Congrats to the Four Blogs That Will Be Reviewed at #Blogchat!

Thanks to EVERYONE that submitted their blog to be reviewed Sunday night during #Blogchat!  Since there were so many submissions, I decided that we’d review 4 blogs instead of 3.  Now if your blog was not chosen, please submit it again next month, and I’ll try to give priority to the ones that weren’t selected this time.  Also, if you do submit again, please try to add who you are writing the blog for.  This really helps us, especially if you are asking questions about the type of content you should be creating.

So without further adieu, here are the 4 blogs we’ll be reviewing tomorrow during #Blogchat!

Dave Cutler’s Blog at 8:00PM Central!

Here is Dave’s feedback for us:

I’m relatively new to blogging and also hoping the blog can help with my job search so feedback from the experienced pros could benefit me greatly. I’d love to hear people’s thoughts on any or all of the following:

Design/layout: is it clean and visually appealing? Anything specific I should change?

Content: I’m a traditional marketer transitioning more and more into the social media space. I’m trying to demonstrate knowledge and understanding but also cater to the fairly large percentage of my readers who are still quite unfamiliar with most aspects of social media. Am I accomplishing that balance?

Comments: What can I do differently to elicit more comments?

Feels Like Home at 8:15PM Central!

Here’s what Tara want us to look at:

1. Set up – My primary concern is whether I should change things around to make it more like a magazine with channels than a plain old blog. There are a few things I dislike about the design – things don’t always line up just so, the links are either all underlined or all not underlined, and the theme disables threaded comments.

2. Overall design – Is it appealing? Again, thinking about switching themes to Thesis (or something all together different) but a little intimidated by the work it would require.

3. Advertisements – It’s necessary for me to monetize, but I worry that I have too many ads on the page.

4. A landing page – I’m thinking about adding a static landing page. Good idea? Bad idea? I used to have a landing page with snippets of articles, but some readers complained. They wanted a full post on the landing page.

5. What’s missing? I worry that there’s something I’m not doing that I should be doing. I don’t know what it is. Is there something important missing?

New Day New Lesson at 8:30PM Central!

Here is Susie’s areas of concern:

1) Tagline. Right now it is too long. Have some ideas but nothing that I have said wow about.

2) Getting more subscribers. I have been blogging for over a year now. i have about 100 or so subscribers. I would like to up that.

3) Monetization- I have recently thought about monetizing, and put up amazon-though it is not doing anything and am not sure I like the concept. What ideas do you have and would you hold off till I have more subscribers?

4) Design-would love a revamp-can’t afford it right now. Any suggestions? I like the fact that there is the most recent post on top, then favorites and popular and then summaries of other posts underneath.

5) Post titles. Generally I put the “lesson” I have learned as a title. Do you think it would affect the concept of the blog (lesson learned each day) to get creative in the titles?

6) General-what would improve the experience of reading the blog.

7) Length of posts. I do all different lengths. Is that good , bad…doesn’t matter.

Social Butterfly Guy at 8:45PM Central!

Here is DJ’s feedback for us and what areas he has concerns with:

1. Design. It’s a WordPress Thesis Theme. I loved it 2 years ago when my blog launched, but it needs a refresh. I just don’t have the skills to do it myself nor the cash to pay someone as this is a personal blog.

2. SEO Stuff. Again, I’m using WordPress and it has some built-in SEO stuff, but I need help!

3. Content: As my tagline says, “It’s all about people.” My content is – for the most part – about people, but I worry that it’s all over the place.

4. Frequency: I was in a rut awhile ago, but finally got on track again. My last few posts have been some of my most viewed/commented in the past 2 years. But, I’m still struggling with the right balance on frequency.

So there you have it!  Those are the four blogs we will be reviewing Sunday night.  Congrats to DJ, Dave, Tara and Susie, and thanks to ALL of you that submitted blogs, and remember that if your’s wasn’t chosen, please submit it again next month when we do this again!  And if you will be joining #Blogchat on Sunday night at 8pm Central, please do visit these four blogs and make some notes for each of the bloggers so you can share your suggestions.  And this will also be a great way for all of us to get some ideas on how to improve our own blogs in the process!

Now it looks like we all have some homework to do, and some interesting new blogs to discover!