@ Swade: Sorry about that. It was perceptive of you to pick it up!

I wasn’t questioning your expertise, and I understand the communal nature of the exercise (i.e. how will a group of visitors find it) but for a fee paid service, I guess I’d want a little more than that. I think this ideas got a lotta legs, but it just isn’t for me right now. Bruce seems appreciative of the exercise and that’s what’s important here.

And with all due respect, there wasn’t a link to Hypebot there when I wrote the comment.

I look forward to the next installment of the community project.

@ Jen: Congrats!

(There is actually a link to Hypebot in the second sentence of the post.)

I don’t think you’re implying that the community should be experts in the area of blog critique (the point is that it’s a good litmus test of how average visitors will perceive your site). My job is only to rank aspects of the blog mentioned by the community in order of most frequent to least frequent, and to add my own commentary.

As for my own expertise, I’ve been designing blogs for four years, have completed (literally) hundreds of blog reviews and have grown Skelliewag to 2,100+ subscribers in just over four months, with a lot of my content dedicated to sharing insights on design, usability and simplicity. I’ve done paid design consulting in the past and am currently paid to write about design, usability and simplicity (in addition to other topics) at a number of well-known blogs.

Whether that makes me an ‘expert’ is up to you, but those are the qualifications I have :-).

As for the links idea being a better way to do things, it asks the ProBlogger readership to create content with little benefit to their target audience (for example, what if someone who blogs about knitting or cooking or productivity wanted to participate? Why would their readers want to read a design review?).

With such a long queue of people willing to take part with the existing format in place I don’t really see why we would ask the ProBlogger readership to make that sacrifice.

Anyway, thank you for the feedback. I’m glad you were able to decide community consulting wasn’t for you without spending money on it and being dissatisfied.

I sent in my email when you first advertised this community consulting program a few weeks ago, but I’d like to remove myself from the queue, please.

There were two attractive ideas about this program: first, the advice that one could receive, and second, the incoming links from a highly ranked site like PB.

On the first point – I think paying bloggers would want some assurance that the advice is coming from experts in a field. now whilst that’s quite possibly the case here, there’s little assurance given to the blogger that that’s actually happening. I fear that this series might start to read the same from start to finish from week to week for each blog analysed.

On the second point, there’s not one link to the target blog in this post, which I find to be of some concern. Prizewinners have more links than the paying blogger in this instance.

Could I suggest an alternative format?

Previous campaigns or community writing projects have involved people writing their piece and then leaving a comment here, which would turn into a link to their piece. If the same happened for this project, then there’s be a whole bunch of links to the target blogger, Skellie would have a list of sites to check out and could still write the summary post and hand out the prizes.

Just trying to think of ways to provide some value for the $250 your asking for this service. But for the moment, please remove me from the queue.

Oh… I won something! W00t! :)

By the way, Good luck to the prize winners.

Cheers.

I’ve seen several suggestions saying that “recent posts” lists should be removed from the sidebar. While I agree that such lists should be short, I wonder how removing them could affect the experience of people who land on an individual post through a Google search or a referral.

If someone lands on an individual post, they’re not going to see any others on the page. If there’s no “recent posts” list in the sidebar, I suspect they’ll be less likely to explore the blog.

I just checked my stats, and it looks like 10-15% of my human visitors click on something in “recent posts.”

I think i miss this opportunity. Anyway, congratulations to the winner of the contest. Hope to read some good blogs from the winners.