Now this might sound strange. Why would I want to create another blog in a niche that I’m temporarily not enjoying? Well, I discovered that it wasn’t the niche that was getting me down, it was my post research and writing style that I sometimes got tired off. Funk13 is more of a facts and ideas kind of blog, I give advice and tips but rarely share my thoughts and opinions on issues in the make money blogging world. My new blog however enabled my to create a more relaxed kind of blog, a blog that’s more orientated towards my personality. I found that expressing my opinions on one blog and giving advice on another has really helped take a way the repetitive nature of make money blogging. If I can’t find anything to post about on Funk13, I go ahead and post on Funk13’s evil twin. After writing my evil post, I usually find that I can write a more practical post on here.

Running two blogs isn’t as hard as you might think. It’s even easier because they are both in the same niche. If I write a post on here I can easily go ahead and write a more light hearted version on my other blog. Try it, you’ll see what I mean. Having two different style blogs in the same niche also introduces you to the different types of blogger, bloggers who come here would probably hate my ”evil” blog and vice versa. A great things is, I now have a make money blog that can I try and monetize to death. It’s a place where I can try out different make money plans on. I haven’t started to monetize this place properly yet. But when that time comes, because I’ve tried things over at Mr.Evil, I’ll have a better understanding of what might just work.

I’m not saying that this is going to be the end of all of your blogging troubles, you might think it’s a terrible idea. The most important thing is though, it’s helped me almost completely eliminate the blogging blues which can only benefit my main make money online blog, Funk13.com

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Long and Informative
Yeah, these types of posts may make you sound clever, but half the time the people writing them haven’t got a clue what they’re on about. If I’m lucky and do find a post where the author does know what he’s talking about, I’ll often fall asleep half way through because the author fails to keep my interest or it’s flooded with big words or subjects I don’t understand. You’ve got to have a flair for writing, know your stuff and have a sense of humor if you want to pull these types of posts off.

Lists
Lists! Arghhh, I hate them! (hmm, this post is kind of a list) I guess they’re good if you haven’t got anything to say, but man, use your brain and think of something to say. Actually I’ll take some of that back. Lists are good if you’re listing the biggest dickheads in the make money online world.

Reviews
Unless you’re reviewing something good I tend not to bother wasting my time with these types of posts. There are to many blogs out there now flooded with paid reviews! Yeah, it’s nice to make money but your blog just turns to crap! People will eventually tire of your blog and quit coming back. If you’re posting lots of reviews, then make sure you double your relevant content to even things out. This doesn’t apply to review blogs of course.

Voicing Your Opinion
If you’re going to voice your opinion try and make it interesting, most people probably aren’t interested in how you found some money and handed it in to the police station. If I see someone writing their opinion on how much somebody sucks, Bam! I’m straight in there, I’ll read everything the person has to say and I’ll leave a comment. The problem of writing posts like this all the time is kind of the same the same problem as writing reviews all the time. Instead of tiring of your crappy reviews, people will tire of hearing your big mouth all day.

Interviews
Interviews can be fun to read if the person been interviewed is interesting. Interviews with the guy who created the latest money scam bore me to death. This is mainly becasue the same questions are asked over and over again ”how long did it take” ”what you did before” Boring! Now if you were to ask ”Do you care that this program is just a scam and people wont make money at all” I’d definitely be interested.

Ass Bandits (Part 2)
Basically were you blog about others just for the sake of getting noticed by the blog you’re blogging about. Pfff, load of crap! Don’t do it unless you want the reputation of been a chow bum boy.

Guest Posting
This has it’s benefits, it will get you noticed by a whole new audience and expose your talents. I tend not to do it though because why on earth should I feed another blogs content just for the sake of 5 minutes of fame. Some people say its good to guest post and others agree with me. It’s up to you decide on this one.

Well I’ve looked at the most popular methods of posting, and I’m still undecided. One thing I have noticed though is that all of the methods seem to have more bad points than good. Maybe it’s just the way I look at things. I seek out the negatives rather than the positives. Strange thing is, it’s the total opposite of how I look at the real world. So, maybe if I start to think more positively towards the content I write, I might just start to create those killer posts.

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1. The Look And The Feel

Making a good first impression is very important. When a person visits your blog they don’t pick up on content to start with, they pick up on the look and their first thoughts are probably going to be one of these two things. ”Hmmm, this blog looks nice” or sadly it could be something along the lines of ”Wow, my eyes are on fire” I’m not a Web Design Guru but I’m proud of the fact that I’ve had many people tell me that my blog looks nice. All I’ve done is keep my blog looking as clean as possible. If I don’t need something I wont use it. To many blogs nowadays remind me of websites, they’re crammed full other little things that draw the reader away from the most important thing, the content. If you’re not giving your content maximum exposure and making sure it’s the second thing a visitor picks up on, why bother using a blogging platform?

Even if you’re useless at Blog Design it shouldn’t stop you from improving the look of your blog. Nowadays people are more than happy to give you a helping hand. Yes, sometimes you will have to pay but if you look around forums and on web design blogs people are more than happy to do it for free. It helps them improve their skills and it’s something extra to add to their portfolios. If you’re adventurous? Google search is packed full of tutorials on blog design, I’ve used many and after a few attempts it pays off.

I’ve posted a little something here about how a slow loading or what I like to call ‘’sloth like” blog will scare aware visitors. It’s very important to keep your blog as user friendly as possible.

2. Stranger Friendly

If you’ve worked hard enough on SEO (Search Engine Optimization), the traffic visiting your blog via search engines will most likely have searched for a subject relating to your blogs content. But every now and then you get what I like to call a stray. Someone who wasn’t searching for anything relating to your blog but found your blog anyway. As you can see in the image, some poor guy has searched for a way to get home and the results have brought up my blog. So, I have to think to myself, if this person stopped bye would they instantly close their browser? Or would they be a little curious and want to find out what my blog is about? As I mentioned in point 1, the first thing the ‘’stray” will pick up on is the look, I think the look is o.k so I probably don’t have to worry about that. The next thing is letting the lost boy know what kind of site he/she has discovered. This is an area I feel my blog fails badly in and is something I need to work on straight away.

You see, this blog offers blogging advice, tips for making money and I discuss my other online ventures, yet when you first visit funk13.com it’s very hard to notice any of these things straight away. You’re greeted with a big picture of five funny looking dudes, some crap about advertising and a link to a custom graphics section. It’s giving Mr can’t get home the wrong impression of my blog.

How Can I Improve My First Impression?

1. Change my header and make sure it relates to the subject of my blog.
2. Remove ”Advertise for free” and ”Custom Graphics” links from my nav bar and place them in the side bar. I should then replace them with something to do with making money or blogging.
3. I could bring my ”Recent Posts” section further up the page so the visitor can see what is actually going on here.
4. I could bring my ”Recent Comments” section further up the page too. This will show the visitor that my blog is active and it might also draw the visitor in to a discussion.

If you’re able to keep hold of new visitors and make them want to return to your blog then you’re definitely on to a winner. Being able to do this with a make money blog is even better. The more visitors, the more chance you stand of actually making money.

3. What Are You Trying To Acheive

If you aren’t quite sure about you goals, you need to have a good think about them. Not knowing what your blogging for is going to slow down the rate of your blogs progression. If you’re a personal blogger, your goal is provide people with stories of what has happened in your life today. A fairly simple goal and easily achievable. But when you move in to niche topics, sorting your goals can become a little more difficult. If you’re in the make money blogging area, which specific area of that niche are you targeting? Are you looking to make money of your visitors? Are you hear to simply offer advice on making money? Make money blogging is such a huge area, it would be very difficult to cater for all aspects of it. I feel it’s best to pick one area of make money and stick to it. I offer random tips and share my own experiences, I’ve tried making money from this blog but I just wasn’t cut out for it.

One thing you must always remember is what ever your goals are for your blog, your readers are the most important thing. You need to listen to them, interact with them but most importantly, give them something to come back for!

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Your host sucks
Your hosting company may be the main cause of your sloth like blog. If you’re on paid hosting and your blog is slow, the best thing to do is email them and ask them what the hell is going on. Be polite but straight to the point. If they tell you it’s a temporary glitch give them a week to sort it out. If that week is up and there’s no real change, tell them your going to move hosts. This has worked for me in the past. Hosting companies hate bad reviews and they don’t want to loose your $7 a month.

Free hosting may be attractive, but at the end of the day it’s free. Your free hosting company has no real obligation to provide you with 100% up time and turbo charged loading times. If you moan at a free host most of the time you’ll get told to shut up and to lump it or leave it. If you’re serious about your blog you really need to get your ass over to a paid host. Paid hosting isn’t that expensive, I pay $9.95 a month for another one of my sites which is on the middle of rage hosting package.

Java Script
A lot of widgets, ad banners, news readers etc use JavaScript. Having to many of these will slow down your blog. Some of them eat up a lot of resources, some are poorly coded and some just refuse to load. Think to yourself, do I really need to be displaying my local weather on my blog? I doubt anyone really pays any attention to it.

Flash
Blogs full of flash sometimes cause a persons CPU memory usage to shoot through the roof. You have to remember that not everyone on the internet has a twin turbo charged p.c with a 100mb broadband connection. Obviously, if you’re a flash games blog, you’re going to need to display lots of flash but there’s lots of things you can do to prevent flash lag. Google is your friend. Here’s one example. If you’re displaying games on your front page why not take a screen shot of the game and place it on the front page instead of the actual game? Then just make sure the screen shot is linked to the page where the actual flash game is displayed.

Audio/Video
A lot of people hate videos, nearly all hate audio on blogs. Do you really need to be playing music on your blog? Apart from slow loading times, videos and audio have scared the crap out of me many a time. If Audio and Video are essential for your blog, the least you can do is give the visitor the option to play it or not. Doing so will help loading times and it will save a lot of people from having to change their underwear. Never have them set to auto start.

Images
Images are only a problem if you haven’t reduced the file size and the image size. If you have a huge image, resize the thing, or display it as a thumbnail nail first and then display it on its own page. File size is also important, the larger the size of the file the slower it will load. I use photoshop for all of my image editing, when it’s time to save an image, I always make sure the preview is of medium quality. I never display the full high quality image on my front page.

These are just a few ideas, there are many many more. Just remember, if your blog looks and loads well for you it doesn’t neccessarily mean it’s going to be the same for your visitors. Always remember to test your blog on I.E and Firefox as well. But that’s only if the option is available to you.

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Lets face it, default WordPress themes, Blogger (ewwww) default themes and all Drupal themes suck. Basically any preinstalled theme on any blogging package is rubbish. So, when starting your new blog, getting a new theme is a must. If you want people to hang around your make money online blog you really need to make it appealing and attractive. You need to grab the readers attention. A boring old over used theme isn’t going to do it.

If I come across a blog with the default wordpress theme I instantly move on. The content might be good but God Damn! Your theme is depressing. When I come across a blog with an original look, I like to hang around and explore it. In doing this I’m been exposed to the blog owners content. This is what you want. I’m not saying my theme is the dogs B!^”&$*S but I’ve made an attempt to keep my theme nice and unique. I’ve taken a free WordPress theme and now I’m slowly customising it to the look I want.

You don’t have to pay mega bucks either to get yourself kitted out with a nice new theme. There are 100’s of theme sites. Yes, a lot of the themes are crap. But eventually amongst all the crap you will find a decent theme and with some customisation, you can turn a decent theme in to a brilliant theme.

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