Overview:

Great news to all you dedicated bloggers! We are launching our first “Monthly Blog Review” or (MBR) which will be featured the first week of every month. I am not interested in writing a review that a blog owner requests in order to receive some compensation. The blog sites we are reviewing are what we consider true to their name.

We will review 3 blog sites each month. Each blog will get a short review along with ratings on design, content, freshness, and Alexa ranking. The ratings will be scored 1 to 5 with an overall rating.

Monthly Blog Review:

#1 Blog Site: Turnip of Power
URL: http://turnipofpower.com

How can you not love the Turnip of Power besides Turnips are high in fiber and Vitamin C? This site has its own energy that really puts it in perspective. A well written blog about internet marketing is the weighted content on this blog. The author has a lot of blog experience dating back 10 years ago. I guess you can say he is a season veteran! Nice blog and a must visit.

Design: 4.2
Content: 4.3
Freshness: 4.6
Alexa: 84,284
Overall: 4.36

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#2 Blog Site: Ben Barden
URL: http://www.benbarden.com

Ben Barden dot com really puts it together nicely with emphases on the subject in hand. Ben doesn’t run contests to create temporary traffic spikes. His blogs are content driven, informative to the reader, and easy to follow. There’s no reading between the lines, Ben delivers it with ease and with passion. This is how a blog site should be. Way to go Ben!

Design: 3.6
Content: 4.2
Freshness: 4.9
Alexa: 110,636
Overall: 4.23

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#3 Blog Site: Yimto Affiliate Marketing Blog by Tim
URL: http://www.yimto.com

Tim provides some of the best techniques about affiliate marketing strategies, beliefs and insight. He certainly shows a lot of passion and strong conviction in his writing. Tim is a young blogger with a hint of entrepreneur vision, I am being sarcastic. He is looking to escape the grips of the cubicle. Way to set the reader straight!

Design: 3.5
Content: 4.3
Freshness: 4.1
Alexa: 94,558
Overall: 3.96

I am sure we all experience some sort of writers block or bloggers block. Have you ever found yourself reading online news to get an idea on how to start your next blog? We all have, and the problem with reading news or topics of interest online is that you fall victim in re-writing what has already been published. Most readers will skim through your blog if they see something they already read ie; “Microsoft offers bid of 44.6 Billion for Yahoo”. Why write a blog about something that has been already published?

How do you find your next niche?

I would think of something that might be historic that I have witnessed or was a part of. Example: If I am a technology blog, I would write about the evolution of how we connected to the internet say back from 1987 to current. I would write about various modem technology and work my way up to broadband.

How about something funny or embarrassing that happened to you and you feel confident enough to share it. I come across many blog sites where the author writes about themselves. In most cases I find it interesting or amusing. The point is, it kept me reading.

Try to avoid what others have already published unless you can add something different to the original content. That’s what many bloggers do and that’s perfectly fine. We write because we hope that others will enjoy what we publish.

Enjoy!

If you own and run a web site you want to know how your web site is ranked. Alexa provides this data to you for free. You can download the latest Search Status from here. This is only for Firefox and Mozilla. Search Status allows you to see the performance of any website in the world, including yours when you have your web site opened in Firefox or Mozilla. It is located at the bottom right of your browsers status bar.

It’s important that you know your ranking to see how well your site is doing. Alexa provides you exactly what you need. It’s also a good tool to use when you’re visiting other sites that talk about SEO (Search Engine Optimization). If that site isn’t ranked in the top 100K than they’re selling you a pipe dream. I have just started and my site has moved from 12 million to 8 million in matter of weeks. It takes a lot of work to get ranked in the top 100K. There are some great SEO plugins for WordPress that work really well.

How does Alexa Ranking work?

Alexa’s traffic rankings are based on the usage patterns of Alexa Toolbar users over a rolling 3 month period. A site’s ranking is based on a combined measure of reach and pageviews. Reach is determined by the number of unique Alexa users who visit a site on a given day. Pageviews are the total number of Alexa user URL requests for a site. However, multiple requests for the same URL on the same day by the same user are counted as a single pageview. The site with the highest combination of users and pageviews is ranked #1.

Alexa’s traffic rankings are for top level domains only (e.g. domain.com). We do not provide separate rankings for subpages within a domain (e.g. www.domain.com/subpage.html) or subdomains (e.g. subdomain.domain.com) unless we are able to automatically identify them as personal home pages or blogs, like those hosted on Geocities and Tripod. If a site is identified as a personal home page or blog, its traffic ranking will have an asterisk (*) next to it: Personal Page Avg. Traffic Rank: 3,456*. Personal pages are ranked on the same scale as a regular domain, so a personal page ranked 3,456* is the 3,456th most popular page among Alexa users.