Blog Review: Success With Todd
Todd Morris had requested a Free Blog Review of the blog, Success With Todd. The review was put on hold while he was moving to a new host and I had missed his email saying it was ready to be reviewed. So, belatedly, here it is…
What is Success With Todd?
The tagline of the site is “A journey of leadership, lifestyle and personal growth”. The About page reveals that Todd is a US Air Force weather forecaster, has 5 kids and lives in Hawaii. That’s enough to tell you that Todd needs to make some money on the side and is quite busy. Yeah, Hawaii is beautiful but it’s expensive to live there as a member of the armed services.
Site Design/Theme
The site uses the ElegantBlue theme by Nathan Rice. This is a handsome, professional looking, 3 column theme with 2 right side sidebars.
Navigation is good but the addition of the Dagon Design Sitemap Generator would improve it more. He has done a good job of optimizing the plugin mix by including Related Content and Top Commentator plugins.
Monetization seems to be mostly affiliate offers. As I mentioned in my recent series on blog monetization I haven’t seen these ads as being effective money makers outside of product niche oriented sites. Maybe Todd has a secret formula?
Content
Todd has several interesting articles that relate to his blogging experiences, his service in Iraq and other areas. Here are some of the top posts I found.
5 things I liked about my time in Iraq gives a insider’s view of what living in a FOB or Forward Operating Base is like over there.
A few pictures from after the Hawaii storm shows the aftermath of the recent storms in Hawaii. You know, the photo of his neighborhood looks a lot like the Other’s Village on Lost, hmmm.
Do you have a dream board? describes how he made an online ‘dream board’. I guess that’s a little better than cutting out pictures from Robb Report and Unique Homes. I also noticed that Todd seems to be into Multi Level Marketing (MLM) which is something I’ve got kind of a distaste for but I won’t hold that against him.
How many blogs is too many? is a good examination of running multiple blogs that I can relate to.
Overall
Success With Todd has a lot of potential since Todd is a good writer and has some interesting thoughts and experiences to share.
I’d recommend that Todd participate in EntreCard and Blogging Zoom to help expand the marketing of his site.
Get Your Site Reviewed
If you would like your site reviewed by me for free, just like Todd did, use my Free Blog Review page to request one. Since I’ve gotten quite a back log I’m going to be doing two at a time spaced out about every 4-5 posts until I get caught up.
Hi Frank,
Thank you very much for the review … I really appreciate it. And never let it be said that I don’t know how to take advice. That sitemap plugin is installed and running … excellent suggestion.
As for monetization, lol just as you’re not a fan of mlm, I’m not particularly enamored of adsense. (oh, and btw, in case you weren’t aware, Ty Coughlin’s system in one of your 125×125 ads backdoors people into an mlm).
Realistically though, at this point in time, the purpose of my blog is not really to put immediate additional cash in my pocket (although I did make $50 from hostgator last month).
Blogging struck me as a good way to network with some cool new people … basically get better known, by more folks … and so far that’s working out pretty well.
The biggest unexpected benefit has been how much I’ve learned from reading other blogs (yours included)
All-in-all, learning to blog has proved to be a very positive experience over the past 6 months or so. And I definitely plan to keep doing it for as long as I can.
Thanks again,
Todd
p.s. I’d totally forgotten about that Iraq post … it was pretty cool reading it again after being home for 2 months.
Hi Todd,
Yeah, I knew the Ty Coughlin thing was an MLM front. There are several around that pull the same kind of stuff. I’m not opposed to making money off giving them leads though. One of these days I’ll have to write a post about what I don’t like about MLMs. Anyway, I’m probably going to make some significant sidebar changes soon.
Making $50 from an affiliate ad on a non-product blog is pretty good.
One of my navigation tests when I’m reviewing a site is to dig up an older, but interesting, post like your Iraq post. It’s good to use a plugin like Related Posts or Random Posts that gives visitors more reasons to stay on your site.
[…] 125s - Frank, over at OpTempo.com did a review of my blog a couple of days ago. The next day, he made a post about taking down his 125×125 […]