My Music Blog

[downloadvyp]

love the design.good content

[mitchellg103]

It looks nice. I personally prefer brighter templates, but yours is nice.

[Salaam - Mac815]

I like this, the content seems very genuine, plus get afew more colours into the template and I think you will be onto a winner

salaam

[playeru]

Thanks all for your comments. Yes, the color is something to consider, although I became attached with the dark feel my blog has. It feels distinctive.

[mln20]

hi playeru, i just visited your blog. everything looks ok, just one comment really. i dont really like the font and colour of the post title. It is not obvious. And i think its not very pleasant to the eyes,and colour as well. Just my honest oppinion Thats just it, the rest looks fine

[nmmb]

Great posts and great music.
Not a fan of the template tough.
Great blog overall!

[playeru]

I decided a template change is in order. I will change it this weekend, I'm starting to search for one less dark. It is not very complicated to change template, right? Should I back up my content just in case?

[playeru]

Ok, it's done, I changed the template. The new one is not very bright either, but the colors are more relaxing I think.

[playeru]

Ok, time for an update. It's been a while, and my blog is looking nice I think. My traffic is currently at between 30-60 unique visitors daily, which is not enough to make real money with it, but it's a start. I feel my blog is alive.

Here's what I've tried to get traffic:

1) Posted in music related forums with my blog as signature. This didn't really worked, I just got some temporary traffic immediately after making the posts, but the traffic never increased, and the visitors were not returning.

2) Search results. This doesn't work either, I don't use any optimization techniques, so the number of search results does not increase with the number of posts. I just have maximum 10 results daily, and it was actually higher a few months ago.

3) This method saved me. A friend of my gave me the idea, and I got good results with it. I write to other music blog owners and I ask them to make a link exchange. Most don't reply back, but some do, and I got really lucky with 2-3 that have very high traffic. I currently have around 35 link exchanges set up, and I get most of my traffic from them. Also, I have visitors that used to get to my blog through the blogroll of other sites, but now they just get to me directly, which is great to see.

I'm always looking for suggestions of what to try. What I've learned so far, is that having a blog is a long time project, it takes time. But I write about something I love, so it's not a drag, I really enjoy it. If I will make some money with it one day, that will be just a bonus.

[Melody]

Hello playeru - I just went back to your blog. It had been quite a while since I had been there.

The first time I reviewed your blog I gave you a positive review because I thought you were doing many things right.

I'm still giving you a nice positive review. You have a clean layout. You look like you're genuinely interested in your niche. It's nice that you DONT have music blaring when you go to your site - I know that would be be a temptation with a music blog.

Most of your taste in music isn't stuff I would listen to, but I can appreciate you have a genuine interest in music.

I would expand your about page a little and tell a little more about yourself.

You have a lot of ads. You've managed to place them well so they aren't too intrusive into content, but you might consider scaling back on ads.

As to your traffic comments:

30 to 60 uniques a day is fine traffic. That's about where my blog started a few weeks into blogging. Your comments about traffic sources are interesting.

1. Your comment about forums - This worked fairly well for me to participate on other coffee/Starbucks blogs. It doesn't bring in huge spikes of traffic but I get several people every single day from those links.

2. Google is amazing. At least 200 people everyday find my blog from google. That works really well. One very very odd thing that I didn't expect, and maybe it will happen to you too:

- So I was blogging along just hitting various topics now and then and finally decided to do a blog entry on the Starbucks City Mugs. Now, it's not the kind of thing that makes me jump up and down, but I realized that a lot of people collect these. Every since then, consistently there are people who find my blog because they've googled for city mugs. That blog post is now almost 8 months old and still people find there way to my site due to it.

The moral of the story is that if you just blog consistently, you'll write a couple of posts here and there that become "anchor blog posts" that continually send you traffic. You might not realize that it will happen but I do think every blog has "anchor" blog entries. Blog entries that are ranked and that google sends you traffic via those articles.

3. I'm surprised ordinary link exchanges work - Most people I think ignore a "blogroll" - On the other hand, this can't hurt. You might develop friendships and create some backlinks. The only downside is that your own blog roll list can become too large and unwieldy.

Keep up the good work!

Once again, I totally think you're heading down the right path.