Pimp My Blog Week 8: paulstamatiou.com

[Everton Blair]

This week we have our first celebrity blogger medium sized blog asking for a pimping.   Many of you will have come across Paul Stamatiou and his blog on your blogging travels.



Paul's blog already has an envious Page Rank of 6 and is well trafficked with roughly 7K daily pageviews, 4.5k unique visitors per day and 4K feed subsribers.  He has however asked for help and ideas on :

    * Increasing readership
    * Monetizing without being ugly i.e. no text ads

Please have a look at his site before adding any ideas in the forum. I’m really interested to see what ideas we come up with collectively. We’re in our 8th week now, so everyone knows the drill now.   Remember all ideas are welcomed - this is a team effort.  Lets see if between us we can make a noticeable difference within a week to Paul’s blog.

Ok, let’s get pimping!

If you would like your site to be included in a future Pimp My Blog then please submit your blog here. Don’t forget that the forum contains many other tools & tips that can be utilised whilst you are waiting.

[AndyBeard]

Fix the feed so it doesn't show with the Firefox overlay - normally just playing with the Feedburner settings helps reset their override

Add email subscription box to the feed

Invest some time in the archives - it is much better SEOed than say Scobleizer, but articles that aren't on the first page in a category are suffering

Add related articles in feeds - much better to do this at the same time as using tagging, but something is better than nothing

Add easy ways to link - many users don't know HTML very well

Monetize the feeds, I know kbcafe is looking for sites to join their Feedburner ring

Maybe add more monetization below the comment area, either before or after a comment is made.

[DidntYouHear]

Here are a few suggestions for increasing subscribers (I accidentally put this as a comment before reading that it went in this forum):

1) Use the somewhat universal subscribe button that looks like a dot with two quarter circles coming out of it (is there a name for this button/better way of describing it?). It’s getting to the point now where that button has become standardized.

2) Where there are links for “blog, archives, contact” etc., put a link to “subscribe”. It will flow with the rest of the links, and will give readers another way of finding your subscribe link.

[Everton Blair]

I think the point about adding an email subscribe button is spot on.

A few other things I would try:

• I think you should add a list of your categories in your sidebar, so that people can find similar posts quickly or new readers can see quickly what your blog is about
• have you considered tagging?  I was amazed how many emails I received asking me to turn tags back on when I temporarily disabled them as readers found them handy for finding similar posts
• I think putting the related posts in the sidebar is a bad idea as most readers will not realise that they are there as they will be focussing on the right column.  I bet if you moved them under the post you would see a big increase in page views per visit
• In terms of monetizing without being obtrusive, have you considered intellitxt?  you can limit how many links are added per post
• Or, how about a banner under the posts?

Will come up with more later in the week.

[AndyBeard]

Removing tags is a terrible thing to do as far as I am concerned from and SEO perspective - some people think it is bad for duplicate content, but it creates perfect LSI related links and I get a large amount of search traffic to the pages created (50% to tag pages)

[Enblogopedia]

Well, it`s hard to give advices to a great blog like yours but...I`ll give it a shot!
First of all...putting a feeds subscribe button is a great idea...first try a big button with same color scheme as your blog. since you don't have a lot of content in your sidebar and you it will go fine with your sponsors images blocks. of course, don't put the button above/bellow these blocks directly!
Placing it under your feeds reader counter will be a great place.

-Using pictures in your posts will be a great idea..(I`ll try it my self in the relaunch after 3 weeks)
Just take a look here and you`ll understand me. The reason of this..is because that you don't have a header..i.e don't have sufficient # of images in your blog, so adding images will make it more spirited/animated.

-one side note.....I saw that you don't have header i.e you don't use H1 header tag for your blog title...so I thought you are using it in your post titles..but, I`m shocked since I saw that you`re using H3 in your Post title!!
I believe using H1 tag will help you raising ur rankings.
Correct me if I`m wrong.

[Everton Blair]

-one side note.....I saw that you don't have header i.e you don't use H1 header tag for your blog title...so I thought you are using it in your post titles..but, I`m shocked since I saw that you`re using H3 in your Post title!!
I believe using H1 tag will help you raising ur rankings.
Correct me if I`m wrong.

Yeah using H1 titles will definitely help, as well as adding a universal subscribe icon.

I think you should also add a page with subscription options like I have.  I don't know why, but this has really given my feed count a boost.  what has also helped is adding a subscription option under every post to encourage search engine visitors in particular to subscribe before leaving.

You say that you don't want TLA ads but you are selling text links directly....If you are worried about the rate you can always tell TLA to set similar rates and you can also veto any ads that they sell.  It seems crazy to turn down a network that is dedicated to selling text links.

BTW are you reading these replies Paul?  we haven't heard from you yet