Blog Reboot #4: BlogoSquare.com

Site: Blogosquare
Owner: Hans

Hans says:

I would like to send BlogoSquare for a reboot session. While I have tweaked many aspects of my blog mainly in the design and SEO part, I would like to have some feedbacks on what people think that might be improved.

My main concern in blogging is whether my articles are up to the level : concise, clear,to the point and resourceful. I tried several ways to know about it, like checking constantly the number of feed subscribers but I think that the reboot might provide me with better accurate points I could apply.

In this reboot I'm going to be looking at these 3 main things:

• Blog Focus
• Monetization
• Building Traffic

Let's get started.

Focus

In the grand scheme of things, blogosquare does a good job of 'knowing' its focus but not such a good job of using it to grow the site.

As part of the blog reboot, I asked Hans to run a survey on blogosquare asking his readers what they wanted to learn about blogging the most. The results aren't in yet, but just the simple step of asking your readers what they want is quite useful if you get decent feedback - I've done a lot of that (asking readers for what they want) and it definitely helps you in knowing what to talk about.

But asking your audience isn't the only (or even the best) way of knowing what to focus on.

Quite often, you can either:

• spot a under-developed sector in your niche to dominate
• learn from what your readers AREN'T saying

Under-developed niches

The idea is for you to look at your market through different perspectives.

For example, for blogosquare, I'd suggest that you use the following starting points to find what you should be focusing on:

• What do teenage bloggers predominantly write about? Why?
• What type of 'blogging help' do these teenage bloggers need (keeping in mind what they are writing about)? What resources can you create / recommend?
• Who's your competition (who else is targeting teenage bloggers) and what are they doing right (and wrong)?
• What type of blogs do teenage bloggers like to read?
• How can you help teenage bloggers get 'discovered' by other readers?

Also, here are a few resource ideas to get you started with:

• Read this article about privacy concerns in teenage blogging (it's 3 years old, but surprisingly relevant) and think about how you can advise bloggers on this / help them with this.
• Technical resources for blog customisation (like your theme / smilies pack, but more).
• Social bookmarking tips tailored towards teenage bloggers.
• Tips for using YouTube to promote your blog.
• Quick image editing using SnipShot, the iMaxWidth plugin, and other tools.
• Site promotion / SEO tips (starting from the basics such as proper URLs, keywords in titles, etc).

What are your readers NOT saying

What is the audience ignoring, or not looking for? Find out what it is, and why they aren't interested. This will help you discover different segments in your audience, and you can use this information to market to them differently.

You'll find a lot of teenage bloggers (and a lot of people getting started on blogging) who don't have the blogging = make money online equation running in their heads. For many people, blogging is just that, writing on your online journal and taking part in a global conversation.

You can target both types of audiences - the ones interested in making money and those interested in doing more with their blogs.

You don't need to make the 'make money' aspect of blogging central to your advice, but do mention it and elaborate on it for that section of your readership who are interested in those topics.

Bottom-line is, the one's interested in making money will be willing to pay you money to learn more. That translates into affiliate income as well as direct product sales. It's one of way of making money from your site (i.e. recommending other products / selling your own services / products).

More Content Ideas

Raj has been writing some excellent posts - check out "creating visual content for your blog" and "blog content alternatives: video".

Monetization

We've discussed blog monetization several times here and since your case is somewhat similar to Performancing (even if the scale is different), I'm going to give you the same list that I gave Ryan:

1. How much is BlogoSquare making right now, per month? How much do you want the site to make after an year's time. $2k / month? More?

   With a target in mind, you can break things down to a monthly basis (ok, so I need to reach at least $XXX / month by August).

   Right now the traffic isn't 'great', so a lot of your focus will be on increasing traffic, but if you do things right you can have both traffic and income rising together.

2. Blog Tweaking Service - you know how to customise themes, how to set blogs up, make them SEO-friendly, etc. You can easily use those skills to earn you an income by advertising your blog setup / optimization service.

   Biggest problem with this idea? If you're going to target your current audience - teenagers - you're not likely to find any paying customers.

   Your best bet would be to use BlogSquare as your leverage (part of your portfolio) in getting gigs like these.

3. Push UBSquare as a top bloggers directory for teenagers, and add sponsored listings in addition to the free ones (sponsored listings could cost $30-50, put their link to the top of the directory page for a month and earn them a site review at blogosquare).
4. Direct Ad Sales - While you can go through TLA (and you'll probably earn $100+ per month through it), another idea is to run the ad sales yourself using WPTextAds. It's an automated text link ads management system for WordPress. Free version allows 2 links only, the full version (costing $149) has no limits.

   IMO, get the free version, sell your first two ads, and once you've got money coming in get the licensed version and earn 100% revenue from your ads instead of 50%.

5. Don't go into AdSense. Yes, it can earn you some good cash, but overall, if your traffic is low and you're not getting much search traffic, then AdSense will earn you very little.

   Granted, $60-$100 per month isn't bad, but you can use the same ad space to push affiliate products through recommendations, from which just one sale could net you $60.

6. Affiliate Marketing - apart from selling services, this is your best bet for making money from BlogoSquare. Products that you could promote:

   Semiologic: Costs $299, Aff commission is $59 or $118 depending on how frequently you make sales.

   PMetrics - premium-grade blog metrics.

   PLR Pro - quality, topical articles every month, excellent for niche bloggers.

   TigerTech - digg-proof web hosting at shared-hosting costs.

   I'm sure you have several more products in mind that you'd want to promote on the site.

More Traffic

Speaking in broard terms, you have 3 main sources of traffic:

• direct (type-in, bookmarks, feeds, regular readers)
• referral (from other websites, including social networks / social bookmarking sites)
• search engines

The ideal situation is to have a strong mix of all 3 types of traffic, although as long as you have a large amount of direct / regular traffic that's great by itself.

Each type of traffic requires a different strategy, but since they're all important I'll discuss them briefly and point you in the right direction.

Direct Traffic

Direct traffic takes a long time to build up - and the key to building your long-term readership is to focus on the content. Provide information that satisfies a core need, whether that's a need to learn or a need to be entertained. If you've got your focus, and you're passionate and good at what you write about, then building a fan base for your website is not hard, provided that you keep sending regular traffic to the site (which is where the next two sources come in).

Referral Traffic

Referral traffic could take different forms - you could get a burst of traffic from Digg, or you could get a steady trickle of traffic from a review on a popular website.

The key to referral traffic is long term link building - the better you are at acquiring links, the more referrals your site will get and those links will also help your search engine rankings.

Of course, you're not just getting links from link pages and directories and blogrolls, you're also going to be doing some old-fashioned (or is it still new?) linkbaiting.

The common perception of linkbaiting is that you target big social networking sites such as Digg / Netscape / Reddit, but you can also target top industry blogs.

For blogosquare, who could you target? Here are a few possibilities

Darren Rowse (problogger.net)
Liz Strauss (successful-blog.com)
Lorelle (lorelle.wordpress.com)
Blog Herald (blogherald.com)
Ryan Caldwell (performancing.com) :)

In short, read the top sites in your niche, figure out what type of content they link out to and then get busy writing / creating something kickass that they can give the appropriate buzz to.

If this makes you uncomfortable, that's ok. You're not doing the big guns a favor - all you're doing is giving your site / content the maximum chance to succeed by getting it as much authority love as possible.

Links, links links. Whether you get them through directories, through link requests or through link baiting, setup a system to get them, regularly.

Search Engine Traffic

You said that you've got a good handle on SEO, so I'll give you some reading material to spark ideas and if you have any questions, just ask here in the comments.

So you want search engine traffic? - Brian Gardner's post on building SE traffic is ridiculously simple and equally profitable.
Killer Blog Titles
Why your blog archives are (mostly) useless
Networking tips for SEO
How to get links (seo shortcuts) - make sure you read the three articles linked in there.

General Thoughts

A couple of points about your site that didn't fit anywhere else:

Your theme looks great in 1024x768 but when you go to higher resolutions (I was using 1280x800) the theme itself is left-aligned while the blogosquare logo (top-right) is right-aligned. So, on bigger resolutions, the whole site pushes to the left and the logo is on the right. All a bit disconcerting really, but something you should know.

Also, instead of saying 'where teenagers and bloggers meet', why not say 'where young bloggers meet' (you could also say teenage bloggers)? Putting the two together immediately gives you a sense of identity (blogosquare = teenage bloggers' hangout).

Just my two cents on this.

Wrapping Things Up

I hope this helps you Hans, and as always if you have any questions, let me know in the comments.