Blog Analysis: A Blog to Emulate

"There is no way I am going to do this in 15 minutes." Especially since there are FIVE blogs that I am very interested in! My goal at the end of this is to have a list of things I want to include in my blog AND to have ONE blog that I want to emulate, let's say content and positioning-wise.

These questions/criteria come straight from Day 4 of 31 Days to Build a Better Blog.

The blogs I am looking at arecc

Shoemoney
Entrepreneurs Journey
John Chow dot com
Problogger
I Will Teach You to Be Rich (for the look, not the content)

2. Take 15 minutes to do some analysis of the blog in some of the following areas

Content:

• What topics are they covering?
  
• What topics are they ignoring?
• What voice/style do they post in?
• How often are they posting?
• What level are they pitching their posts at (beginners, advanced etc)

Reader Engagement:

• What topics generate most conversation?
• What styles of posts seem to connect with readers best?
• What questions are readers asking in comments?
• What complaints do you see readers making in comments?
• What tools/mediums is the site using (eg: are they using Twitter, forums etc)

Design:

• What first impression does their design give?
• What have they done well? What have they done poorly?
• What Options do they give readers to subscribe?

Monetization:
if you’re attempting to make money from your blog this will be relevant as it will give you hints as to how you might make money:

• what advertisers are targeting this blog?
• what type of affiliate programs are they promoting?

Traffic:
You might also like to head to a site like Alexa or Compete to do some analysis of the blogs traffic levels. Is it growing, plateauing or shrinking. Alexa also gives some stats (not always accurate) on page views, time on site, sites linking in, bounce rate, where the audience is from (geographically), where people go on the site etc.

SEO:
If you have some competence in SEO you might like to check out how they’re doing in some of these areas:

• Who is linking to this blog? (use the link:www.blogurl.com command in Google to find out)
• What does their source code reveal about how they’ve set up their site
• If they have an open or unlocked stats package what can you learn from their stats? What pages are popular? Where does their incoming traffic come from?

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