I mentioned yesterday that you should have at least 30 blogs in your feed reader at all times, today I want to give you some suggestions. These are sites that I enjoy and have helped me out. So I would highly recommend you add them to your feed readers if you haven’t already. No matter what niche you’re in, you should always be subscribed to the some of the top Make Money Online/Blogging Tips/How to Blog sites, just so that you can stay informed. These are all sites from those niches, and no matter what your blog is about, you’ll be able to profit from these sites.

The first 10 are essentials, and I will write a little seller’s pitch for each of them. The rest are optional ones that I enjoy. I will categorize them so that you can learn what they’re about. MMO stands for Make Money Online, HTB stands for How to Blog or Blogging Tips, and AIM stands for Affiliate or Internet Marketing.

1. ProBlogger (HTB)

Excellent Blogging advice given everyday. Guest posts very regularly so you can get the best posts from multiple writers. He’s the top blogger for a reason.
2. Doshdosh (HTB)
Doesn’t post very much anymore but his site reached incredible success because of his great content. If he’d kept posting he’d be up there with Problogger, but his lack of posting has hurt him. There’s a gold mine in the archives though.

3. Thoushallblog (HTB)
Doesn’t post as often as I’d like, but he has weekly posts that are too good to miss. Excellent content and a great attitude, you can always count on Yan to be writing posts helpful for you.

4. DailyBlogTips (HTB)
The name says it all, daily blog tips that you won’t want to miss. He’s posts every day, so you can get great information very quickly.

5. ABloggerBlog (HTB)

This may be my favorite site of all. Unfortunately he only posts weekly if that, but his lessons are incredibly valuable. It’s like one massive ebook. Just start reading through his archives starting at lesson 1 and you’ll have learned everything you need to know, to start blogging successfully.

6. LinkersBlog (HTB)

This site gives great content on a consistent basis. Danny Cooper was incredible, but i’m still unconvinced about it’s new owner Donny. If nothing else there’s value in the archives hopefully Donny can continue to give us good information though.

7. How to Make my Blog (HTB)

This is by favorite new site. I just found it from a guest post by problogger but he provides great information. He posts every day or two days, and his posts are a breath of fresh air in this congested niche.

8. RajaieTalks (MMO)

Excellent blog by another teenage blogger. He keep you updated on all the happenings in the MMO blogging world. I really appreciate his fresh approach on things.

9. TheNetFool (AIM)

Here’s where I get my internet marketing and affiliate marketing help. Lots of great information on here, and unlike everybody else, he’s speeding up his amount of posts following christmas break, while everybody else is still recovering.

10. TheUniversityKid (AIM)

This site may lose it’s value because Jason has stopped writing for a while. But he’s written great articles in the past, and the guest posters should be pretty good if he’s accepted them.

11. IronBlogger (HTB)

12. DatMoney (AIM)

13. WebTrafficRoi (HTB)

14. Balkhis (HTB)

15. Johncow (MMO)

16. FranklinBishop (HTB)

17. MrJavo (AIM)

18. SearchForBlogging (HTB)

19. TeenProBlogger (HTB)

20. BradBlogging (HTB)

21. ShankerBakshi (HTB)

22. Problogineer (HTB)

23. WinningtheWeb (HTB)

24. Bloggingtips (HTB)

25. CopyBlogger (HTB)

26. Lorelle.Wordpress (HTB)

27. Shoemoney (AIM)

28. Preblogger (HTB)

29. Collinlahay (AIM)

30. DotcomDud (HTB)

31. OneMansGoal (MMO)

32. EnkayBlogging (HTB)

33. ImwithJoe (AIM)

34. ZacJohnson (AIM)

35. MoneyBites (HTB)

36. Tyler Cruz (AIM)

37. JimKukral (AIM)

38. Blogsessive (HTB)

39. BloggerUnleashed (HTB)

40. StandoutBlogger (HTB)

41. CarolineMiddleBrook (MMO)

42. Affiliate Confessions (AIM)

43. PeiProfit (MMO)

44. Ian Fernando (AIM)

45. GaryConn (MMO)

46. BlueVerse (MMO)

47. Retireat21 (MMO)

48. BlogAboutYourBlog (HTB)

49. Entrepreneurs-Journey (AIM)

50. How to Blog (HTB)

Now maybe you’re are wondering why stop at 50? There are hundreds more, why not list more great sites? Because there aren’t any more great sites. Even a few of these should be taken out because they merely copy the ideas of other bloggers and write posts about it. These are the top 50 MMO AIM and HTB bloggers on the internet in my opinion, this isn’t a list of All of those types of bloggers. These ones post original content in my opinion, in a congested crowded niche. They are all very useful to any type of blogger. I would recommend subscribing to all the HTB sites, because they can help you no matter what your blog is about. Making money and affiliates, are only for some. I hope this list will be useful for you, and please comment below if you think I missed any. Don’t be offended if I didn’t list you, most likely that’s because I haven’t heard of you. List your link below and I’ll check it out, and possibly add you.

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.

Edubook.com Blog Review

Today I’m presenting to you edubook.com which is administered by Peter Chang.

In the words of Peter, edubook.com, “is a collaborative article marketing blog which allows people to publish their hand written articles in order to promote their authorship online.” The site allows any free-lance writers, to publish articles on subjects ranging all the way from Education, to Arts, to Business, Home Improvement, Sports, and many others. The site encourages you to join them, to see the benefits of article marketing.

Blog Theme

The Blog theme of edubook is very impressive in my mind. The orange, black, and white color scheme, flows together very nicely. The site looks very professional, with the articles nicely placed in the center of the blog, and large titles explaining their topic. The site doesn’t look very cluttered at all, and has nicely placed RSS and email subscribe options, in the top right corner. I am very impressed with the site, especially considering how most sites and blogs look very cluttered, as people try to cram lots of excessive widgets onto the pages. The site almost looks too bare, but as far as websites go that is not necessarily a bad thing.

Final Grade

8/10

Jonathan’s Suggestions

Though the site looks very professional, I’d love to see some type of graphic in the header. Though just the words “EduBook” is a good header, you have lots of free space to the right of it. I’d love to see a picture of something related to the site, to make the site a little less bare.

Navigation Through Site

The site has a very large archives system set up on the left sidebar. Though some people could find this annoying, considering the purpose of this site is to advertise articles, I think this is a great way to keep the old posts relevant, and thus is justified. However, I do not think a blog would be able to get away with something that large. The different topics have nice, click-able scroll downs lists, which are great because you don’t need to go to any new page to see the various sub-categories. The site also features a useful little search box in the top left corner, that allows you to find specific articles. The site loads very fast, because there is no excessive flash options on it. All of the sub-pages load very quickly as well, which makes it nice to browse through.

Final Grade

7/10

Jonathan’s Suggestions:

N/A

Extra Pages

The site has three pages on it’s header, Home, Join Us, and Contact. Again it seems almost too bare, it includes only the basics. The contact page is simple and professional, it does it’s job. The Join Us page is very inviting, and encourages you to join their team. Nothing much to say here, just the very minimum, essential pages.

Final Grade

6/10

Jonathan’s Suggestions:

A Top or Recommended posts page needs to be added. If this site is focused on articles, and they’re trying to get new writers to join their group, showing some example work would be a great addition. We need some sample articles, to get us to want to read more, right now it’s just the most recent posts, which more often then not are related to what I like.

Quality of Content

According to websitegrader the site has a reading level of highschool, which is a good level, because elementry isn’t good, but you don’t want college level. Blog posts are supposed to be easy to read, and “highschool level” is a good middle ground, for a site devoted to articles. The posts average about 500 words each, which though that is a bit small, if they can adequately cover the topic then that is fine. The articles are good at not beating around the bush, and cover the topics nicely. You can tell they use grammar, and spelling check, and so these make the articles flow very well. The articles were not fascinating to me, because they aren’t related to my niche, but they are informative and easy to read.

Final Grade
6/10

Jonathan’s Suggestions:
I would like to see some list articles, instead of always just block print. Bloggers love lists, and they are much easier to read, then just paragraphs all the time. I’d love to see you switch it up every now and then.

The Use of Ads

This is the disaster of the site. This is a rare, seemingly obvious mistake by Edu Book. The homepage isn’t that awful, there’s only one adsense ad on the right sidebar. But this ad is incredibly distracting because it is Green and White! It completely contrasts the colors of the site, and needs to be removed immediately. If you click on a post it only gets worse. Now the posts are surrounded by ads, and the left and bottom bars are replaced by totally irrelevant ads. Relevant ads are bad enough, but these have to do with losing weight, and vacation deals.

Final Grade
2/10

Jonathan’s Suggestions:
Fortunately ads are something that can be easily fixed. It’s better to have a problem with this, then with content or theme issues. My suggestions would be to first change the ad on the home page to text only. Right now it’s image and text, and I tried those ads before. The only image ads are “SEO Malpractice Apogee,” which nobody will click on, and the colors are very disturbing, with almost all blog themes. If you Have to keep the ads for some reason, then I would suggest limiting it to one ad. Find which ad is giving you the best results and keep that one, and discard the rest. You aren’t getting enough traffic to make it worth it, and right now you just look desperate, and unprofessional.

Use of Widgets

What widgets, you’re probably asking? Edubook has a nice subscribe button, though it could be bigger, with the standard option for email as well. The Technorati authority link, and the add to blog favorites link, seem unnecessary and a waste of space. The impressive technorati ranking makes you expect more then what it gives, leaving you slightly disappointed with the result. The ads we already discussed… The links to Author Pages are good. Again they are a bit large, but for a guest blog, that is needed to keep all parties happy. The site is very bare of good widgets.

Final Grade
5/10

Jonathan’s Suggestions
I would recommend ditching the technorati links, and the ad. Some of the author’s have little descriptions under them, but not all of them, so get rid of these because it makes it unneat. Right now the site is seriously struggling from a dearth of comments. The site looks very weak with almost every post saying zero comments. I would recommend, adding a top commentator list, to encourage blog commenting. I would also recommend ditching the copyscape warning, if people are going to copy your work, a warning isn’t going to stop them. I would suggest adding a links to the PR of the site. A PR of 4 is very impressive, and helps give credibility to the site’s articles. I would also recommend taking off the amount of subscribers, until it’s a more flattering number. I would also recommend adding a Recommended posts, where you can showcase the top articles of the site.

Site Stats

Right now edubook has a respectable Alexa ranking of 233K and a Technorati of 51K. These are especially good numbers when you consider the site has only been around for shortly over a month. The site has a PR of 4 already, and it looks like these numbers will continue to grow. It has 92 subscribers, which is a great number for a month. If the site has this impressive stats already, I wouldn’t be surprised to see these numbers continue to grow over time.

Final Grade
8/10

Jonathan’s Suggestions:

Honestly I think these stats are pretty flattering. I wasn’t incredibly impressed with the content, and so to have these good stats after such a short time is phenomenal. The stats I think are largely due to the wide range of topics covered, and the incredible rate of which new posts are added.

Drum-roll Questions

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

Sadly, right now I have to say No. The key reason for that, is because right now, edubook has no section of articles having do do with blogging. Considering mastersofseo.com is a blogging tips site, I’m not going to recommend a site that has nothing to do with blogging tips. However, with that said, if you want information on practically anything else, there’s a good chance it’ll have an article on it. But right now, it’s not related enough to the niche I post in, to make it worth the read.

Final Constructive Criticisms

I asked several bloggers, to give me their first impressions of edubook.com These are the opinions of Max Miroff from Blogbadly.com, and the team over at BloggingwithSuccess.net Here are their opinions.

Alright, here’s what I think:

The design is very clean and professional – orange, black, and white are solid colors that go well together. The posts seem scattered about a variety of topics which isn’t such a good thing if you want to build a consistent readership interested in one topic, but there are 127 subscribers so perhaps that’s working for them. I don’t like the fact that some of the top rated authors have small bios next to their names while others don’t – it looks out of place. Either require a short entry or don’t add anything. The “Viewed By” on each post should be removed – it’s useless and the numbers are fairly unflattering to the sites traffic (viewed by twenty readers, for example).

-Max Miroff, Blog Badly – Blogging Tips and Tricks.

Here are my first impressions:

The blog has got too much categories which may be a good or bad thing. Because of so much randomness, people will have to think twice before subscribing. Participation of readers seems to be low as last 3-4 articles have no comments. However, blog has good chances of success and you can get traffic if your article is nice enough. You get your profile page at the blog, so it will be useful in publicizing your blog. Also, clean homepage means user can focus on your content and follow to your blog.

-A Team blog dedicated to helping new blogs succeed – Blogging With Success

I want to make a point of reiterating one point that Max said, the number showing the amount of post views, is incredibly unflattering. Make that your first change. Also a lot of the inner posts, don’t have meta keywords, and meta descriptions. I would recommend adding the SEO All in One wordpress plugin. My final thoughts would be, this site is quickly growing, and with it’s good SEO, I can see it getting a lot of success. Right now it’s not worth a subscribe to me, but in a few weeks/months, this site could very easily become a site to be reckoned with.

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 Peter would like to hear your opinion as well.