Problogineer.com

Today we feature an interview with Darren from Problogger.net. His blog is one of the most popular blogs around on the Internet today and has a vast amount of some of the best information for bloggers around. If you have never visited Problogger then i suggest after reading this interview you make it your next stop.

1. Who is Darren tell us a little about yourself?

Let me tell you ten things about myself:

1. I’m a 36 year old guy living in Melbourne Australia
2. I live with my wife, son (almost 2) and soon to be born 2nd child.
3. I make my living from blogging, mainly from ProBlogger.net and Digital-Photography-School.com.
4. Today a new book that I co-authored was released! I’m very excited and slightly hyper.
5. I co-founded a blog network called b5media which has over 300 blogs written by hundreds of bloggers around the world.
6. I’m a keen photographer (just a hobby these days)
7. Before I was a blogger I worked as a minister – most recently in planting a church called LivingRoom.
8. When I was in primary school I started my first business – selling pictures of Brooke Shields from my Mum’s Women’s magazines to my male class mates to stick on their books.
9. I used to be a Goth.
10. I enjoy reading – I’m currently reading Jeffrey Archer’s latest book.

2. How did Problogger.net get so popular and what are the plans for its future?

I’ve been writing ProBlogger for around 3 and a half years now and it’s steadily grown in popularity since then. My aim with the blog is to provide daily content that inspires and equips bloggers to improve their blogs.

I think that this genuine desire to help others succeed is probably the reason it’s grown. My philosophy is that when you provide people with value and enhance their lives in some way that they’ll come back for more and pass on news about you to others.

The future – I have a long list of possible ways to expand ProBlogger. At this point the main thing is to launch the ProBlogger book and see where that takes us but in the coming 12 months you can also expect to see ProBlogger continue to expand the services that it offers bloggers and the options that they have to learn about blogging.

3. I believe you are promoting a book what is it about?

Yes you’re right (the fact that I managed to weave it into both of my answers so far probably illustrates my excitement about it!).

ProBlogger (the blog) has over 4000 posts on it. That’s a lot of content and it can be very overwhelming to a new reader.

The aim of the book is to provide an up to date, easily understandable, broad introduction to the idea of blogging as a means of making money.

Basically Chris Garrett (my co-author) and I wrote it as the guide to blogging that we wish we’d had when we started out. It goes through many important aspects of setting up, writing and growing a blog to a point where it earns an income.

You can get a taste for the book and what it covers in the introduction and free sample chapter that we have available at ProBloggerBook.com.

4. What one tip would you give new bloggers?

Let me give you three tips (I could talk on this topic all day so it’s hard to narrow it down):

A. Start with something that you’re passionate about – blogs take years to build up and life’s too short to write daily on something you have no interest in
B. Don’t ignore that the readers you’ve got in an attempt to promote your blog – the best asset you have to promote your blog is those you’ve already converted as loyal readers
C. Put Yourself ‘Out There’ to Find Readers – readers don’t come to you, you’ve got to go to them. Find where your target reader is already gathering online and go participate in these places. Write guest posts for others, leave valuable comments in forums and on other blogs – in the early days spend as much of your time as possible off your blog.

5. What do you think of the Generalmarketingblog.com?

I hope you don’t mind a bit of a ‘critique’ – I see in most of the other interviews on the site those you’ve asked this of have said ‘you’re doing a good job’ type comments – but I’d like to give some honest first impressions and hope it’s taken in the spirit I give it

You’re generating some good comments – getting interaction on a blog is difficult to do so keep it up and keep building the community among your readers – they’re the key to your success and it creates a great impression when you arrive on a blog with comments on each post!

The Content is good – I like the interviews that you do, this is a good way to draw people into your blog.

I wonder if you might have too many ads. I see 12 or so 125 ads on your front page – plus six more empty spots (as well as the google ad links, banner ad, ad up the top….). That’s a lot of screen real estate dedicated to advertising. Sometimes less is more – having fewer ads means you can offer advertisers more value (less alternatives for your readers to click means more clicks per advertisers), it also means better performance for affiliate programs and a less overwhelming and obviously commercial site. Some big blogs can pull off lots of ads – but most can’t. I’d pull back a little and see if it helps. Less ads would enable you to run the 125x 125 ads two across and dedicate more screen to content.

As I look at your front page I wonder if the content could be highlighted more effectively. There’s a lot going on on the page (all the social media links, invitations to subscribe, categories etc) and the titles sort of blend in to me. Perhaps to pull back on the size and prominence of some of the other information (or remove some of it all together from the front page – for example do you need the invite to subscribe under every post on the front page?) and draw reader’s attention to the titles and content itself might create a better first impression.

On individual post pages I would suggest not having the AdSense ads above content (I don’t see this on every page but it’s on some). When I come to an individual post page on your blog on my laptop I don’t see any content above the fold at all. All I see is ads, navigation links and a title. While the ads will perform better there I would suspect that a percentage of first time visitors to your blog will simply hit the back button on seeing a page with no obvious content. If you must have AdSense ads at the top of content choose a smaller ad and align the content around it. Another approach is to move the ads down under your content and above comments. This position can work quite well on blogs as people get to the end of reading and are looking for something else to do/click.

I think you’ve built a great blog so far and hope my thoughts don’t come across as to negative. I’m looking forward to seeing how you continue to grow your blog!

Darren

I hope you enjoyed the interview and i have to thank Darren for the criticism and good comments he gave about my blog and will definitely be taking some of them into consideration.

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