Order just what the doctor ordered. To your blog. It might be sick.

Currently I’m in hospital. Nothing serious, just got inflammation in all mayor parts of my body. Well, it might sound serious, but I’m fairly used to it. Got this disease, you see. Got it 25 years ago. Now, I’m 26.

And with so much inflammation as I got today it would be useless to try to fix all the parts of my body one at the time. So the doctor ordered just a general treatment, treating all the parts at once. Easy.

Even tough you don’t need a doctor yourself - at least I hope so - your blog might. Your blog might be sick, without you knowing it.
Or being aware of it.

FINDING THE DISEASE:
This is the hard part, and could possibly be best described as a typical physical check-up which doctors perform every day all day. In reality, the doctor just check typical areas where you might have problems, and areas that might suggest you have problems somewhere else

Your blogs typical check-up areas will be things like these:

• Content and writing
• Design and layout
• Trust - are your readers trusting you when you say something?
• Readers - too few? Too many?
• Reader activitity - getting comments?
• Money - making any?
• Your blogs health in general - just a overview really.

To get you started I’ve done this quick check-up on my own blog so that you can see how easy it is. I’ve walked through the different areas and tried to find the main problems, and possibly the right medicine.

CONTENT AND WRITING:
This is the main problem of my blog. The problem is not the number of posts I’m writing, but the quality of them. I often do the easy solution and just write something that might not be very useful to my readers instead of going the long way investigating, finding sources, link-resources and making it more interesting to read with some pix here and there. In fact, I’m just pretty lazy.

Medicine: Stop being lazy. I can write very good posts at a high level if I just set my mind to it. The main medicine here is actually just stop writing so damn often. Write fewer, but BETTER posts. Make sure the posts are worth publishing before posting them. Oh, and the language might also be a problem. I’m not a native american or englishman, I’m Norwegian. English is not my mothertongue, so I’m not exactly a expert on the english language. But, I’ll be better as time goes by. Experience will make me better.

DESIGN AND LAYOUT:
Not a problem. I’m a blogdesigner. I know what is good and whats not. The design and layout of my blog is good, not the best in the world, but it doesn’t need to be either.

This was my first actually. My blog wasn’t sick. Turns out, it was. It was a huge bug making users of the shit** browser Internet Explorer scroll way down before actually hitting any content at all.

So, I had no choice. Had to make a new template. Which I’m about to do. Not finished yet. It will be good. Just wait.

TRUST:
Not a problem. I’m well known in the wordpress community, making all those free themes and doing freelance work for other bloggers. I know wordpress just as good as anyone, and people know that. If I post a post on wordpress, theme development, or stuff like that, people trust that I know what I’m talking about.

Another main trust thing is the use of resources to back up what you are tring to say. You might have a perfectly right argument, but if you can’t back it up with some facts people may not trust you anyway. I don’t have this problem since I usually write about wordpress and things like that, so readers can easily see with their own eyes that I know exactly what I’m talking about.

But, I have one problem here anyway. The use of sources. I usually don’t use any sources, but I ought to do it. I often say things like “place this code snippet in the loop”. Well, most people don’t know what the “the loop” is (do you?), so I have to explain it every time. Due to my lazyness I seldom explain things like this good enough. In fact, the explanation gets worse and worse every time.

HERE IS A GREAT TIP!!
Write resource-pages which you can link to every time you need to explain something you have to explain in depth on a regular basis. In the resource-page you can explain the expression or topic deeply, adding links to external resources, etc. In the example above with the “loop” I really should have a single page devoted just to this topic. Explaining every aspect deeply, providing examples of the “loop”, providing some links to wordpress.org and other great resources. You get the drift?

So, if I write a short post using the phrase “the loop” I could just link to the resource-page so that the user can get a decent explaination of what the loop is. The best thing is that I can use this resource-page all over again lots of times, and in fact the resource-page might be the blogs most valuable post in time.

JohnChow have a resource-page like this. Its about money-making programs, and is his most-read post. He link to it every time he has to explain a phrase like “Google Adsense” or “Text-link Ads”, and its really something smart to do.

READERS:
I have about 600-700 readers every day on this blog. Plus the 100+ subscribers to my rss-feed. (If you haven’t subscribed yet, consider doing so. Its free! And you might learn some neat tricks as a blogger. No really, I’m serious.)

The reader-numbers aren’t half-bad, but not anything spectacular either. I expect the number of readers to grow steadily step-by-step in the future, mainly because I add content of great quality on a regular basis. I’m in it for the long run. There is no rush.

If you are in a rush to get more readers, there are techniques. But, I won’t get in to them anymore then saying link-exchange, buying traffic, digg.com and stuff like that. In fact, I think that the only way to get more readers who actually becomes loyal to your blog and read it on a regular basis, is by providing good quality content that the readers actually needs or search for.

Look to Copyblogger as a good example of a blogger who have a huge readership just by providing great content on a weekly basis. There may be more good examples, but I think Copyblogger is the best one.

Anyway, my readership is not huge, but its huge enough for me to bother writing stuff. I don’t need 10 million daily readers, but it would be nice to have it of course. But, readers - the number of them - isn’t really a problem here at my problem. I don’t need to take any immidiate action to increase the readership as long as I have 700 daily readers. The number will grow in time.

READER ACTIVITY:
I have commentators. Not a huge amount of them, but not so few that is a problem either. On a regular basis I get 3-4 comments to every post. Some posts more, some fewer. I would really like to increase reader activity, but I don’t really know how to do it. Have to get some tips here.

Maybe you got some?

MONEY:
I make money on this. Not as much that I can quit my other jobs, but I make enough for now. Of course, I could always wish for more, but making money have to be done by finding a way to maximize the blogs income. I usually made $500-700 from (a huge SE-company I won’t name here due to some TOS) on a monthly basis when I blogged in norwegian at this blog, plus whatever I could get from private ad-sales, usually $1000-1500 pr month. Some months higher, some lower.

The earnings have dropped some lately due to this blogs change of topic from Norwegian humor and celebs (which I got tired of), and over to technology and Wordpress (which I’m interested in). Building a new readerbase which is much more used to pick out ads from content, will damage the income from typical adsense-ads and stuff like that.

In reality, I have to find better ways to monetize the blog. Sponsorship may be one way to go, but I’ll see what the future brings. In fact, the biggest moneymaker will be my future themes for Wordpress. And a blog about wordpress is of course one of the best ways to sell them.

GENERAL HEALTH:
My blog is somewhat a little bit sick, as it turns out. I need better content, and finishing the design. Further, I need to produce some resource-pages, which I could use heavily when I’m writing content. And they will for sure also be read a lot. Resource pages tends to be the posts which gets most reads on a blog.

But, in general. Peterandrej.com is somewhat alive, and still kicking.