Thread: Weight Loss Blog Case Study

I decided to start a case-study too. Basically, I want to make a successful blog in the competitive weight loss niche.

Disclaimer: I set up my blog using my own blog installer product that I intend to market in 2012.

The actual domain I have owned for several years, but haven't really made the best use of it.

So after installing the blog with the plugins and legal pages, I wrote the about me and first post. For the first post, I pushed myself to write over 700 words to make the Panda happy Also, I incorporated images into my post.

The blog is at: Weight Loss Ninja Dot Com - this isn't such a great keyword, but good for branding I think.

Weight loss tips are a popular New Years resolution. You picked a good time to start this topic.

Do you plan to ad adsense or amazon?

Weight loss tips are a popular New Years resolution. You picked a good time to start this topic.

Yes, ha ha. January is the peak month for gym membership I think. Hands up how many of us ever joined a gym in January.

Do you plan to ad adsense or amazon?

Yes, but once I build up the traffic and content. I will probably add eBay feeds too on selected posts where I talk about using exercise gear/equipment. Maybe I will try and build a mailing list too, if I can get motivated to build a free report or exercise planner?

I want to sit down and plan out some initial topics where I can write long posts about what I have done over the past year to lose weight. That would provide a core of solid content to start with.

Then I can follow these with my opinion on things, and news about what I am doing to continue the weight loss progress.

As a blogger, an important thing to do is start networking with other bloggers to get more comments. Like, you can siphon off vistors from their blogs by posting comments.

You can search for recently updated blogs at blogsearch.google.com to find relevant blogs to comment on.

Another idea would be to get involved in weight loss forums where you can have a signature link.

Later I will build links to my posts using the Unique Article Wizard service.

Yeah, I think it was Johnny Chow that wrote a decent piece the other day about making from from his list than directly from the site. The one time I tried this in earnest on an affiliate site (not weight loss) that I have up, I had no luck. (I figured out 2/3rds of my list were reps of the various vendors I hawk on the site!).

I've changed my personal minimum length of content to > 500 words (when possible while avoiding fluff) in the past month and am thinking about even going larger at 750 or 2 pages without images, etc.

Looking forward to seeing your progress!

Oh, for a question. What do you think about putting one set of the boiler plate stuff (legal, TOS, privacy policy) up on a single site and linking back to it from the others? Good, bad, indifferent? I don't do this, but was thinking about starting to do so.

Originally Posted by javanx3d

Oh, for a question. What do you think about putting one set of the boiler plate stuff (legal, TOS, privacy policy) up on a single site and linking back to it from the others? Good, bad, indifferent? I don't do this, but was thinking about starting to do so.

It makes it easy to do updates when you have a ton of web sites, especially when Google comes along and requires a disclaimer about ads or the government sets up new guidelines that require a disclaimer if you recommend or endorse products.

Yeah there are a lot of legal pages on my blog, they are generated from my WP Tycoon blog management tool. One of my earlier sites was a place to link to for a Free Privacy Policy and I think that 1000's of sites did so. So I do think it is efficient to link to one set of these kinds of pages, but it would link all of your blogs together unless you link to a site that has a large number of other sites linking to it.

This gives me an idea for my blog management tool, a bulk legal-pages updater

Looking forward to seeing your progress!

Thanks I look forward to your progress too.

Lately I added a "videos" page listing YouTube videos that I think my blog readers would like, and may not have come across before. Another idea for a page would be a resources page for calorie counters, BMI calculator etc.

To try to build a list, I wrote a Top Tips report that subscribers to an Aweber form can download. I made a simple 3D image for the report using "Ecover Studio FX".

I added a photo of my thinner-looking self to the right sidebar to personalize the blog.

I used a text widget to draw people's attention to new features of the blog such as the subscribe form LOL.

Posted a 2nd post. I'm writing my own content, so it will be a while until I get a solid foundation of content.

Nice on the eBook!

Is there any particular reason that made you choose Aweber to manage the list over the other services out there?

One suggestion that I have is to put the legal, privacy, disclosure in the footer and remove from the top menu.

Use the pages for sticky content like nutritional information. Posts for updates on your progress or reviews, medical information, diet pills, supplements, exercise equipment etc. Boilerplate in the footer.

Suggestion: This could be a good topic. Testosterone deficiency can result in weight gain. Most males that are 35+ experience a drop in testosterone. etc ..

@bogart thanks for the ideas, I will put them to work.

"Nice on the eBook!

Is there any particular reason that made you choose Aweber to manage the list over the other services out there?"

Thanks! I used Aweber since I already have an account with them and everybody says that they are the best. For e-mail deliver-ability I think that they are good, also they have great templates for the e-mail form with the call-to-action arrows. I am also a subscriber to direct responders which is only $10 a month. I am kind of wasting my money with these services though since I was so busy coding that I haven't been focused on marketing and building lists. It seems like anybody that makes a lot of money online has subscriber lists in place.

It's easy to make an e-book with Open Office and export to pdf. And you can embed links and copy-protect the document with Open Office.

Actually, my e-book is only 2 pages long. It's a summary of what I plan to cover in depth on the blog.

To ensure that the pdf is downloaded (rather than opened in a browser window) you can add the following code to your .htaccess file:

Code:

<FilesMatch "\.(?i:pdf)$">
  ForceType application/octet-stream
  Header set Content-Disposition attachment
</FilesMatch>