Raiber Cristian recently won an auction I was having for a review on this blog {there’s another one going on btw starting at $2.00} and he asked to have his blog CristianR.com to be reviewed.
Raiber has been blogging since March 2007 but it seems his posting frequency isn’t as much as I’d expected. If you’re going to be talking about blogging tips and strategies you’re going to have to post a lot more than a handful of posts in a month. Reading his about page he tells us that he wants to teach his readers about “making money online, building and maintaining a blog and becoming a more socially connected person”. Well and good Raiber, but if you’re going to teach your readers anything about that you’re going to have to increase your posting frequency and give out some solid gold advice. Advice that can only come from experience.
Some of his interesting reads included -
- 5 Viral Marketing Methods
- Are Cartoon Logos Invading The Blogosphere
- Do You Think Entrecard Sucks - Yes, and Mostly. It’s good enough for free traffic.
Overall, I think Raiber can do a much better job with his blog then he is already doing. I would suggest him to take off pages from his navigation if there is no content in them. It just looks like you’re not interested in your blog, even if you don’t want it to look that way. Also, somethings wrong with the comments. I tried to leave one and got an error to fill in the spam protection. Trouble is, I couldn’t find any other fields for the said protection? It’s fixed.
If you are thinking of getting a new theme, I would suggest getting a custom made one. If you want to be taken seriously enough, you can’t go with free.
About the author
Hyder has been blogging for the past two years on this blog. He started Weborithm, his web company, in 2007 and along with designing blogs and websites also releases various web related products.
CristianR on February 11th, 2008
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Thanks for the review. Posting frequency isn’t something that determines your blogs popularity. You can post 3 posts per week and still have a great blog, remember it’s quality not quantity. I do admit I’ve been really busy lately with exams and other things coming up and I didn’t really have the chance to update the blog as often as I would have liked to. Those pages were put there as a reminder to myself, to update them with the necessary content.
I’ve never stated I’m a problogger, I’m just a regular guy sharing his thoughts and ideas on blogging. From my point of view, there are only a few “pro-bloggers” out there, such as Darren Rowse, John Chow, Maki from DoshDosh, Steve Pavlina, etc.
I don’t think that a good design influences your readers positively, they’re not coming to your blog looking to admire its design, they’re coming to read about stuff that interest them. Remember that content is king.
As about the comments form, it wasn’t working because I was just switching templates and forgot to add the necessary function for the spam protection plugin. Other than that, if you would have checked my Popular Posts section in the sidebar you would have noticed that there are some better articles in there rather the ones you mentioned above.
P.S : Don’t take it the wrong way, I appreciate feedbacks of any kind. Thanks for your time and suggestions, I’ll do my best.
Mrs S on February 11th, 2008
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I was interested in this comment Christian:
**As about the comments form, it wasn’t working because I was just switching templates and forgot to add the necessary function for the spam protection plugin. Other than that, if you would have checked my Popular Posts section in the sidebar you would have noticed that there are some better articles in there rather the ones you mentioned above. **
How does the popular posts function work? Does it count hits or stickyness of articles? If it’s hits then are you sure the content is popular? Maybe the titles are good so people click on them - but click away without reading the content?
CristianR on February 11th, 2008
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It’s based off the Popularity Contest plugin by Alex King. It measures a post popularity by incoming traffic, comments, trackbacks, views and so on. Every comment, view, trackback and so on has a certain number of points. After the comments, views and trackbacks are all counted, that post receives a final score. Based on that score, the posts are categorized and listed in the Popular posts.
Mrs S | A pocketful of pixie dust on February 11th, 2008
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So they are genuinely popular - sounds like a useful plugin I might have to check it out - thanks!
Hyder on February 11th, 2008
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Rabier - Since you’re main thing is about blogging tips and strategies generally in this genre, the more posts you have the better. People are just hungry for information on a daily basis when it comes to that.
Perhaps you’re right, maybe my title was mis worded. I’ve corrected it to better portray your blog.