Site Review: My Crafty Corner
Peter has been playing along at home and recently requested a review of the site he and his wife are working on, My Crafty Corner.
Hopefully he doesn’t mind it being done in a public fashion such as this, but I think that format is especially helpful, as it provides links and eyeballs to the site being discussed as well as possible tips and fodder for people working on their own site. If anyone else lurking out there would like a similar review, holler at me and it shall be so.
From the highest of aerial views, the site is a great start, especially starting from scratch and with no previous knowledge of working with WordPress, affiliate sites, HTML, etc. You picked a great topic, as it’s one that you and your wife obviously know a lot about, but also one that has lots of Adsense advertisers. So not only is it easy to create lots of juicy content, but there’s an audience and market for a lot of the keywords you’re working with, due to the theme and nature of the site.
You’re also doing a great job of incorporating images into your content. Not only do they illustrate the projects involved, but they also do a great job of personalizing the site, as they’re largely pictures of your family, so it’s much easier for users to connect and empathize with your content.
It’s kind of a subtle effect but it’s much easier to build trust and authority with your audience if they feel like they know you on a more personal level than the average surfer/webmaster relationship.
Some general areas you might monkey with, in no particular order:
1) I wonder if tackling the broad “crafts” market is the best choice, or if you’d get more traction if you optimized the site for a smaller, more focused slice of the crafts pie.
2) Since it’s largely about scrapbooking (and the ads currently displaying via Adsense are almost all scrapbooking related), I’d be tempted to run with that, possibly titling the site “My Scrapbooking Corner” or “My Crafty Corner: Adventures in Scrapbooking and More.”
That doesn’t mean you can’t touch on other non-scrapbooking crafts content, it would just mean that the site title (which gets a lot of emphasis when search engines rank pages) would focus on scrapbooking.
3) I struggle with this constantly myself, but you might consider breaking up the content in the posts a bit with paragraph breaks after every 2-3 lines. It’s much easier to read Web content when there are liberal breaks used, and it gives the illusion that your content is longer and meatier.
4) I’d definitely change the background color of the existing Adsense ads that you’re running, so that they blend into the color of the theme. With the white background that they currently use they pretty much scream “Ignore Me, I Am an Advertisement!”.
5) It’s kind of a painful reality of the affiliate world, but you’ll get the best traction from Adsense if you blend the ads tightly with your content, and put them in places where they’re highly visible. Here’s an example of a layout that’s worked well for me on assorted sites, as far as integrating Adsense ads.
I’ll admit, that’s a little intrusive. But it works, as far as getting clicks and making money in Adsense. The 468×15 link unit ads above the post title look more like navigational links than ads, so they get lots of clicks. The 200×200 Adsense unit in the text is pretty intrusive, but again, people tend to click on links like that more often if they’re actually embedded in the text. Then the final Adsense ad unit at the bottom hits up anyone that’s made it that far with one last sales pitch.
Whether you go that far or not is ultimately up to you. Some people don’t like to dirty their sites up that much with ads, and that’s totally understandable. In general, though, the more tightly you integrate the ads into the content, the more money you’ll make.
6) You might check CommissionJunction (CJ) to see if they have existing affiliate programs for some of the products mentioned in posts. I think Joann’s has a program through CJ, and there might be other arts/crafts retailers. If you can link to actual products via their affiliate program, you’ll get a lot of potential bang for your buck, and won’t have to rely solely on Adsense to potentially make money.
7) The titles of posts could do more work for you, as far as being more descriptive of the project involved. Search engines put a lot of weight on the titles of pages and posts, so you want these to be as descriptive as possible and to hit up common search terms that people interested in scrapbooking might search on.
Overall, though, it’s a great start, especially for your first shot at it. Keep on cranking out juicy content and tweak and fiddle with a few things, as you’re definitely on the right track.
Site Review: My Crafty Corner and related information can be found in Getting Started, Site Reviews