, but it keeps getting pushed to the back burner. I think it was the first thing I wrote on my site and I haven’t looked at it since! I also need to start using Google analytics on a deeper level. Can anyone point me to a good post that takes you through all the ins and outs of it?
Sam, Striving for simplicity and clarity is a never ending goal. I particularly like the recommendation about the value proposition. Additionally, “baby steps” is a reality for all but a rare few.
Google Analytics is definitely a gold mine for data! Your top 20 pages will also give you some serious hint about which keyword you should focus on. If 5 pages are about the same topic, continue to write about it and link back to your older posts that already rank in Google. This is a great way to improve your SEO in a healthy manner :-)
These are great tips to use throughout the year. I am looking to figure out what my value prop is and I want to continue to evaluate that proposition throughout the year. 2013 is going to be a busy year.
I recently updated my about page and a couple others too. It’s funny how things change over time and it’s easy to forget about pages when we’re primarily focused on just generating new posts. I also try not to use too many plugins because I hate dealing with things that break.
Thanks for the post. Google analytics is about to locate my blog. Definitely looking to write more articles on my page using SEO and paying attention to my keywords. Thanks Sir
Thank you for the tips! I just started blogging and it is great to know these things in advance!