My Music Blog

[Invader_Stu]

Looks good and you seem very interested in the subject that you are writing about which is always a good thing.

[playeru]

Hi Melody,

Thanks so much for your review. I'm glad you think I'm on the right track. Here are some comments about what you said.

1. About forum posts. Yes, they do bring you so traffic, but in my experience the traffic is not long term. For example, if I make one post now, I might get 3 hits from it today, then 2 tomorrow, 1 the following day, and then it will eventually die out. I can safely say I don't get any hits from comments posted months ago. What you said about "anchor posts" is interesting and true for blog posts (I will get to that in a moment), but I don't see that with forum posts.

2. Yes, I do get some search results, the maximum I ever got was about 20 I think, now I usually get under 10 daily. And yes, I do have some posts from a while ago that strangely get me a steady flow of visitors. While others more recent don't. Anyway, Google is strange, you never know what will happen, and I'll be very interested to see my stats in the future.

3. About link exchanges, here's some of the advantages I see. It is something requiring minimum effort, you don't have to do anything, just make your usual posts in the blog. And once you are added to a blogroll, in 90% of the occasions you will never be removed. As for your link list getting too long, I don't see a downside concerning my site. What might happen is that my link partners will feel that they don't get the traffic they are providing, and will remove you from their list. But again, that almost never happens. I found out that most actually don't really care how much traffic they get from me, they just want to be friendly and supportive, or they feel some links will look good on their website. They probably get their big traffic in different ways.

There's one more thing to consider. I think you found a niche, something unique, which is great for you. However, my kind of blogs are all over the net. I like to think that my content is interesting and stands out, but what I write about is something that many wrote too (album reviews). This might explain the somewhat poor search results I get.

Regards,

Mihai

Originally Posted by 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.