Rauru.com Reviewed by Blog Design Studios!

Posted on Sep, 26 2008 under Randomness by Héctor Cabrera

Being critic about your own work can be a difficult task to achieve, specially when you love what you do. Can you take a honest look at your own work? I can, but it’s difficult.

The problem is that whenever you criticize your own work, you also start recalling emotions - the very same emotions you felt at the time you were doing it. You have the full picture of it. You can truly understand what it is and what it means. That’s why self-criticizing si so difficult.

Seeing all this, I decided that the best option for me was to ask for help. I needed someone who could take a look at my blog more clearly, more objectively, and less emotionally. Here’s where my good friend Mayank Gupta from Blog Design Studios came in.

Mayank wrote a very nice review about my blog on his site, pointing out a few good things -and some bad ones too- about Rauru.com. I found it very concise and complete, and I’m feeling truly grateful for it. Among other things, he said:

Consistent blogging - I noticed that generally Ikki blogs after few days, that’s good although I’ll suggest that in order to ensure that blog’s traffic increases, there has to be consistent blogging. May be 1 every day if possible.

… I have got no objections here. He’s right. I should set a blogging schedule and stick to it.

Use of Social bookmarking sites - Although, Ikki believes that traffic from social bookmarking sites sucks, however I still believe that a blog with good stats will always leave bigger impact on people. Of course, higher traffic will always help in monetizing the blog well. I’ll suggest Ikki to write list posts to ensure that it gets very hit on social bookmarking sites. As an example, my recent post i.e. 25 blog design which’ll make you jealous got hit on stumbleupon and good more than 2000 pageviews in few hrs. time and as a matter of fact, I got few subscribers for the blog too.

… I’m still not very attracted to the idea of relying on Social Bookmarking Sites for traffic. However, I might give it another shot and experiment with it within the next few days. Maybe you guys can help me with that?

Use of icon or logo - Personal branding is something which is really important in blogging. It helps you in standing out of the crowd and this ensure that an image sticks to reader’s mind. So, if someone has a logo or a unique identifier then it will surely help in improving the brand image.

.. This is something that has been worrying me too. Since I started Rauru.com, I have never got a decent icon/logo for it. I may hire someone for the job since I’m not that skilled at designing stuff -yet-.

No direct link to RSS - Another thing which surprised me was that there is no direct link on the blog which points to the RSS feed. There is an RSS icon, however it asks you to subscribe to the email newsletter, which no doubt is good. However, tech savvy people will always prefer to read the blog through RSS feed and you just need to make it easier for them to spot the RSS feed link.

… To be honest, I never thought of this. I’ll work on it. The only drawback I see on having 2 RSS sources is that I won’t be able to track down how many subscribers I really have. You can’t have it both ways, they say.

Read the rest of his review here. Please do share with me your comments about it, I’d really appreciate it!

4 Responses to "Rauru.com Reviewed by Blog Design Studios!"

Swastik Sep, 26 2008

T’was a good review. I agree with some of his points
Swastik Sep, 26 2008

BTW, You’ve categorized this into SEO, blogging.. Sounds weird?

You should create a new category
Wong Sep, 26 2008

That was a great review. I agree with most of the points, especially consistent blogging. The pace of blogging on this blog is a little irregular.

Agree with Swastik on the category thing.
Ikki Sep, 26 2008

@Swastik: yup, I just didn’t know where to put it xD I’ll consider adding a Reviews category or something similar.

@Wong: I know :$ I promise to be more consistent from now on.