Case Study: Successful Blogging Tactics for SurvivalStew

There is no magic formula for success. But there are strategies to set your ladder against the right building.  This post presents a case study of one blogger who is heading in the right direction.  His name is John Mellem, owner of Survival Stew.  John recognizes learning as a key component in his success. Follow along as he enhances his blog to attract visitors and increase income.

Lesson #1 - ask for help

Student Question:

Dear SBA,

jrmellem has posted a new message to your shoutbox:

hello, timetheif gave me your name as someone who could help a beginner using blogger. Can you check my blog and provide any suggestions?

Guidance Response: First set common ground for the 'learning' or guidance.

SBA: "I... What do you think you need help with? Bloggers need long & short term goals, so it could be increase RSS, monetize blog X dollars, more comments, etc. Suggestions need to relate to your goals." [see Blogging Goals: Why and How to Define ]

John: "I would like to monetize 100 dollars for a short term goal. I only have $ (amount omitted) now. I am not familiar with RSS. I have adsense and a amazon store and have joined about 6 different groups, followed, commented, posted guest articles, etc.

SBA: Gave a broad brush response to start the dialog.

Monetizing- You have Adsense and Amazon store related to survival. I know it's difficult to make money on Adsense without lots and lots of visitors. (Blog has less than 800 page impressions to-date, mostly from a while back) I suggest you break your goals by source. e.g. if you make $2/mo, let's say $1.50 is Amazon and $.50 is Adsense. Then you may want to concentrate on Amazon, setting a bigger goal like $2.00 and smaller one for Adsense. $100 may be unreasonable for short term. Then you need to look for ways to reach that $2/mo quickly.  [See Ad Networks Series ] Some suggestions for your blog:

• For Adsense a larger ad between posts might work better.
• Install the Google custom search bar which also can provide income.
• Add icons for your popular books, clicking would take them to the store... Write a review of some books.

RSS- You must learn about post subscriptions via Feedburner and start telling visitors to sign up for your feeds by reader or by email. [ Add subscribe icons to your Blogger sidebar.]   Sign up for Google Analytics and start monitoring, tracking and reacting. [see How to Keep Track of Your Blog Visitors.]

Promotion- Guest article are good. make sure the link back goes to a post your write (a landing page) to 'convince' people to follow your blog , show some of your best posts, create a contest, use BlogCatalog broadcast, create friends of people with similar blog tags as yours. Send about 1 hr/day promoting. Check you new RSS count in a month to see effect. Visit your commentators' blogs and reciprocate. Sign up for their Google friends gadget --- to build up your community.

Content- Read about writing good content, use photos to attract attention -- e.g. for your recipes. Use keywords and categories and tags that people will find in Google searches.  Make your titles 'catchy'. [see Content section of Top 100 Articles to Help You With Blogging ]

Design- Content is most important along with Promotion, but you may want to spruce up your default Blogger theme.  Your goal is to make money but that means people reading several posts, viewing several pages and clicking! If you have only a few readers, then you may have too many ads (can turn people away). Some suggestions:

• Move the second ad in sidebar and make it horizontal above the first post on each page --- key ad should be above the fold. Reduce the number of ads until reader count grows.
• I'd tighten up the header (takes up a lot of space, wordy)
• provide more navigation (categories list, contact form/info for feedback)
• add the date on your posts.

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Lesson #2 - take action

Wisdom is knowing what to do next, skill is knowing how to do it, and virtue is doing it-David Jordan

Here are some of the actions John took over a one week period, applying new tools and concepts. First take a peek at the before and after snapshots. Click the thumbnails to see the full pages, stored online. Quite a lot of action and learning going on!

Before

After

Monetizing

John had trouble with placement of his AdSense ads. He had two in the sidebar,  and wanted one after each post (initially he had were over 6 posts per page but ads were not showing or one would show sporadically).

Guidance:“Don’t forget Google allows only 3 AdSense for content units, three link units and two search boxes per page. John tried the ad above the post and decreased the number of posts per page so that he had one after the fifth post and at the bottom of all posts in the column. He set a smaller income goal for Adsense on a monthly basis.

“Adsense nonsense” -  remember Google's maximums for ads on one page (regardless of where they are placed — counts sidebar, footer, before posts, in between posts….)… otherwise Google will leave large blank spaces and turn it into nonsense….

RSS

He signed up for a Feedburner account and added RSS and email signup boxes in the sidebar. The count went from 1 to 18 in a couple of days, with the expected fluctuations. He had more readers than he thought --- no wonder since he was not tracking them and comments (or lack of)  are not reliable indicators.  John also started a Google Analytics account --- stay tuned for more in our future updates.

Promotion

I advised John to use Google searches for keywords like "survival preparedness or emergency" to contact bloggers in the same niche. Ask for reviews or guest posts. He was already an active member of several blog carnivals which published his posts and linked back to the blog.

John: "Hey SBA, I found someone to guest post 2 articles." Stay tuned for more in our future updates.

Content

The blog content is on target for John's niche and he's been told by a Blogged.com reviewer that "the content and writing are great." However we know that the right images can do a lot to draw reader to the content. So John added one image per post and a few in the sidebar for popular books and recipes. He's giving more thought to post titles in terms of SEO and sparking visitor interest in reading further. Also paying closer attention to titles and text that have the google search words like survival or whatever keyword people use to find such information in his posts.

The footer had too much content related to the 'privacy policy'. It took up about 40 lines. So he created a  post to hold all of that text and shortened the footer to two lines with a text link to the privacy disclosure. Stay tuned for more in our future updates.

Design

Remember the post Does Your Blog Design Scream Success? John requested a review from another blog and this was the response (a wake up call):

"a higher rating may be given if the design were different than the ones offered on Blogspot. Countless bloggers use the template and blogs that have a more original design, tend to get higher ratings in that area.
Also the color of the font makes it a bit difficult to read as it tires the eyes after a while. Adding pictures would benefit the blog as well."

Changes he made to start screaming success:

1. Header- reducing the size of the header and description --- it was pushing the content too far down on the page. John changed the header to cover one line and reduce the description down from six lines.
2. Text - changed to black for legibility.
3. The template is the basic default Blogger template named 'Scribe.'  It has  a wide border, very narrow post column with one sidebar. The page wrapper is a simulated paper texture. John thought the only way to spruce up would be to switch to WordPress which he did not want at this time.Guidance: Using email messages I told John how to widen the columns with just three  changes to the template html. In effect we changed the total width of the two columns from 700 to 900 --- sidebar from 150 to 255 and content from 430 to 450. At the same time we eliminated the paper texture in favor of a solid color by changing four lines. An additional line changed the sidebar to a light cream for contrast.  I plan to write a full tutorial on my blogspot blog [one day.. ]
4. Visitors should see  survival store instead of
   

   survival store

   http://astore.amazon.com/survivalstew-20

   Guidance: How-to-do this? - highlight the words you want to be clickable like great books, press the little green icon on the Blogger editor (createlink) and a window opens up. Paste or type the full url and close the window! Similarly with images, just highlight and set the link url.

Summary

Success Lessons: Whenever you're ready for the next rung on the ladder of success, look for a hand to steady the ladder as you climb. That hand can be a person or many persons you've befriended online or an anonymous forum member or even someone else's blog post or tutorial.  This case study was over a very short time, but demonstrates visible progress.

Call to Action: Put your efforts into learning, understanding and getting more experience under your belt. Create a test blog to try things that you're unsure of.  Prioritize your efforts and set short measurable goals. Periodically review your progress and refine your plans.

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