7 Little Known Tweaks to Improve Your Money Making Blogs

Warning: This article is only for those people who already have a blog and wants to make more money and enjoyment out of it. With that said, even if you don’t have a blog, you could read this first and probably have a head-start when you decide to take blogging seriously. After your read this, you’ll be able to improve your blog significantly, as much as doubling your blog’s subscribers and readership, just by doing small tweaks. My main goal here is to make everything as simple to you as possible. So, those tweaks that are too time-consuming or require advanced technical knowledge, I would ignore them. These are the 7 little known tweaks to improve your money making blogs.

1. More subscribers

A lot of bloggers gave free eBooks, videos, or audios to increase the number of  their subscribers. But even after they do that, their number of subscribers remained the same. If you really want to increase the opt-in rate of your blog significantly, Make you opt-in box POP! Tim Ash, the author of Landing Page Optimization, in his interview with Google, say one of the deadly sins of a landing page design is visual distractions. If there are too many images, animations or texts in your page, your visitors would have something called an action paralysis. To dealt with that, famous bloggers like John Chow, Darren Rowse, and ShoeMoney implement the pop-up window (Lightbox newsletter signup) in their blog. Light box signup focus your visitor attention on the opt-in form, as the rest of the screen was darkened. It might be annoying to some of your readers, but John Chow has proven that it indeed works very well!

“I was getting 20 to 30 new sign ups per day using my newsletter form at the top left of the blog. Since adding the Lightbox, new sign ups have jumped to as high as 100 per day.”

Just remember not to overdo it by limiting how many times a week it should appear. Try it out. [NB: In case you’re wondering why I don’t do it…It is because I find it obtrusive. And as the saying goes: Treat others like you treat yourself, I’ll just sacrifice the number of opt-ins I could have for what I believe to be visitors’ comfort.]

2. More Page Views

Before you could get more page views, you need to understand how your visitors browse the pages in your blog first. For instance, they’ll usually arrive at one of your posts (maybe because of one of your article marketing efforts) and then browse from there.  Now, all you have to know is how you could persuade them to browse the other posts in your blog. The method that works very effectively is having links in your posts that link to other articles in your site. Just make sure that those two articles are actually related, don’t force it. You could also have Related Posts section below your articles, allowing your visitors to visit other articles they might be interested in. Having the Most popular Posts in your sidebar also works. It’s telling them that these are some of the best that your blog have to offer, try these out. Think of it like the chef’s specials in a restaurant or something.

3. Longer Stay

In order to have visitors stay longer in your site, you need to make sure that they are at their most comfortable browsing environment. How do you do that? Use light, easily digestible color palette for your blog design. If that sounds a bit abstract, just copy the design principles of all the best sites in the world. Google: white background, blue links, and black texts. Youtube: the same as Google but with a bit of red for their logo and small design elements. Facebook? Yahoo? All have simple white background and probably some other light colors as complementary colors. Don’t use primary colors, like pure red, blue, green and yellow color to dominate your site’s palette because they are extremely annoying to your visitors. Also, make sure that your site is easy to browse and explore. Your categories section is lay out nicely and so does your archives page.

4. More Traffic

I have covered this topic in many of my other articles, like 10 Worst Kept Secrets of Cheap Web Site Traffic, or How I Write SEO optimize article in 45 minutes or less. (see how I implement point no 2 of this post). So let’s just go through this fast. This time, I focus primarily on what you could do on your site to get more traffic with as little work as possible. Some of the WordPress plugins to optimize your blog are All in One SEO, Related Posts, and Tweet This plugin (more about WordPress Plugins). Another tweak that you need to do, if you haven’t already, is to allow people to social bookmark your posts and encourage them to do so, using Twitter, Digg or Stumble Upon.

5. More Sales from Your Reviews

To get more sales from your affiliate product reviews, you have to simply be more personal in your writing. Tell YOUR experience with the product, YOUR story. People do care about the product features and specifications, but they could obtain all those info from the sales page of the product. What they want to know is what you feel, find, and gain from the products you promote. Frank Kern, the Mass Control guru, is the master of this. When he was selling this affiliate product called 13 Sneaky Email Marketing Tips, he was doing 30 minute ++ video without telling the audience what is inside the product or the bonus that he offered. Instead, he explained why email marketing is important and how using the product he was promoting, he double his sales. That should be what it’s all about, pre-selling. If you have “Featured” section in your blog, you could put your product review post there as well, so it won’t be buried by your other posts after a week or so.

6. More Comments Love

I installed mine today because I find that this plugin really pushed me (or at least gave me the final nudge) to comment on others’ blog. What am I talking about? It’s the Comment Luv plugin. For those of you who don’t know, it’s the plugin that retrieves the latest post title from your commentator’s blog and put it together with their comments. It benefited both parties, the commentators have a chance to obtain more traffic, while the blog would have a more active community. Another plugin that you could use to increase the amount of comments you’ll get is the Top Commentators plugin. It ranks the commentators in your site based on how many comments he had given over a period of time. I haven’t use it myself because I can’t get it working the way I want it to with my theme.

7. More Credibility

This final tweak to your money making blogs will let you appear more credible. And it could be done in a couple different ways, but I’ll just focus on the two easiest ones. First, quote famous bloggers or gurus in your market. I have used or quoted more than 3 gurus/bloggers in this article alone. Your visitors won’t trust you and why should they? You are not famous and you haven’t really proven yourself yet. So, to make up for that lack of credibility and trust, use gurus or famous bloggers’ names to help you. Also, if you haven’t already, use Favicon. There was once a time when only the big names in the internet (like Google, Yahoo, etc) have favicons. But now, almost every half decent sites on the planet have it. So, if your blog still doesn’t have one yet, it’s time to put one in. You don’t want to be perceived lower than the industry standard, do you?

These are some of the little known tweaks that you could do to improve your blog, increasing subscribers count, getting more comments, or simply improving your product reviews sales. Feel free to leave comments below or tweet it if you like it.

Related Posts:

1. Top 6 Blogging for Money Obstacles and the Antidotes
2. The #1 Trap when Making Money Online
3. Is There Money in Making Your Own Web Show?
4. Do You Make These 6 Mistakes When Writing Product Review?
5. Is Your Blog A “Me Too” Blog? Diagnose It Now!