9 replies to this topic

[Kai2810]

Hi everyone. Here's the link www.InternetMarketing4Noobs.com

General
Is this site completed or under construction?

Yep it's completed, built on Wordpress 2.2.1.
I'm constantly upgrading, platform wise or installing new plugins for my site.

If completed:
How long has the site been up?

I started my blog at Wordpress.com on 16 Dec '06, move my blog over to my own hosted server on 15 Jan '07

SEO
Do you have incoming links?

Yes, mainly from 5 areas;

• Articles I submitted to lots of article directories, used ArticleMarketer.com, but later manually submitted to 20 high PR directories for each article
• Forums, here and elsewhere
• Comments I left at blogs I frequently visit
• Just started on using Squidoo and social networking sites
• Submitted to a number of website directories with PR 4+, submitted to DMOZ a while ago, but not sure if it's listed there yet.

What keywords are you targeting?

Mainly internet marketing and affiliate marketing. But I have been posting more than just about these two areas, with posts about Wordpress...seminars I attended...

The articles I have posted at my blog, under the "Articles & Important Learning Experiences" each have a targeted keyword I found using Keyword Discovery and Wordtracker.

I also just installed a SEO plugin for my blog, and still in the process of adding meta descriptions/keywords for every page. Quite tedious...only done so for the most recent posts.


Do you want your code reviewed for errors or improvements?

Yes please.

Marketing
Who is your target audience? Think about:
Gender Both
Nationality Anyone who can speak and read English
Age Range Late teens to working adults
Income/Education level Any level, mainly towards those who are interested in establishing another source of income through the Internet
Likes/Dislikes People who have been "exploited...cheated...misled" by those sales pitches out there. People who dislike those long, bombastic sales letters.

The more you tell us about your target audience, the better. We don't know them- you do!

My main target audience is basically anyone who is looking to establish a small online business and is really confused by what they are seeing out there, or not sure where to start off.

I'm also targeting people who have spent thousands attending courses, buying ebooks but have yet to earn back the money because they are just taking in information but not putting them into action.

Why is your site different from sites selling/offering similar info/goods/services? Why will someone want to do business you?

A majority of the sites I have seen so far are just recommending one internet marketing eBook/course after another, getting them to click on the affiliate links they have posted on their sites. But they never really show them how to settle down on whatever they have brought, and putting those techniques they learnt into action. They just keep cramming newbies/noobs with more information they already brought/have, and getting money out of them in the process.

My blog aims to help recommend at most 2 Internet Marketing eBooks that I have found to be effective and still using myself. On top of that I aim to give information on how to handle information overload (from my own experience and what I found to work for me so far), how to quickly find reliable information on Internet Marketing out there on the Internet.

I'm trying to brand my site/myself as someone who has been through what my target readers have been through, and only providing honest views, my own personal learning experiences and information to help my readers, and not one who is just trying to sell them something.

How important is usability?

Very Important.

Is my site easy to navigate?
Does the links to the various parts of my site bring visitors to what they think they are being brought to?
Is the information posted, my style of writing, too long winded? Will most visitors want to read through the entire post and give their thoughts/comments on it?
The posts I written, are they easy to understand? Am I able to bring across the message through my writing?
Will people want to read through the information I presented?

What is the purpose of the site? (inform, sell, online community, support B&M business, contact info only, etc)

Basically to build up trust amongst my readers, and recommend/sell them the internet marketing eBooks/hosting/tools I am using, through affiliate links.

By middle of August, I will have a free report up for download to collect email contacts, build up my list, and eventually introduce subscribers through my email about the Network Marketing program I am in.

Design
Do you want design suggestions?

Yes please. Especially the portion about the way information is presented on my blog. Font of readable size?

Thanks in advance!
Kai Wei

Edited by Kai2810, 07 July 2007 - 01:55 AM.

[Jill]

You're going to need some links that are actually "votes" for your site from other people, not just ones you put up yourself.

The types of links you mentioned really aren't going to count for much, if anything, in the scheme of things. And in such a competitive market, you have to be sure that tons and tons of people love your site and want to tell others about it.

[torka]

I'm in my 40s (or as I prefer to think of it, extremely late 30s ) and I found your font size readable.

Two things I would suggest:

For usability, when you want to emphasize text, use italic or bold, not underlining. Many people will interpret underlined text as a link. Since you don't actually underline your links, this could present a usability issue, with people trying to click on underlined text that isn't a link, and therefore possibly missing text that isn't underlined, but is a link.

(Not that you need to underline your links; I think the color change, bold and mouseover effect is enough, personally; just don't confuse the issue by underlining text that isn't a link.)

Second suggestion: if you haven't already (and based on a quick look it appears you may not have), consider installing the SEO Title Tag plugin. Don't be scared by the "beta" designation; I've been using it for awhile now and haven't noticed any problems (and in any case, it's easy to back out of a WP plugin if it doesn't work for you). In this case, it will give you an easy way to create optimized HTML title tags for each page and post, independent of the "display" title you may give the article itself.

--Torka

[Kai2810]

@ Jill

You're going to need some links that are actually "votes" for your site from other people, not just ones you put up yourself.

The types of links you mentioned really aren't going to count for much, if anything, in the scheme of things. And in such a competitive market, you have to be sure that tons and tons of people love your site and want to tell others about it.

Yep, I understand that those links are actually not really votes from others. But for now, while I'm pushing up the quality of my content, having self-submitted links pointing back to my blog is the way to go to get traffic first, from what I learned.

When I have reached the stage where my content is being spread through word-of-mouth, I will probably stop submitting to article directories. It takes up A LOT of time!

@Torka

Thanks for pointing that out! Will be digging my CSS files in a moment and get the stuff fixed. One problem with the theme I'm using is that it converts text which I italicized, into bold text. I have to find and change the CSS lines to get that right...

On the SEO Title Tag...hmm...I thought Wordpress will automatically use insert the title of the post into the Title tag, and I FORGOT the importance of Title Tags too! Just went over to the SEO forums and read up on it.

BTW, Torka, you heard of the "All-In-One SEO Pack" plugin? It's quite new, and I found it useful. It places, under your text editor, fields for you to enter your Title Tag (independent of the display title too), Meta Description and Meta Keywords, all in one!

I have also just updated my "My Purpose" (About me) page at my blog. It's at the bottom of the page. From your experience, do you think the audience I'm targeting can be considered a good sub-niche in Internet Marketing? I know I can't dance with all the top guns out there.

Thanks you Jill and Torka for spending the time to look through! More criticism are welcomed and needed!

[torka]

No, hadn't heard about that plug in! Thanks for the heads-up... I'll check it out.

--Torka

[Kai2810]

Sigh....

The wordpress theme I'm using has a very complex CSS system...If I increase the size of the font, ALL the fonts in the them goes up as the theme author uses the em to control ALL the font sizes of ALL the different parts of the theme.

And the links...if I set the links to be underline...ALL links, including the Blog title gets underline...looks ugly. Got to manually insert a different CSS class to all the links I placed in all my content so far...

Torka, you may find the text size readable, but due to the length of some of my post coupled with the small text size I'm currently using, does it put you off?

[torka]

For me it was fine. Others may have a lower tolerance for small font sizes, I dunno.

What bothers me more than small font size is too-tight line spacing. I like to use somewhere around 1.5 ems for line spacing, personally. Again, that's just me, YMMV.

--Torka

[Kai2810]

Update!

I just changed the line-height (spacing) to 1.6em. It looks better, more readable for me. I also changed the list bullets to a solid disc.

Here's the screenshots comparison. To avoid cluttering up this post, I posting only the screenshots taken before I saved the changes.

The line-height.


The bullets


I also changed my blog to display only excerpts on the front page, so visitors can quickly browse through to see which posts they want to read.

How's the changes? Easier on the eyes?

[torka]

I like the new line height.

--Torka

[ceuyan]

the design looks to have potential.

header color and navigation look really good but when i scroll down to the content it looks like you only have 2 colors. try adding more color to your site