Blog Review: Retireat21

This is was a paid review by Don Gilbert of mastersofseo. If you are interested in a paid review, check out my advertise page for more information. As you can see I cover all the aspects of your site. This is a great chance for you to get constructive criticism about your site.

Today I’m presenting you with retireat21.com which is administered by Michael Dunlop

Blog Template

The blog has a nice color scheme, with the green, grey and white coming together nicely. But the blog looks very cluttered, he has every possible feature I’ve seen on a blog. He’s got ads, blog posts, featured posts, recent posts, recommended sites, favorite sites, forum activity, about page, recent interviews, an ebook, the list goes on and on. The site looks very cluttered and needs a severe spring clean up job. There are several empty white spaces at the bottom of the page for some reason, which make it look like he wasn’t finished. The header and footer, are crammed with pages, and thus looks unprofessional. Very congested site appearance, with gives you a bad first impression.

Final Grade
4/10

Jonathan’s Suggestions:
Prioritize! Figure out which of your widgets are most important, and get rid of the rest, because right now it looks like you’re trying to cram too much information, into too small a space. This would be my opinion, but ditch the Michael’s favorite sites, or make it smaller and in the footer. Get ride of a lot of the pages. Make the about box on the sidebar, into a page. I don’t know how much money the shop is making, if it’s a lot then maybe it’s worth it. But I would recommend making that into a page at the top, or getting rid of it. A section called Retire@21 products would be a great way to advertise all of the things you’re selling. You could put your e-book and t-shirt links in this. I would recommend putting it where the about page is now, you’d probably sell more, and it would look more organized. Ditch the news post, and stop posting them as the featured posts. I would recommend either doing your featured interviews at the bottom, or just make it your most recent blog posts. I think if you made larger email/RSS buttons, you could improve your subscriber results. Maybe you could remove the search box, and then stretch the buttons to fill that space.

Navigation Through Site

All the pages are clearly in the middle of the header, but there are so many of them it almost makes it difficult. There are several unnecessary pages like news, creating websites, and then directory, hasn’t even been used for anything yet. It just has several test posts. Right now the site has recent posts/interviews options, so you can really take advantage of this. He seems to really be stressing new visitors seeing past posts.

Jonathan’s Suggestions:
I think instead of all the different widgets showing past posts, and nice archives system could do the job. You could set up a nice one on the homepage, and that would accomplish everything you are trying to do. Just make sections like Featured posts, Must Reads…

Final Grade
6/10

Extra Pages

There are Lots of extra pages. In total there are 37 page links, that is the most I’ve ever seen, and probably will ever see. Does that mean it’s bad? Not necessarily because each of them has great, informative content, but I think they could be compiled somewhat.

Final Grade 5/10

Jonathan’s Suggestions:
Many of these pages are very small, and have a couple posts on them, then seemed to have been forgotten about. Ones like website ideas, and press releases, should be removed. There are many others on there can aren’t necessary, and could be compiled into fewer ones. Again a nice archives system could help eliminate part of this problem.

Content Quality

This is the clear selling point of the blog. It is one of the top blogs on the internet in this respect. It has some incredible interviews of famous internet entrepreneurs like Yaro Starak, Darren Rowse, Aaron Wall, and tons of others. He has lots of great lists, ranking top young moneymakers, and top bloggers. These lists have been really popular. He also runs a full-time blog, and forum, that both have great content on them. This has, and always will be the selling point of this site.

Final Grade
9/10

Jonathan’s Suggestions:
There isn’t much to comment on as far as content wise. What you do, you do great. However, my only thought would be, is more How to articles. Maybe an article on the affiliate marketing, or site flipping or something. I get all fired up after reading all these success stories, to get out their and start making money, so some tutorials would be a great help to bloggers trying to take it to the next level.

Ads

There are five different sets of ads on his homepage, but you would probably never of known that if I hadn’t told you. It has two affiliate marketing buttons, for Blogging to the Bank. One google adsense ad, and a set of text links and 125×125 ads.

Final Grade
7/10

Jonathan’s Suggestions:
They really aren’t much of a problem, but I just wonder if they are worth it. It doesn’t seem like the google adsense ad would make enough money to make it worth it, maybe it does but it just seems out of place, especially with it’s irrelevant ads. Google ads don’t seem to do a good job of having relevant links typically, so I would consider switching if not taking it down. There are two affiliate marketing boxes which are the exact same. They are right next to each other, and so it seems rather pointless to have both. I would recommend removing one. The text link and 125×125 ads are fine, they are too big, and I’m sure are good money makers. It’s rare to see all the text links filled up so I guess he’s making good money from them.

Site Stats

This site boasts an impressive 70K Alexa Ranking, with a PR of 3, which is ok for a blog. It only has a Technorati ranking of 118K but these links are purely through direct links. He does almost no commenting, and so unlike most blogs that have manipulated their way to a high ranking to lots of commenting, these are all purely from blogs that liked his content. So in reality it has a much better ranking then you might think.

Final Grade
8/10

Jonathan’s Suggestions:
Both of these ranking systems are very skewed and don’t reflect the true stats. It is averaging a large amount of visitors, and the Alexa ranking is very impressive. According to siteanalytics it got about 40K hits last month.

Drum-roll Question

Is this site worth visiting right now, Yes or No?

Yes. Despite poor navigation, and a crowded interface, the content is too great to pass up. A poor homepage is not enough to doom a site. These interviews have priceless information, and should be read by all bloggers. Any future entrepreneurs, or people seeking to make money online should definitely stop by. Especially for the new wave of teenage bloggers, and young entrepreneurs, these articles will be really useful to them.

Please consider subscribing to retireat21 by clicking here.

Final Constructive Criticisms

I asked several bloggers, to give me their first impressions of retireat21.com. So these are the opinions of Daniel Scocco and Normal Joe.

Objective Opinions

Daniel Scocco from dailyblogtips.com

“I came across RetireAt21.com a while ago, and the name of the site intrigued me to I decided to check it out. The information I found was interesting, particularly the series of interviews that the author conducted with young entrepreneurs. The design is pretty clean as well.”

Normal Joe from imwithjoe.com

I like the site, I used to visit it frequently when I first started reading various blogs. I haven’t been over there in a while but I think it’s a
great site and instills hope in people by seeing folks that are so young have success just from their creative ideas. I think the theme layout makes it easy to consume the information without forcing you to focus on one particular story. They have features, but other stories strategically placed on the front page so everyone can chose which they want to read. It’s efficient and effective.

This is was a paid review by Don Gilbert of mastersofseo. If you are interested in a paid review, check out my advertise page for more information. As you can see I cover all the aspects of your site. This is a great chance for you to get constructive criticism about your site.

Please comment below, if you have constructive criticisms to add. I’m sure Michael would like to hear your opinion as well.

The 3 keywords in affiliate marketing are platform, product, and funds.

Your product needs to be the first part done. It’s possible to sell without funds, you need a platform but that’s the next step, first you need a product. Way too many affiliate marketing companies sell products that nobody wants. Things like “free laptops” which nobody believes, and “ring-tones,” both of which spell spam all over them. The way that most people do affiliate marketing today is through commissions. They put up the links on their sites in the hope that other people will sell a lot of products through their account, and thus give them 3-5% of that for the referral. Though to some extent this will be successful, it seems like everybody is trying to do the same thing. I have yet to meet a blogger who is actually selling the products, as opposed to just going for referrals. Getting a good product can be challenging because it needs to be something original, but also something that everybody will want. For example alot of people try to sell amazon products. This I think is stupid because if they wanted to buy something from amazon, they would go to amazon and buy it. Unless you are writing the article purely to sell the product it doesn’t seem like that would work. I think the best way to be do both the referring and the selling, is with creating an e-book. Now if you haven’t thought of creating one already then don’t waste your time, you don’t have any new information to add. But if you do actually have good information, then creating an ebook can be really useful. Not only for publicity but you can make some good money from it. Now the key to selling it is to be original, and actually have information that nobody has told before. Now if you take this ebook, and put your referrals links in it, then you can be getting money not only for the ebook but also for the affiliates referral. Two birds in one stone. But the key to this is having a good product, so make it informative, original, and creative, and you stand a chance of selling it, but if it’s not don’t waste your time.

To successfully sell products you need a good platform from which to sell it. This can be the most difficult and tricky part. Because funds and product can be worked out, but if you don’t have a good platform your campaign will fail. The model platform is what shoemoney problogger, and johnchow have created, at this point all they need to do is give it a thumbs up in a blog post and it’ll sell. So we need to figure out how we can get our product out there. There are the obvious things of putting a link to it on our blog, but what if our blog isn’t popular? There are several makeshift platforms that can be good ways of getting your product out there.

1. Forum marketing

2. Commenting with your affiliate/ebook link as your url

3. Word of mouth

4. Make it into a 125×125 ad and advertise that

5. Host a contest to celebrate it’s creation, and post your referral links

6. Winning Free Reviews, or buying them

These are just some quick ideas, but I’ll be writing a more extensive post soon, because I googled this and found nobody has written anything on this, so make sure you check back for more ideas on advertising.

And the third key is Funds. Ever heard the saying, you need money to make money? Though this isn’t completely true it certainly helps. Anything you can do for free, with money, you can do better and more efficiently. If you are willing to make a gamble with some money then you can achieve a much higher level of success. I think the best strategy of all would be to create an incredible ebook, and then put some referral links and ads in it. And then buy a product review from John Chow for example. These cost 500$ but if you think about it, you could easily make that back with a good product. If you think of the thousands of visitors coming to his site everyday, you’ll only need a very tiny percentage to buy your product to make it worth it. However, this will only work if you truly have an awesome product, and if John Chow advocates it. This shouldn’t be too hard because you shouldn’t be creating an ebook that isn’t awesome anyway. If this gamble doesn’t pay off because John slams it, it properly serves you right for trying to sell spam content.

You can make money through the sales of the ebook and through the referrals. Say the ebook sells from 20$, which it could be more if it’s really that good. Then that’s 25 sales, which shouldn’t be that hard. Especially if you are selling it using the other ways as well. Now if you don’t want to use money you can still succeed, just it takes a lot more time and dedication. With time anything can be accomplished. Maybe you can exchange something with a lot of smaller bloggers to get reviews with them. If you start thinking about it their are lots of options. But I think the best strategies is through finding all the possible platforms you can, and utilizing them all to their fullest potential. With some originality and creativity anything can succeed, you just need the time to see it come to completion.

As 2008 comes to a close, I want to wrap up my first year of blogging with some things I’ve learned this year. Many of these are mistakes I’ve made, so hopefully you can learn from them.

Expectations and Prep-work

1. Write about what you know

2. Post as much as you can

3. Don’t get started unless you have the time to finish

4. Don’t do it for the money

5. Blogging should be a hobby, not a frantic attempt for cash

6. The bloggers who succeed are those who know what they’re doing

7. Don’t fall for the John Chow Effect

8. The only secrets to blogging are consistency, and originality

9. Sadly, more posts beats larger posts

10. Focus on content, and the rest will come

Setting Up your Blog

11. Read blogging tips blogs, pretty much anybody on this list is good.

12. Create the essential accounts, twitter, stumble, digg, feedburner, google…

13. A good design is important, but a bad one won’t destroy you.

14. Prepare yourself for a roller coaster of success and failure

15. Use wordpress, not blogger.

16. If you know how to get your own domain

17. Write as many posts while you’re in the mood, because there will be those days…

18. Start networking right away.

19. Read this article

20. Study a little, these topics in this order, CSS, HTML, SEO Traffic Generation, Social Networking, and Social Media.

Essential Plugins (for Wordpress)

21. Top Commentator List

22. SEO All in One

23. Not a plugin but use the latest version of Wordpress and keep updating.

24. Comment Luv

25. If you’re picky about comments, Keyword Luv

26. I love Social Book Marking

27. Large RSS and Email Subscribe Buttons

28. Akismet! It’s blocked 450,000+ spam comments on here

29. Full Text Feed

30. Google XML Sitemaps

Content

31. Make content your focus at the beginning, not marketing.

32. Set up a recommend/featured posts set up, so that you can advertise your top posts.

33. Write in lists and use pictures

34. Conduct lots of reviews, studies, and polls

35. Use lots of links, to yourself, and to other bloggers

36. If it’s under 500 words don’t post it

37. Humor is ok, as long as you’re still giving them good information

38. Read some stellar posts so that you get an idea on how to do it.

39. Bold and Italicize your keywords, this helps catching the readers eye, and the SE spiders like it.

40. Use spelling and grammar checks

Marketing

41. Comment like crazy

42. Look for free links like Q/A posts, or top commentator lists…

43. If you have good information to share, share is as good information, not as obvious spam, The Secret to Millions Online

44. The best way to get quick links, is through sponsoring a popular contest

45. Learn How to Comment successfully

46. Learn Popular Social Media Sites

47. Email people, and have a contact page.

48. Read and study. Learn from the experts, and other people’s failures.

49. A Failure is better then never even trying. Because then you’ll probably succeed next time.

50. Accept that some posts will do better then others, and market those ones.

SEO

51. Use the SEO All in One tool. I know I already said this, but use it from the beginning, that way you have meta tags, and descriptions on every post.

52. You don’t need to be an expert on SEO to be able to use it, learn the basics and you’ll be fine.

53. Use comments for SEO purposes

54. Use Google Adwords Keyword Tool to choose your keywords

55. If you’re in this for the long run, aim for popular keywords now. It’d be annoyed to have to re-optimize later, for a different keyword.

56. Make your title tag your top keyword, and put that keyword in your meta description and keywords for your homepage.

57. Use beginner and advanced squidoo tips, to bring traffic and Link juice to your site.

58. Google respects powerful sites. Just keep focusing on content , and dont‘ use too much flash, and you won’t be sandboxed.

59. Google isn’t the devil people make it out to be. They’re just scared of it, because they don’t understand it.

60. If you comment enough, then all your posts will be added to google anyway. You don’t need to worry about submitting your posts to it, and don’t’ waste your money on those people saying pay them to add your site to search engines.

Traffic Generation

61. Social Media is awesome, and highly successful. Learn Digg and stumble!

62. Comments bring traffic.

63. Guest posting brings traffic, links, and markets your site. This is one of the best ways to market your site.

64. The Viral Effect can happen to anyone, at any time. Be prepared with either a big enough server or run away from digg, cause it’ll blow.

65. Word of mouth/email is still the best way to get traffic. You need your readers to be telling other people about your site.

66. Use Press Releases, and take advantage of current events to be the first to be writing on your evolving niche.

67. Use forums on your niche to your advantage. And don’t be afraid to ask questions on this.

68. Use your connections to market your site/products.

69. Sell something that’s really good. Spend a while on an Ebook and give some free promotional to start the viral effect rolling, and get the traffic flooding in.

70. Try the new rage, Video Posting

Stat Trackers

71. Alexa and technorati are both awful and misleading, try not to use them when you’re analyzing sites.

72. Though still skewed, siteanalytics is a good way to compare site’s traffic.

73. Use websitegrader to give you useful information about your stats, and site SEO.

74. Get listed in lists like 45n5’s and Winning the Web’s.

75. Use every stat tracker you can find.

76. Every stat tracker will be different, but analytics is the most trusted.

77. Aweber isn’t legit, don’t use it, and people don’t trust it. People use it to try and say they get hundreds of visits a day, but it’s not true.

78. Feedburner is the best feed stats tracker.

79. Use these tools to get untrue and unrealistic monetary values of your site.

80. Understand that visitors are not what makes a blog, but it’s active readers that create a community.

Monetizing

81. Have a creative original 125×125 ad.

82. Have an original site slogan that people will remember.

83. Don’t do it too early.

84. You can always monetize later, but monetizing too early can greatly hurt your site.

85. Ebook sales are awesome, once you have a popular enough blog.

86. Don’t try and sell something you don’t know.

87. Monetizing=Marketing You’ll only sell as much as you can market it.

88. Private ads are the top money makers for most people.

89. Affiliate Marketing can be a huge money maker if you know how to do it.

90. Sponsored Reviews and PPP, programs like that destroy your Page Rank. Be careful what programs you start up.

Extras

91. An About page is not an essential, but you should make one if you can.

92. A Contact Me Page you Need!

93. Advertise pages are more then just for buying advertising. I read all advertise pages just to see what type of stats they have, and which ones they use to get an idea of the blog. If you see them relying too much on illegitimate sources you can realize how important money is to them.

94. Patience and Perseverance are critical to succeeding on the internet. You’ll probably need to wait a while awhile before you will see anytime of monetary success.

95. Use Google Reader to stay informed.

96. Learn twice as much as you write. This way you always stay a step ahead of your readers, and have an inexhaustible amount of posts to write.

97. Don’t let stat results get you depressed. Good content combined with time, will always succeed, eventually…

98. Getting the first 100 subscribers is the hardest. After that, it only gets easier.

99. Have a good archives system set up, so that people can find the posts they’re looking for.

100. People Love Freebies! Give as many freebies as you can.

101. I got this post idea from Thoushallblog’s 101 blogging tips list. Make sure you check out his as well, because he has some great stuff on there, that I didn’t cover.

102. Stay One Step ahead of the other bloggers in your niche.

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