We Review 3 More Student Blogs…
Friday, April 18th, 2008Note: Tomorrow’s video is going to talk about the difference between BLOGS and WEBSITES and why exactly blogs are so powerful…
As promised, here are 3 more student blog reviews - this time you get to hear from Rosalind! Take it away Ros…
Donna’s Meditation Retreats Bloghttp://telemeditationretreats.com/blog/
Donna started this blog in February of this year and has made 18 posts already. Good work, Donna!
What I like about this blog is that Donna has realized the importance of relationship-building early in the game, most notably through installing both a newsletter signup form (she’s using Aweber) and lets her readers subscribe through a Feedburner feed.
I also like that you’ve made good use of Categories which makes it easy for your readers to access information on a specific topic.
In that vein, you might want to consider removing the ‘Articles’ category (too unspecific) and either move those articles into their appropriate topic categories, or creating Pages from their content.
We’ll be covering the distinction between Posts and Pages during the course, but for now suffice to say that Pages consist of static material that is of high importance on your site.
Too… I’m wondering why, after such a prolific start, no posts have been made yet in April? By it’s very nature, blogging is most effective from a traffic generation standpoint when we post regularly.
Tricia’s Sunshine Rewards Bloghttp://sunshinerewards.com/videoblog/
Tricia started her Sunshine Rewards blog on an already established site on April 1st, 2008 and has been posting every 3 to 4 days.
What I like about Tricia’s blog is the seamless integration into her existing template and I LOVE the fact that she’s video blogging, doing both product endoresements and videos of a more personal nature such as asking for reader support in her participation during the 17th Race for the Cure in Indianapolis. Fantastic!
Real people love and trust other real people far more than they do corporations, so Tricia is definitely on the right track here.
What I might suggest here is that Tricia consider adding more categories to her blog, such as Health & Beauty, which would be a great category under which to put the acne clearing device video.
Too, to make the blog more noticeable to viewers who arrive on the non-blog homepage, is that she place a link to the blog in the top navigation.
Steve’s Buy and Sell Cars for Profit Bloghttp://buy-and-sell-cars-for-profit.com/blog/
Steve started his blog on the first day of the course and I see that he’s already made a post and changed the header background colors… cool!
What I really appreciate about Steve’s work is that the first thing he tackled was his ‘About’ page, something many webmasters often neglect.
I would suggest adding your photo to that page, Steve, or if you’re shy, have a charicature made that identifies you throughout the site. We want people to know that Steve is a real person.
Steve mentions in his first post that he ‘changed hosts for my site www.Buy-And-Sell-Cars-For-Profit.com recently and dumb me didn’t realize that I would lose all my previous blog posts’. Steve, you can incorporate articles from the original site into your new blog, they’re all still there.
Lastly, the category topics should be distinct from one another, as you might get penalized for having 4 categories that all contain some form of ‘buy and sell cars’.
Likewise, posting one entry to all 4 categories may result in duplicate entry penalties — something we want to avoid and will talk about more during the course.
A message to all our students - feel free to participate! Help your fellow students by giving them advice…
We’ll be back tomorrow with a video from ME this time (Anik) - I’ll talk about the difference between blogs and websites and why BLOGS take the award in our opinion.
