Pimp My Blog Week 11: AskDanAndJennifer.com

[Everton Blair]

I've been looking forward to this week's Pimp for a while. This week on Pimp My Blog we have AskDanAndJennifer.com from Dan and Jennifer. This should come as a surprise to them as there were about 6 sites in front of them, but none of these were active on the blog or the forum, so they weren't eligible.



If you've visited Dan And Jennifer's blog before then you will know that it's a dating and relationships blog, rather than a tech blog. But, the same basic principles still apply.

Dan and Jennifer have asked for help with:

   1. Increase traffic to 10,000 hits per day
   2. Improve site stickiness - page views per visitor from 1.8 to 3+
   3. Increase site revenue from adsense and affiliate products - without adding more clutter to the site

Ok, let’s get pimping! Remember - please submit all ideas in this thread.

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.

[thilak]

AskDanAndJennifer.com writes on a really interesting topic. The top most leaderboard Google Ad is smartly placed to receive click through. To improve site stickness, I would suggest you to install Related Posts Plugin, so that your readers could browse other related posts.

You can also try changing the theme, you current is theme is extremely simple and decent looking, but I feel you readers need fancy kinda theme (This is just a personal feeling). Swap Featured sites with Email Updates, so that you can increase your subscribers

[fakestar]

The top most leaderboard Google Ad is smartly placed to receive click through.

It's smart and against the Adsense TOS.
They can be banned for this.

[Everton Blair]

I'd be careful with those images as well as they are risky as I think they are probably in breach of Google's TOS.  I would probably move the images above the site title just to be safe.

   1. Increase traffic to 10,000 hits per day

I was looking at your site on a widescreen laptop so my fold is a bit higher than usual, but all that was above the fold was the header banner and links, your images, the text link ads and the left google adsense banner.   Only about one paragraph of the first article was above the fold!  I think the fold on 800x600 is in about the same place so this is bad.  I think if you got more of your content above the fold, you would see more traffic e.g. if you moved your recommended posts higher

   2. Improve site stickiness - page views per visitor from 1.8 to 3+

Have you considered adding a more prominent 'ask dan and jennifer' feature like a traditional agony aunt section?

I also think if you get more content above the fold you'll  get more traffic.  Your site is a bit narrow in my view.  If you made it wider you would be able to get more content above the fold.

   3. Increase site revenue from adsense and affiliate products - without adding more clutter to the site

Which of your units do you get the highest CTR from?  I'm convinced that even if the horizontal unit is getting a higher CTR, you will make money overall if you drop it to improve the CTR on the top left unit and it's CPM because of smart pricing as they top left unit is better positioned in my view.  It is in the hotspot whereas the only thing the top banner has going for it is it takes up a lot of space.  The space it is taking up is killing your fold in my view.

I see you already sell TLA and I'm trying to get you on intellitxt.  Have you tried selling ads directly?  I think if you created an advertising page and contacted some companies directly you could land a big sponsor?

If you make your theme a bit wider you could accomodate a skyscraper banner in the sidebar. 

I'll do more tomorrow when I'm not in a rush

[Everton Blair]

   1. Increase traffic to 10,000 hits per day
   2. Improve site stickiness - page views per visitor from 1.8 to 3+
   3. Increase site revenue from adsense and affiliate products - without adding more clutter to the site


I've just noticed that you have your topics near the bottom of the page - have you experimented with moving them higher on the page?   I think they are important as they give prompts to new users as to what they can expect to find on your site.

I'm not sure if the MBL widget gives the right impression for your site as most of the visitors seem to be guys. 

The links section at the bottom of your sidebar takes up a lot of space.  I really think if your template was wider it would give you more space to play with, and it'd also allow you to display things like the images in your header without them dominating the page.  It'd also allow you to wrap your posts around your top left Google ad in your posts, which will get you a much higher CTR.

Your posts are very text heavy which is ok for a tech site, but I'm not sure about a dating site.   Adding a few images will probably help to soften the look& feel of your site.

Have you had any thoughts about removing the top horizontal banner?

[DanAndJenn]

Hey Thilak,

Thanks, great advice.

Yeah, the top AdSense banner is a great producer for us, but I'm emailing Google to check if it's ok. It doubled our AdSense revenues when we added it, so kinda hard to think about making it go away. :-)

Regardless of the Google stance on it, we'll consider moving it per Everton's comments advice.

On Related Posts:
We did have that, but since you mentioned it, that got me to realize we were putting these too far down, not in the flow, but rather past our opt-in box. Check out what we've got now and let me know what you think:
http://www.askdanandjennifer.com/break-up-and-divorce/break-up-and-divorce-should-you-condemn-yourself-to-a-bad-relationship-for-life-because-of-religion-and-guilt/

The current approach is similar to what JohnTP is doing on his site, which I expect works pretty well for him.

Right after the related posts we also have context-sensitive text-ads that we rotate with our OpenAds ad server.

What do you think about this?
A friend of ours - Jeff Kee - has related posts at The Top of his post, and he does have on average 5 clicks per visitor... but we're not sure if that's what is doing it. Here's an absolutely excellent post on his site (yes, it's a review of our site. :-) ):
http://blog.jeffkee.com/2007/03/18/blog-of-the-week-askdanandjennifercom/

Thanks!
Dan

[DanAndJenn]

Guys,

Thanks for all the great advice. Please keep it coming! We'll consider and implement all we get our hands on.

Come on, don't be shy - I know more of you are lurking. I just know it! :-)

Have an awesome day!
Dan