Free Quick Blog Review: Caroline Middlebrook, Livin’ Online

This post is the first in a series of 5 free quick blog reviews worth a total of $500 that I’m giving away to promote my blog consultancy.

Caroline Middlebrook: Making a Living Online

First Impressions

My first impression of Caroline’s blog is that I liked the design: Good colors, not too busy, not too plain. Specifically, I like:

1. The picture: I want to see who I’m reading about, and Caroline’s picture is big enough so we can see what a friendly human being she is.
2. The RSS icon and the subscription info above the fold: nice, big icon and high placement makes it tempting and easy to subscribe. Normally, I’d say the icon’s too big but the large author picture balances it out.
3. The calendar graphics for each post are nicely done.

Two elements stand out to me that could be improved:

1. The navigation bar should be up higher, so that the top of the navbar is even with the bottom of the header.
2. The link colors seem a bit too brightly blue compared with the rest of the theme’s color scheme, so perhaps a more muted blue or a different color altogether, such as a dark red, would work better.

Content and purpose

Caroline’s got a very human and interesting story, and I like that her about page is called “My Story.” When you read it, you really want to root for Caroline. You hope she succeeds. While the story is great, it’s not all there is to this. Caroline describes herself as a programmer. The tag line for her blog says she’s starting her own business in software development and internet marketing.

As I go through Caroline’s archives, I get a lot of blogging and internet marketing posts, but very little about software development and what, if anything, she’s doing with it. Blogging is one kind of internet marketing, but she’s getting into metablogging territory. It’s really easy to slip into that, but she should be careful about that because the blog’s in danger of being about too many topics. According to her tags, right now she has only 3 posts on internet marketing and just 1 on software development. She has 16 posts on niche marketing, which is redundant to internet marketing.

Recommendations

In her post, The Relationship between Software and Internet Marketing, Caroline says:

…anything I can learn about internet marketing in general is going to be very useful to me further down the line when I have a software product that I want to market.

Caroline gives no indication of what kind of software she wants to create, other than joking about “…a cool MMORPG with millions of players and I’d be rich and famous!” If I can wear my psychology cap for a second, people often say what they really mean when they say something is “only a joke.” If you’re brave enough to quit your job, Caroline, then you’re brave enough to tackle something in the online gaming space.

However, what really struck me is that there seems to be a disconnect between software development for her and internet marketing.

I think Caroline should seriously consider writing internet marketing software and fuse the two things together. Instead of following someone else’s system about how to make money online, what if Caroline took her knowledge of software development and wrote the kinds of programs that other internet marketers are selling online for big money? As she herself knows, there is always a market for easier, better, and more automated ways to make money online! If Caroline learns enough about internet marketing, I have no doubt she could do this. She could sell it herself and create her own affiliate programs on ClickBank or whatever, or join forces with an established internet marketer for a big fat cut of the profits. ShoeMoney has his Dillsmack, right? Well, maybe Caroline is a Dillsmack waiting for her own ShoeMoney.

Caroline’s blog follows the classic diary format, telling her story as she goes along. If people get caught up in her story at this early stage, they will feel like they know her and trust her when she says: “Here’s my software you download or buy.” She will have a ready-made customer base of her readers.

People will want to read her story, but only if it goes somewhere. Her blog’s readers need to be reminded what the destination is from time to time. There must be successes and tension as part of the story or people will lose interest. If Caroline makes money with her own software, people will be ready to buy it from her so they can make money, too, and that’s when Caroline will make the real money.

Any internet marketer will tell you that your email list is gold. Caroline needs to build her email list. She needs to offer a newsletter and/or some other incentive to build that list, and use good email list software, like Aweber, to do it.

Recommendations review:

• Move navbar up
• Consider different link color
• Build her email list
• Consider creating her own internet marketing software

Hope you found this review helpful and food for thought, Caroline!

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