What are we doing wrong? | Bloggers Lair | Yakezie Forums

Hello Betty, I am no expert, but I do know that you have to stick with it and I also know that it can be very, ok extremely, frustrating at times. Here are the additional suggestions that I would ad.

1) Email subscriptions

I am of the believe that mainly bloggers and internet people use RSS. Your market may not even know what that is so offer the emails subs as well.

2) Free Give Away

In exchange for signing up for your email newsletter, consider giving away some thing free. This could be a guide to control your cash, some crash course, other free ebook, a few chapters of your book. Something to entice them to join.

3) Spruce up the Site a bit

Although your site is clean, there is another level of design out there. I am not saying that you have to rival CNN.com, but you could step it up a bit. Use pictures in your blog post that will show on that front page to give it a little character, life, and further build your credibility with your audience.

4) SEO

Start studying and learning SEO and keywords a bit more. This is a way that you can get focused, targeted traffic to your site by getting to the top of the SE for particular keyword phrases that you know will draw people that 100% interested in your content…takes time as well. A great site to reference is http://realbloggingtips.com

5) Social Media

Not sure how much you are into FB, Twitter, YouTube or LinkedIn, but they are not huge for nothing. Get involved in the conversations in these areas and help people out. You can use search.twitter.com and search specific phrases, when people mention them or ask questions about it you can jump and help them out. Don't just spam them with your link, but help them and eventually feed them back to your site. Or maybe there is an article on your site that is what they need, send it to them. Or with YouTube, there is a monster community out there of people that just love videos, so give them what they want and leave links back to your site.

6) Stick to the fight & Don't GIVE UP!!

Not saying these few tips will put you over the top, but I am sure they will lead you to more and more idea that could be the difference you seek. If you have any follow up questions, feel free to shoot them my way.

Hope this helps

Freddie,

Great ideas. Here's some more info. 

SEO: I just updated our site using Genesis with the Corporate child theme and the All-in-One SEO Plug-in. I'm hoping these 2 changes will jump-start our SEO which has been piss-poor. 

Site: I go back and forth on the issue of photos on the front page because of the load time issue.  Does anyone else have thoughts on this?

Email subscriptions (with a free giveaway): Great idea.  I'll implement that immediately. 

Social Media: We have a Twitter account @CYCash with 348 followers.  Each of use separately (@Bettykin & @GregVegas) have more followers than @CYCash so we have to figure out a way to convince our personal followers to also follow @CYCash.  That's one of our top goals for 2011. We also have a Facebook page http://www.facebook.com/ControlYourCash but, again, I have more friends individually  than we have likes on our fan page so I need to do more to integrate the 2.

It is frustrating but we'll keep plugging and chugging along.

Thanks again for the input!

Okay, I just took a quick (2 minute) look, here's my absolute first impressions:

1) It looked like a business site instead of a blog.  BUT, that could be a great thing since I knew right off the bat that you are selling a book that Len Penzo likes.  :-)

2)  I'm a scanner but everything is written for in-depth readers.

3)  I thought I found your blog posts on the left side of the home page and then was slightly confused by the "Blog" tab up top.  I clicked back just to make sure they were the same.  Thousandaire does something like this too – drives me crazy, lol.

4)  I like your writing style but would also suggest some headers in between to break up the length.

Cool beans though!  I'm sorry you are feeling frustrated.  Blogging is so subjective that it is hard to figure out which side to lean towards (in-depth vs scanners, super anti-ad readers or the more laid back ones, etc).  Good luck!

@Crystal

The "is it a blog" vs. "is it a website" debate rages on.  We started out looking like every other Wordpress blog, then our book publicist recommended more of a website look which got us to where we are today.  I like the more professional look of the site and we still have a blog that looks "bloggy".  It's just not on the first page. 

Yes, the blog posts are in 2 places.  Current stuff on the front page and, as I wrote above, the more traditional blog is under the "blog" tag.

I'm definitely getting the message loud and clear that our posts, while not too long per se, are too text intensive.  We'll have to work harder on creating smaller chunks of information (for the scanners :-)) that's easier on the eyes.

@Sandy

The comments are open! Blab away…(and, oy that tenant!)

We're working on our first contest right now and we're putting together an email giveway per Freddie's suggestion.

What kind of navigation buttons do you want to see on the sidebar?

Thanks for the great suggestions.  Keep 'em coming.

Post length is fine, I just think it needs breaking up a little. I'm with crystal on this one – I skim quickly and don't really read unless it catches my attention.

Otherwise all good.

Try some book give aways to attract more people to you RSS feed.

Thats looking better. Its a lot clearer to me now that whats important is the appearances and the book. I like the book excerpt comment – made me laugh. (but ive not yet bought the book – soon, I promise)

The landing page is much improved with a good mixture of selling the book and the blog.  Adding the Twitter feed in the sidebar was a good idea and better than the categories.  I see what people are saying about the posts being long, but I get into the stories so I enjoy them.  What you might need to do is break them up a bit with section titles.  Sam does that with his posts when they are long and I think that it works.

Wow! Thanks you guys for the great insight and advice.  As you can see, we've already made some changes based on your suggestions and we're feeling a lot better about what we're selling (book vs. blog) and how to structure the site.

Thank you for sharing your time and expertise.

If you're just reading this thread, feel free to add your comments.  The site is a perputual work in progress.

B

Oh, wow, I just visited the site and it is looking much improved!