The Writer’s Coin

Welcome to Day 2 of my quest to build a better blog by following ProBlogger’s Guide. Yesterday was Day 1 and I emailed a new commenter to say thank you.

Today’s tip is to Run a First Time Reader Audit. I have to be honest when I say I almost skipped this one (or faked it) because I felt I didn’t have the time to get someone to sit down and cruise the blog while I stood behind them and take notes/ask questions. I felt like I could easily do this myself—and I was wrong.

This was one of the most enlightening experiences I’ve had related to blogging. I’ve spend so many hours on it so the site is ingrained in my memory and experience, so there’s no way I could make it “fresh” in my mind. So I had M sit down and go through it and I learned some really interesting things:

• Color jumps out at her and draws her in. Images with color are attention grabbers. This meant the “What I’m Reading” area was clicked on (to Amazon).
• The top three tabs were completely ignored, they blended in with the page too much.
• When there aren’t any colorful images on the right-hand side, she actually read the article, but ignored the Blogroll, Categories, etc.
• Oddly enough, there were a couple of Adsense ads she wanted to click on because the links had interesting titles like “Earthquake test.” But I told her not to, of course.
• She liked funny. Funny images like this one made her laugh and got her reading the article.
• She was browsing the home page and I noticed she had no way of commenting on the posts she was reading. This makes me think I need a “Comments” box or something similar to what The Simple Dollar and Lazy Man and Money have. What is this button? A plugin?
• Sharethis button was ambiguous—she thought it was how she could share her comments with the writer—like a comment.
• The comment box was way far down the page (after Google ads, related posts, share this button) and made it real tough for her to naturally find.
• A personal story she was reading really hooked her and she read it until the end (it was the only such story).
• The bolded text helped her get through the piece by breaking it up.
• She was leery of Revolution Money Exchange because she’s never heard of it.

In all, this was a great experience and now I have some direct feedback that I can use to make my blog more user friendly. Some of it I can change and some of it is just the way it is (ShareThis button), but either way it helped me figure out what users go through when they come to the blog. I’ll probably post when I make some of these changes, but I’m looking at making commenting easier, adding some more color to certain parts of the page, and rearranging some of my links on the right-hand side to draw more attention to them.

Thanks ProBlogger!

Go back to Day 1’s tip, Email a New Reader.

Tags: 31 days to building a better blog, adsense, first time reader audit, google, Lazy Man and Money, problogger, The Simple Dollar