Free Blog Review #2 - ComicHacks.com

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Free Blog Review #2 - ComicHacks.com

December 17th, 2007 | 6 comments

Well we’re finally back home after 2 weeks in Germany. It was good to see our friends back there and Claudia’s family, but it was very stressful with our 10 month old son, Aaron. Anyway, it’s good to be back and finally settled in. I’m just about caught up with email and other aspects of my business, so I can finally start blogging more regularly now

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Obviously I’m way behind on my promised posts. I have a million free blog reviews to do and I still have a few more parts left of the Free Ebook Creation and Marketing Guide as well as several post ideas I need to write in between those mentioned, so now it’s time to start catching up.

The second blog review is of Chris’s ComicHacks.com blog.

I have to say, this blog is set up very nicely. There were no “red flags” and very few minor things I would even change. With that in mind this is going to be a fairly short review.

What I Like

1. I like the internal linking structure. You have “recent posts,” recent comments” and “categories” on every post without a big blogroll or “frequent commentators” list of links sucking the PR from your own pages. This is good for retaining PR and guiding the SE spiders.

2. Although I’m not a big fan of WidgetBucks, it’s an extremely relevant advert! A big selection of comic books. How much more relevant could you get for a comic book blog. I’d still play around with adsense or Amazon a bit, but I’d wait until you have 500-1000 uniques a day so you don’t risk driving anyone away in the blogs infancy.

3. I like the images - With a “visual” market like comics, I’m sure all the great graphics are very appealing to the reader! Alot of great bloggers have driven in the fact that images really help posts out and make them more attractive. You’ve certainly done this well!

4. The blog isn’t full of adverts like so many others. Too many adverts will drive people away, especially in niches such as yours outside the IM niche. You may even want to test out some adsense within your posts on top of the WidgetBucks advert. Adsense normally doesn’t convert well for IM related blogs, but non-IM related blogs have much more potential with Adsense.

What Could use Improvement

1. The target audience is most likely not very family with RSS feeds etc. and I’d say they’re certainly not familiar with FeedBurner. I’d replace the FeedBurner “fire” logo with a small RSS image. Only primarily marketers know what FeedBurner is, but more and more everyday people are learning what an RSS feed is and the universal RSS image.

2. Insert a rel=”nofollow” attribute into the feedcount widget, Technorati “Fave This” link, WordPress footer link and entires and comments links in the footer. I’d also either remove or nofollow the feedburner link that appears under your email updates form. Also, the green Technorati button is appearing to the right of the Feedburner “fire” logo in IE7.

3. I would change “enter your email address” to something like “get blog updates via email.” It just seems a bit demanding and some people may have no idea what it is and just ignore it.

4. I personally wouldn’t display the reader count until you’re up to around 100, but that’s just me.

Overall Chris has done a very good job with this Comic Blog.

Job Well Done, Chris!

Popularity: 10% [?]

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6 comments

Chris @ ComicHacks.com (13 comments.)
18th December, 2007 at 12:26 pm

Josh, you rock!

Thanks for the review!

I’ll try to implement the suggestions that you made. I can easily make some of the changes that you suggest. Not really sure how to do some of them, but I’ll figure it out somehow.

Right now I’m really trying to get readership up and will be adding more articles to article directories. I never realized how easy it is to take a blog post and shrinkwrap it for an article. It’s really easy to do and I suggest that more folks do it.

I’m also going to get signed up with OnlyWire to do more social bookmarking.

I’d like to add a Most Popular Posts widget like you have to my site. Will work on that as well.

It just takes time.

But thanka again for the review! I really appreciate it!
Josh Spaulding
18th December, 2007 at 4:50 pm

No problem at all Chris. Just let me know the things you’re not sure about and I’ll be happy to help.

Some people do suggest submit blog posts to article directories, but personally I like to keep my blog content unique.

I use Alex King’s Popularity Contest plugin for the Most Popular Posts.

Good luck with everything. See you around
Chris @ ComicHacks.com (13 comments.)
18th December, 2007 at 5:00 pm

Josh,

What I do with the article for article directories is rewrite a shortened version of the blog post that is completely different from the blog post.

Since EA accepts articles as short as 250 words, it’s reall easy to rewrite a shortened version of the blog post that’s unique and put it on EA.

For example, I took this blog post -> http://www.comichacks.com/x-forcekill-squad-im-sold and made it into this EA article -> http://ezinearticles.com/?X-Force-1-Should-Marvel-Comics-Have-A-Kill-Squad?&id=845628

See what I mean?

What do you think of that idea? I’m also thinking of doing other variations of the same concept for future articles.

Thanks!
Josh Spaulding
18th December, 2007 at 5:57 pm

Sounds like a plan to me As long as it’s unique you can’t go wrong. Good thinking.
Chris @ ComicHacks.com (13 comments.)
18th December, 2007 at 6:00 pm

Haha! Thanks, Josh!

Quick question: have you ever used JetSpinner or JetSubmitter before? If so, what were your thoughts?

Thanks!
Josh Spaulding
18th December, 2007 at 7:53 pm

I’m not a big fan of spinners, so no I haven’t used them. I do like submitters if they have the option to semi-manually submit as Article Post Robot does. I haven’t used JerSubmitter though.