Why is my Tech blog not taking off?

Too cluttered, not really structured nicely, way way too many ads. I was on and off in 5 seconds flat.

I will trust what the previous poster wrote, that there's good content. That being the case, I would change the look of the site a bit to be clean, neat, and easily navigated. I would remove the ads entirely.

Then: make sure Google Analytics is in place so you know what your visitors are doing. Write at least one new piece every day for 6 months. Check analytics, but don't stress on the numbers coming in. See if you can figure out why people are leaving, and work towards retaining them instead. Change a little at a time, and monitor how each change reflects the actions of your users.

Do this for 6 months while your site goes up in the search engines. Speaking of search engines, check all the major ones, some of them need you to submit your site to them. Make sure you have a robots file configured properly and all that.

Organic traffic will find you, it's a matter of patience, discipline, and making your site perfect for your audience.

Oh - about the ads - once the traffic grows so large that you have to get a dedicated server or what have you, then you should think about monetizing. Note, the best way may not be with ads. Cross that bridge when you come to it, and don't do it on a whim. Spend lots of time thinking about how it will affect your audience.

Good luck!

That's a great looking site. Lots of content.

My guess on your problem: It's hard to be engaged with it because it's a very "factual" blog. The blog tells readers "how to" do things.

But perhaps it doesn't offer much opinion or controversy. Something to make people care about you as a person. To keep coming back, etc.

My 2 cents (I've never figure out how to make a blog work, so it's just my opinion).

I'd say it lacks a Unique Selling Proposition, something remarkable that makes it stand out.

Let's be frank, you picked a field that is already crowded with competition. So, why should anyone read your site instead of all the others? After spending some minutes on your site, I haven't found any real reason to do that.

Your site is "expensive", ie. it takes too much time to find the relevant information. As the others have noted, there're quite a lot of ads. The site loads slowly, at least for me. The sheer amount of screenshots distract and their varying sizes make it appear confusing. Another serious mistake: The content is not scanable!

Talking about the content: It seems to be a incoherent mix of tips, news and howto's with varying levels of required background knowledge. It includes -- for the lack of a better name -- "poser" topics such as "Show your Twitter addiction with these beautiful Twitter inspired desktop wallpapers", newbie topics such as "Remove all traces of an application on Mac with AppCleaner" (D'oh!), up to really esoteric topics such as "Avoid ThreadAbortException in ASP.NET with Response.Redirect"!

In other words, subscribing to your news feed is probably a waste of time for everybody. For every potential audience, there's not enough signal in all the noise.

That leaves you with random search engine traffic. A good howto site -- and according to a recent Wired article, even a bad one -- can probably make a living with that, but I guess you have not enough dedicated content to do that.

Some short term suggestions:

• Enlarge content headings to make it more scanable.
• Insert sub headings in longer texts.
• Remove some of the unnecessary screenshots.
• Crop screenshots of a more regular visual appearance.
• Use Ajax lightboxes for larger screenshots.
• Remove some ads.

In the long run, however, you probably need to find an appropriate niche.

Hope that helps.

I agree with Harv, I went to the site and immediately felt claustrophobic, and then the twitter bar started coming up, things were popping up, and I immediately left. Defiantly look at a nicer design that is more fluid and doesn't seem as cluttered and busy. I'd also lose a lot of the ads and the popup bar/notifications.

Traffic is fickle. Here's what my feedburner history looks like. Note the sharp bend(s), and note that I didn't really do anything differently at that point.

So my suggestion is: You can't tell when the growth will come, or why. The best advice is to consistently produce high-quality content, because that increases the chance that anything is beloved, retweeted, and subscribed to.

It felt like everything I would click would just be ads, or the articles were ads themselves. It just didn't feel like a blog, something I could just read and subscribe to. But the real problem is your article layout looks like adsense, so I didn't want to click anything. Your problem may just be "design".

demogeek - with regards to advertising your site. In the same vein as a few of the other posters have mentioned, I think you need to really focus on one thing. I started a blog that would chronicle my progress through a certification process. Along the way I would share little tidbits of useful information that I was learning!

To throw up a "tech blog" is just way too difficult. You're competing with people who have been doing this a long long time, and they have multiple writers working for them every day around the clock!

My advise is to really narrow it down to a niche. Write about it; become the expert. That draws in organic traffic. If you rank on the first page of google for something - anything, you're getting somewhere. Then you try to write your articles so well, and so focused, that they all end up on Google page 1. Not all of them will - I have probably 50+ posts on my blog, one, yes one post, results in 90% of my traffic.

And it's about diagnosing an iTunes error message. Talk about disappointing! But I struck gold where nobody else has any real answers. That's the key.

I don't actively advertise, I set up my blog to be readable, work on mobile devices, relatively easy to navigate, and I put out what I hope is good content. If I can't put out good content, I don't put out anything. But if you can put out good content every day, you're most of the way there. The rest takes care of itself.

Thank you Jason for sharing the stats. It looks impressive! You said you didn't do anything different on those spikes. DemoGeek.com's behavior is also on the same track. It picks up traffic for no reason (on some older posts) and dies down on the traffic spikes for no reason again.

I'm sure I'm missing out on some marketing efforts. I leave constructive comments on some other related blogs but I think I should do something different to market the blog. I would be more interested to hear about that "different" thing that I should be doing. I'm sure it would help many of the aspiring bloggers out there who look for answers at onstartup.com.

Please share you tips and advice.

Thanks everyone for the constructive comments and feedbacks. This is more effective than ProBlogger.com's criticize forum. Very well done Dharmesh & Jason!

Dumping more info into people's brains is not an attractive approach. Half as many articles and add your own one line "why read this" to major articles and add value by acting as an editor (cutting down the noise) will make this site worthwhile.

BTW, what are you using for the toolbar at the bottom of the home page? Nice!

Thank you everyone for all the constructive criticisms and advice. That is exactly what I was looking for, both the criticisms and advice.

Sorry I was not able to direct reply to each comments. I think I should have asked the question when logged in instead. Too late!

Anyways, many of you suggest that I take the advertisements down...there were not many ads on the site until just a couple of days back. Since the traffic was not huge (I get moderate traffic though) I thought of trying ads anyway. But it surely looks like that's a turn off and I'll try to minimize that impact. Just for your information the site has been live for more than 1 year now without much advertisements!

Once in a while I see performance issues with the host but then it goes off pretty quick and the site loads at a decent pace. I've been using most of the performance boosters to make sure the site loads quick. May be, as many of you have pointed out, because of too much content-clutter on the page you are noticing the performance penalty I guess.

I would certainly take all your advices and would start working on to improve the time my readers stay at the site and also to make it easy to find the information. May be it's time for a UI revamp! There is another side to this that I get many emails in favor of the layout that I have and that's the reason I thought it's working out okay. But, as you've pointed out, reducing the clutter is always a good idea and it would help with the page load I would certainly take your advice and would tweak it in that favor.

I would also focus on breaking the post into smaller digestable chunks. The nature of explaining how to do things in tech makes it to go longer and longer. Of course, if I can work on to reduce the length of the posts that would reduce the stress on my wrists as well!

Any advice on how to market my content the effective way. I've been doing it on Twitter and StumbleUpon but that seems to be not enough to "take off" as I've mentioned before. It does receive decent traffic from those social media outlets but I keep going back in comparing it with my competing sites and there's a big difference in terms of traffic numbers. I'm sure I'm missing some of those recipes and I would like to take your advice on what those recipes would be and how to use it effectively.

Once again, thanks for all your detailed responses, Harv, JM, Centurion Games, Claus Schwarm, Ben MC, Bob Walsh.

Bob - that toolbar is called "Wibiya" and is in beta testing I guess. Mashable and many others use it and I thought of using it for the direct communication popup.

Pick one very small niche and be the absolute best, most authoritative, most engaging source on the topic. Then promote the heck out of it. You have to be really clever and resourceful in how you promote it. Building an audience is very hard work. YOu have to be persistent, patient and resourceful.

• Who are you?
• What are you talking about?
• Are you interesting?
• Why would I want to have a relationship with you?

When you start a tech blog, you're asking people to have a long-term relationship with you... let them know why that's a good idea!

Seth Godin has a lot of good things to say about this:

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/

good luck!

Lots of good responses on here. All I have to add--it took 5-10 seconds for the homepage to load. Not sure if that's bandwidth or all the html on the page. I'm on a fast computer, so I'm guessing it's your server. I agree with everyone else on the cluttered appearance of the site.

I have implemented some of your recommendations. Ditched most of the ads, reduced the clutter a little bit by removing the number of items it shows on each category on the home page, did some back-office clean up work and few more. Overall the site should look a bit more clean and should load fast (enough). I've been trying with the Fiber Optic connection at home and T1 lines at work and it seems to show signs of improvement in terms of performance.

dlynton and other friends - please give it a try one more time and please let me know if you notice any difference this time.

I'm also planning on a complete redesign soon and hopefully that would reduce the clutter a little bit. Correct me if I'm wrong, do you think this could be because of the nature of the blog that's it looks cluttered since there are too many categories of content and I wanted the home page to sum it up a little bit?

Apart from the "cluttered feel" feedback, I would certainly love to hear on any of the marketing tips that can work reasonably well for a blog of this nature along with the critique of the content on the site.

Again, I appreciate all the feedbacks and comments. Thanks Guys! Hope to hear more on this topic.