Monday, March 28, 2011

I GOT REVIEWED!!!

Soooo you guys, I asked Jon Acuff author of STUFFCHRISTIANSLIKE.NET to review my blog and he did!!! Do you guys think he ACTUALLY reviewed it?!?! LOL This is what he said...

Mary
Thank you so much for buying my second book! I really appreciate that. ( I am assuming you did for the blog review. If not, go pre-order my new one, I think you'll dig it. http://www.amazon.com/Quitter-Jon-Acuff/dp/0982986270/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1301245367&sr=8-1)

I am reviewing blogs right now and
just came to yours. Sorry it took me so long. I grossly underestimated how long it would take to work through this list. I apologize for the delay.

I love your blog. Here’s what I did: I took a look at the most recent posts and came up with a few blogging principles I think you should keep in mind going forward.

1.Keep creating such consistent content. Most bloggers struggle with writing lots and you are knocking it out.

2. I'd like to see you do a couple of posts with lists in them. Blog readers really love to have short, easy to digest content and I personally have really seen community grow with posts that allow specific, list based things to react to. (For instance, 10 things you thought about _______)

3. On the community tip, the best way I grew my community on SCL was by joining other communities first. For a year before I launched my site I plugged into other blogging communities and would regularly post comments. Becoming known for generously leaving comments is a great way to encourage people to comment on your blog.

4. Think about creating more “exits and entrances” for your posts. Readers need visual entrances they can use to start reading. Sometimes it’s tempting to have long run on paragraphs, but readers sometimes feel intimidated by big “walls” of text. Try to break up some of your posts into smaller chunks and give readers the chance to “enter and exit” ideas easily.

5. I love that you're using photography/videos. (The guess which one is me photo was great!) Think about what it would look like for you to have a "style guide" when it comes to the photos you select. I love how certain blogs, the pioneer woman or michael hyatt, stay very consistent with the look and feel of their photography. I think you could do that too.

6. I love your header. I think it’s great. It might be cool to see if you could make it a little smaller. I want to make sure that people can quickly get to your content. That’s the part of your site that changes most often. The header is static. A smaller header would give your content more room to shine.

7. Try to keep your blog as simple as possible from a visual standpoint. By no means should you make it boring, (my friends who are photographers have visually stunning blogs) but watch out for things like a parade of different fonts, animated photos, a smorgasbord of videos on top of each other, etc. I’d also be careful about using white text on a black or dark background. Some folks have a hard time reading that. (The black background of your blog makes that kind of hard to read)

8. Always give the most critical pieces of your blog the most critical space on your blog. If you feel like you’ve got a lot of content for people to explore, make sure the archives are high up on the page. If you don’t have an archive section but think the search functionality is more important to your readers, make sure you have the search bar up top. I’ve seen a lot of folks give too much attention to widgets like “where are people reading from,” but those kind of widgets aren’t why people came to your blog. They came to read your great content. Keep that in mind.

Hope that helps

Thanks for buying the book!

Jon

 
Some GOOD stuff and good advice!!!

So what do you all think??? Any suggestions from all my AWESOME readers??? Does anyone knows how to...
1. Make my header smaller
2. Make it so that each blog post only shows half and then says, READ MORE and you click on it to read the WHOLE post.
3. Add the FB, twitter, buzz, email tool bar to the bottom of every post
4. Add the footer at the bottom of each post that says if you liked this post you might also like...
5. Make a COOL signature at the bottom of each post 
THANKS Classic Mary Moment readers for all your help!!! :)