Yeepage: Blogging Tips And Money Making Journal

YeePage gives blogging tips for money making. In this saturated niche the standard is constantly being raised. Buying a review ($45 on Blogging Fingers) is a great way to get the opinions of other bloggers on how to stay ahead of the game and that is what Simon from Yeepage smartly chose to do.

How I Would Change The Yeepage Design

• Take down the RSS feedcount until the subscriber numbers don’t fluctuate below at least 100 (I first showed mine at 150).
• The purpose of the sidebar links needs to be addressed. Loyal readers will be up-to-date with the latest posts and new readers should be shown the best posts. Therefore the Recent Posts widget doesn’t serve a very useful purpose and I would advise removing it and putting the ‘Most Popular Posts’ in its place. Recent Posts is good for news blogs which Yeepage is not.
• Too much space is given to encouraging comments. The DoFollow badge, the Recent Comments and the Top Commentors widgets are all used. The best way to encourage comments is to write content that stimulates people to respond. Offering a “bribe” of a free backlink is fine but 3 sidebar items is too much. With fewer widgets on display, more focus is put on the ones that remain.
• Remove the calendar and the badges that show off the Alexa and Technorati rank until more impressive rankings are gained.
• Get a more distinctive graphical header. Personally I do like the crispness of the black header, but in terms of branding it doesn’t make it stand out from the crowd. I say this to almost every review buyer. Having a custom logo/header graphic is one of the easiest and cheapest way to brand a blog. At Digital Point Forums one can be bought for little more than $10. A free alternative would be to stick with the current header and create a square version of it to use on sites like MyBlogLog as a logo. I noticed the banner ad Simon bought on Blogging Fingers does not match the colours of Yeepage. Branding is all about repetition and this needs sorting.

Perhaps a separate blog should be started to accommodate for the scuba diving hobby because it’s hard to figure out how “buying oxygen” will interest readers who want to make money online.

I’ve come up with quite a few improvements for the design but really they are boiled down to un-cluttering the sidebar and sorting out the branding of the site. Other than those things I find the design crisp looking and a pleasure to look at.

Content Improvement Tips

• Be Consistent in capitalizing the 1st letter of each word in the titles. The simplest way is to just have them all capitalized e.g. “How To Write A Headline That Will Grab Your Readers Attention” rather than How to Write a Headline that will grab your Readers Attention.
• Stick to teaching what Yeepages has been successful in. For example there is an article on How to Sell Your Blog Real Estate but I can see that only 1 banner spot of the 6 has actually been sold (the others are affiliate banners).
• Be more selective with choosing affiliate programs to promote. Friendfinder’s Group can be a big money maker but does it really match the readership of YeePages? Also the YeePages review of TNX was very positive and based on little evidence. For readers to be compelled to take action each review can’t just contain a few basic stats and praise about the program but a personal opinion as well as criticism is essential.

Conclusion

Simon is clearly a clever guy and I can see Yeepage growing bigger and better. To summarize all my improvement tips with YeePage the issue is about choosing the focus of the site and understanding that sometimes less is more. For example on Yeepage AdSense is used alongside the private ad spots, lowering their value.

I’m sure Simon would appreciate your thoughts on Yeepage. Why not go check it out now and consider subscribing to the RSS feed.

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