I think your URL is fine – “retire at 21″ is an eye-catching and easy string to remember; what more could you want? As long as you acknowledge for yourself that it’s only a “figure of speech” phrase, and that you’re just as interested to address older members of your audience, it’s fine. Your intentions will show from your writing – so simply don’t focus too much on “young”.

What software do you use to create content? While getting someone to proofread would be ideal, you could already gain a lot from a tool with some powerful spell-checking built in.

Maybe you need to get someone else to proofread? That’s often better even for those of us not fighting a handicap.

Michael at Retireat21.com here again.

Once again – thank you everyone. The amount of time and effort that has been put into this community consulting is amazing. I am also very grateful to Skellie and the ProBlogger team.

As I mentioned the other day, I am currently in Ghana (doing some voluntary work) and getting a reliable internet connection is not always easy – plus I have also been quite ill this week. I would have liked to have been more active in these discussions – but it has just not been possible. So I really appreciate the number of comments and also the amount of detail that so many of you went into.

Rest assured – as soon as I can I will be updating my Blog about this community consulting and also going to work – to implement many of the suggestions.

Just about everyone has mentioned I need to proofread all of my copy – as a dyslexic this has been one of my biggest challenges. I do however accept that that is no excuse and while I think it will be rash to state I will no longer make errors in grammar or spelling, there will be nothing like the quantity of them in future. (I promise)

Really it is unfair to single out any single comments here – because just about all the comments have been helpful but if I may I would just like to specially acknowledge Easton Ellsworth, Anthony Lawrence and Yung-Chin

One thing in particular that impressed me was knowing that so many of you did a whole lot more than just vaguely look the site over. I feel I have been well and truly examined and I accept that in many areas there are failings, which is precisely the reason why I took the advice of my father (Barry Dunlop) and also my good friend Dean Hunt who suggested applying for community consulting.

Thank you all again – I do hope you will check back on the site from time to time, to see how I progress.

Of course, also feel free to comment further – especially if you feel something has been missed.

Michael Dunlop

Interviews

Depth and multimedia. More questions, more answers, more information. More photos, more audio, more videos. Make each interview the one-stop place for people to figure out what makes that young entrepreneur tick. Don’t settle for anything quick and light. Let these interviews make your visitor ache for the success they hear about and rejoice for the encouragement and instruction they gain.

For every interview if possible, get a video of you talking to the person, or at least of them talking or doing something. Put all your site’s videos on your own YouTube channel to get even more followers that way.

Design

Another commenter correctly suggested that putting your blog front and center on the homepage – that is, featuring recent posts right in the main content area on the homepage – would draw visitors into your site more readily. But you could also benefit by simply displaying teasers, much like Darren Rowse does at this site, on the home page and letting people click through to read the articles whose headlines and blurbs they find most interesting. Either way, the key is to show that you’ve got a variety of fresh intellectual foods for them to feast on.

Make http://www.retiredat21.com redirect to http://www.retireat21.com/blog/.

To make your site easier to read, make your default post text darker and your article headlines bolder and a bit darker.

Use lowercase letters in your article headlines in addition to uppercase – OTHERWISE IT SEEMS LIKE YOU’RE YELLING.

Unify your hyperlink colors – right now on the front page there are green links, blue links and gray links (and that’s not counting the different mouseover colors). Change all links to a single default color and a single mouseover color – I’d recommendthe blue since it stands out best from the green of the headings and the gray of the main content. This wil increase the number of clicks within your site.

Scoot the ebook box to the right and make it smaller, or get rid of it on the homepage and only include a “Free Ebook” link up top somewhere.

That whole link area up top could be consolidated into a single bar with no more then 5-10 links. Maybe “About — Contact — Subscribe — Free Ebook — Interviews — Articles — Blog — Tools.”

http://www.retireat21.com/about doesn’t load.

Less can be more on the homepage. Give the reader a few simple, direct choices and she’ll thank you by staying longer. For example, the layout could tell her, in essence, “Welcome. You can read our blog, subscribe for free updates, get our free ebook, read our articles, watch our videos, listen to our audio, check out our tools, learn more about us or contact us.” She’ll take a step in one of those directions and then you can show her many more choices and links.

Make your favicon agree thematically with your website. Right now it looks like a red cog. Maybe make it a bright gold, gray or green coin with “21″ on it.

Get rid of the quotation marks around the tagline. Make it all bold or not at all.

So many of the problems with your website would go away if it weren’t so cluttered. If you set me loose on your site, I’d immediately set to work with the delete key and lots of cutting/pasting. Lots of things need to move out of the way, and lots of things need to be consolidated and grouped.

Right now, RetireAt21 is a bedroom closet with all the clothes sitting unfolded in several laundry baskets instead of on the racks and in the dressers. The clothes may be clean and good-looking, but the clutter is likely to frustrate anyone looking for something specific. The clutter may well upset them so much that they either leave without trying anything on or frantically ransack the place until they find something appealing, only to leave feeling stressed out despite the quality of what they’ve just found.

So, you need to put all the clothes in their proper places – hang some up, put others on racks, put others in the dressers. And everything should go where it will be found most easily. So put a link near the top saying, “Free Ebook,” for example, and then don’t include a large box promoting it except on a single page devoted entirely to it. Or consolidate the “About” information (you even have two of the exact same picture of you on the front page!) into a single place and move most of it to the About page. All of this will make your visitors enjoy your site much more, and they’ll be more likely to come back often and bring their friends along.

An “Articles” link up top would be good too, linking to a page where you list every article on the site.

Move all of the subscription stuff to a “Subscribe” page and just have an RSS button or some other visually appealing thing appear in the upper right, like a “Subscribe for Free” link.

The current tagline is confusing. It says your site is about young entrepreneurs making money online – so the visitor may incorrectly expect to only find information about other young entrepreneurs. Instead, shift the focus to the visitor herself.

Bring the logo and tagline closer together. Each seems lonely for the other.

Make the text in the site logo more bold and all of the same color. And make the logo more simple. Lose the flying bills too. Remember that Google and Yahoo!’s logos are basically plain text; their power and uniqueness come mainly from the stylization of the text. See LogoPond.com for inspiration.

Make sure people can easily tell the date on which a blog post on your blog was published.

Overall Content

The name “Retire At 21″ seems to divide visitors into two groups: those 21 or younger who have a shot at retiring before their 22nd birthday, and the rest of us, who have already blown that chance. Assuming that “retire” means “stop having to earn a living,” there are surely many people in both groups who would be interested to learn how a person can retire by the tender age of 21.

So you have two main choices:

1. Restrict your content’s focus to things done by people 21 and younger (so, not by 26-year-olds unless you’re talking about things they did back before they turned 22)

2. Focus on sharing principles of entrepreneurship that benefit the under-21 crowd as well the over-21 crowd and downplay the possible exclusivity implied by the domain name.

I think you could succeed either way. If you go with choice #1, I suggest creating another website at RetireAt30.com (40 or 50 just don’t sound as exciting) and having each site complement the other. You could even work the content to where over the years, your followers “graduate” from one site to the other. If you go with choice #2, make sure your homepage copy immediately makes it clear that the site is for everybody.

Also, what about offline stuff? There are hundreds of ways to make money as a young entrepreneur offline. Consider expanding the scope of your content to include both offline and online ways of making money. Bonus points if you can teach readers how to make the two realms amplify each other.

There are many writing mistakes that probably make many visitors distrust you. They are so easy to fix and to avoid. I know dyslexia poses a challenge. But you must insist on having a website free of glaring linguistic errors.

Audio and video, my friend. Right now is the time to start. It’s okay if it’s not polished. Just record yourself and publish and go from there. You’ve just got to start. I would recommend doing video first or instead, since it’s going to have more of an impact at the site where people can actually see that you ARE young.

Your content needs to grab attention and keep it. You need to whip out a colossal article that gets you on the world’s radar. The over-21 crowd is much bigger and would love to talk about you if it just knew how good you are.

Do something that hasn’t been done before, or at least, that your readers most likely haven’t seen and could use. Like a video series detailing every step of how to make money online through affiliate sales or some other tightly-defined topic.

Get a Flickr account and host your site images with it. More traffic will come from Flickr, and you’ll get to let Flickr handle more of the site bandwidth by hosting a lot of your images. And young entrepreneurs like you will have one more way to network with you and connect with you.

Make it more clear that the site is by you – or explain who all is involved. This is easily done in a tagline or brief about info in the upoer right, like “RetireAt21.com offers articles by Michael Dunlop and other young entrepreneurs on how you can make more money online and retire earlier than you ever thought possible.”

Consider adding tools like calculators (how early can you retire if …? for example) and having those go on unique static pages or under one page, like retireat21.com/tools, so people can bookmark it and it can get some social media buzz that way.

Your tutorials area (retireat21.com/tutorials) is great – lots of good content there. But you need to make it more obvious to the first-time visitor just how deep that pool of content really is. I can’t even remember how I found it. After all, you’ve got like 5,000 pages on the site. It just doesn’t look that way from the front page. How to remedy this? Again, by reducing the number of links on the front page itself and brining them all under several headings that point to pages with much longer lists of links.

Viral Content

Make something people can’t stop talking about – especially within your target audience. Some ideas:

1. Create a free tool that quizzes people and then tells them at what age they can expect to retire. Make it cute, embeddable and emailable. Put it at RetireAt21.com/quiz. Have someone Stumble and Digg the URL.

2. Create a widget that displays recent headlines from blogs by or for young entrepreneurs. Make it cute and customizable. Make a directory of participating bloggers at RetireAt21.com/directory.

3. Publish a blog post that provides hard-to-believe information about 32 (pick a number) of the world’s most famous young entrepreneurs and how they achieved success. Bonus points if all the people on the list rose from financial obscurity.

4. Expand the “Top 21…” page into the ultimate list of young entrepreneurs. Rank ‘em and update the list annually. Encourage visitors to submit themselves and their friends for inclusion. Can you imagine seeing conversations all over the place going, “Yeah, did you hear about that new whiz-kid? He’s sure to make Michael’s R@21 list this year.”

5. Hold a contest where you offer a cash prize to the person who submits the best article on how to make money as a young entrepreneur.

6. Make a widget with your logo on it and a link to your site in it, and have it display the person’s age (”19, Retiring at 21!”). Give it out regularly to other bloggers and webmasters as an award, or unleash it to the whole world.

Promotion

Build a community through the comment box and the contact form. Connect with people, get their emails, get their URLs, etc. Most of your blog posts still receive 5 comments or less. The time has come for them to start getting dozens of comments each. Make great, meaty content and it will promote itself pretty well, saving you more than the time you spent making it great and meaty.

Also, use the real world. Seminars, conferences, meet-ups, classes, reunions, parties, shopping trips … everywhere you go, talk with people face to face about your site.

Flaunt your age. Tell the world you’re 19. Say so on the front page.

Getting your visitors to talk to you and to each other is a huge key to your success. If they can add comments or even articles to the site, it can make it into a community, a destination. Right now it seems more like a highway leading to other places. Make it a dead end that people won’t care about running into.

Hire a copywriter, hire a designer. Let them handle the look and feel of the site. That will give you more time to write your book. :)

SEO

Google sees 277 Web pages linking in to your site and 6,350 pages on the site – pretty good. A quick MarketLeap Link Popularity Check showed that you are doing well compared to some competitors in your niche, but that you still plenty of room for improvement.

Technorati has indexed only a few (16 or 17) links to your blog but nearly 500 to your site – that’s in the last 6 months, I believe. Very decent for the site, kind of poor for the blog – especially given how saturated that blogging niche is.

Right now the first text Google and Yahoo! are indexing from your homepage is “Young Entrepreneurs Making Money Online – Latest Interviews …” or “Young Entrepreneurs Making Money Online – Interview with … .” Change the page title and add a text tagline right under the site logo so the spiders instead see something like:

Page Title: Money Making Tips for Young Entrepreneurs – RetireAt21.com

Tagline: Learn how to make money online and retire young.

Monetization

What is your ultimate financial reason for this website? Ad revenue? Resume building? Lead generation? Direct product sales? Professional relationships? Consulting services? Something else? Pick a main reason and fit the other reasons around it like the spokes of a bicycle wheel.

If it were my site, I’d get rid of all the banner ads and only rarely use affiliate text ads. My main focus would be to draw visitors to me as a source of worthy products and services. The knowledge imparted freely at the site would be the appetizer, my fee-based personal help the main course, and any affiliate promotions the dessert.

Fee-based help could take the form of ebooks, printed books, CDs, DVDs, audio files, site memberships to access premium content, consulting or simple one-off services (such as isolated phone calls or customized reports).

There’s too much advertising, particularly for other people’s stuff. You should use most or all of your advertising space to share content that leads visitors to purchase directly from you – your books, your consulting, your “I’m 18 … Only 3 Years Till Retirement” T-Shirts, whatever. If you do advertise, I would urge you to pick more subtle ads that don’t scream so badly for attention.

What can you do for other young entrepreneurs that they can’t do for themselves? What can you do better than they can? What problems do they have that you can help them solve? Focus your whole website on healing their wounds and calming their worries and shedding light on subjects that to them have been dark. And surely you’ll make profitable partnerships here and there as you get to know your visitors personally.

Try to get some testimonials on your Advertise and About pages, at least, where people you know share a few thoughts about you that help visitors build their trust in you.

Consider offering premium content at a recurring monthly charge to people who sign up specifically to get access to it. That can be another powerful way to build revenue.

Other Ideas

Consider hiring someone to help you implement all the changes you’d like to make based on the community feedback you’ve received here. Also, you should contact every commenter here who you think might possibly have knowledge that might help you, and ask them for more advice. Offer to help them with your expertise as a trade.

Conclusion

Ask yourself these questions:

1. How does RetireAt21 make people feel? What they feel is more important than what they learn when it comes to deciding whether to become avid followers of RetireAt21.

2. How remarkable is RetireAt21 to visitors?

3. What difference does it ultimately make in people’s lives?

You are a smart, hard-working young man, Michael. The world needs more like you. Your website is well on its way to helping meet that need.

This website and others you have made constitute your online resume. Assemble it carefully.

Work hard, treat your visitors as honored guests and never stop thirsting for improvement. Best wishes to you and RetireAt21.com.

Please pay attention to grammar, word usage, redundancy and please don’t make up words. “Domainer” is not a word. Poor grammar and made-up words convey inexperience and lack of thought or effort; entrepreneurs, whatever their ages, need to be professional.

Example: corrected blurb for the Matt Wegrzyn interview: “Interview with Matt Wegrzyn of Bodis.com. Real step-by-step advice on making money buying and selling domains.”

I could not find an RSS feed button on the pages, only the email feed. I could get to the RSS subscription by clicking on the number of subscribers, but there should be a recognizable RSS button somewhere prominent.

Some of the menu texts do not convey what they lead to. The Top 21 Websites, for example, doesn’t convey that these are 21 websites created by young entrepreneurs. It also appears to have very similar content to the No Grey Hair CEO. Along those lines, “Be Our Friend” should ask for what you want (in this case, perhaps, “Spread the Word”).

Everything on the main menu should go toward furthering the message of the blog. When I clicked on the software and tools, I expected a list of software and tools that would help someone retire early. What I saw was a “my favorite things” list. This needs to be pulled back into the direction of the site.

Good luck with the site!

The green and white theme color and green images are excellent – but there is a lack of organization on the homepage. So the eye tends to wander aimlessly

There is no focus, so one does not know where to start

The interviews are interesting – it will be interesting to track these people years from now to see how they eventually did

One of the biggest “take aways” from this is that we need to have a wider age focus – on the whole make money online niche as you mention.

Funny enough my Dad is 47 – and he has been saying the same thing.

I have some ideas – but if anyone else wants to make suggestions on how to make the AGE focus wider while retaining the URL (which I have found is a good icebreaker – that makes people want to find out more) I would be all EARS!

thank you

Michael

This is Michael, owner of RetireAt21.com – I am currently in Ghana, and finding a reliable Internet connection last few days has not been easy – but here I am now.

I just wanted to say a huge thank you – the generosity of people here is amazing and being able to see “my” site as others see it, is most helpful

I was not 100% sure what to expect by community consultation – but now I have gone through the process I can say I have no regrets. It may well one day, be the single “thing” that made the biggest difference in taking R21 to where I want to take it.

Your feedback / comments has been very fair and balanced. I now have a huge amount of work to do – and the site that you will find 30 – 90 days from now will be quite different from the present.

Thank you all again. I will be commenting about this experience on my blog – and in particular some of the immediate changes I will be making.

Kind Regards

Michael

The other problem with the site is that the navigational structure of the site. The navigational structure as it is laid out tends to take the user away from the main content areas and is quite cluttered, with bulletted subheadings. It may be easier to find another theme or modify the existing theme so that it utilizes tabbed navigation – for example I would lay his navigation out this way:

Home Page – should host the main blog content only

About Page – could have the press releases, the about Michael page, and the About Making Money Online in this category. This would give the user a better idea of what the site is about.

Resource Page – Entrepenuer interviews, Top 21 Websites, Young Rich List, & No Grey-Haired CEOs are good resources to refer back to, but he needs to expand this category with additional resources that will actually aid a would-be-entrepenuer in getting started.

Software/Tools: Another page that can be expanded to add additional software, including his own to help entrepenuers.

E-Books and Courses: Another page that can be expanded to add additional e-books and courses, including his own to help entrepenuers.

Support: Should have only one contact form, two is redundant (Ask Michael/Contact Us).

Other Suggestions:

Sidebar is too cluttered: Category of Latest Blog Posts should focus on just the title of the post. Adding the first sentence of the post did not appear meaningful. A user wants to quickly get to the content by clicking the permalink.

The Other Links Category should be broken up or renamed. The posts focused primarily on the interviews.

He needs to add a social bookmarking widget to promote his blog posts as well as the category as well as feed buttons to give users with different feed readers an opportunity to subscribe to the blog feed.

As the saying goes, “why have everyone dig their own 3 foot well when the community can build a 30 foot one together?” You should make an initiative page where users can list their goals and see how they can help each other and make forums to do it.

In this way, Retireat21.com can further help entrepreneurs connect and empower them to achieve their goals and actually retire at 21.

How about Seth Godin for an interview, questions seems ok.

• What can Michael do to improve the interviews?

Considering this is a link bait post, not much..
• Design — usability, visual appeal, readability, navigation.

Make it w3c complaint. In some countries it is the law now.

• Content — got an idea for a great viral post the blogger could write?

Would I be here if I did….

• Promotion — how would you suggest the blogger promote the blog?

Probably trying pay per post. The only problem is Google has got wise to that now.

• SEO — can you see areas for improvement?

W3c will help SEO

• Monetization — could this be done more effectively? Do you see any missed opportunities?

There is always a better advertiser, it is just a question of making your product better.

The interviews themselves seem to be reasoable, both in length and content. I would design in an introduction details box at the top of the interview, listing name, age, website links etc – a sort of ‘about’ box for the person beig interviewed. I’d also try and get better quality head shots of those you are talking to.

What can Michael do to improve the interviews?

See above

Design — usability, visual appeal, readability, navigation.

Hate the logo, looks cheap. I do like the color scheme though. Top navigation lists are ok, but I don’t like the 1, 2, 3 numbering – the links are self explanatory.

The “Get Retire at 21’s” ebook promotion lowers the value of the site tremendously. While this may (or may not) be a decent product, it makes the whole site look as though its geared towards selling you something, and not about good sold advice for those wanting to make some money themselves.

The website sponsors on the right hand side are like those appearing everywhere these days – ones that flash look cheap and tacky – I’d try and use alternative static banners if possible.

The footer is over stuffed with links, which looks bad and is just repeating whats linked in the header navigation. If you must put links there, perhaps link to content thats off the beaten track rather than content thats linked on every page anyway.

Content — got an idea for a great viral post the blogger could write?

The making money on line page is bloated and badly layed out. It should be split over a couple of pages, with more padding between paragraphs. The photo used on this page looks low rent – go and get something better from iStock or similar.

The table on this page – “Website’s, Blog’s or Forums? When starting a website a lot of people don’t know whether to build a stand alone website, blog or forum. Below i have created a chart with the pro’s and con’s for making money online.” is not explained in any way, it just appears to be a series of numbers. Explain it better.

Promotion — how would you suggest the blogger promote the blog?

Get someone big from the blogging world, maybe Darren Rowse from problogger.net, to help you with this one. Perhaps suggest offering some free traffic in exchange for comments about your site, which will no doubt help promote the site for you.

SEO — can you see areas for improvement?

More content.

Monetization — could this be done more effectively? Do you see any missed opportunities?

Too many competing ads – I’d thin them down, not increase them. If you give your visitors too many ways to leave the site, they’ll just close the window or tab. You are also writing for a very web-savvy target audience – the kind of people who are unlikely to click through on flashing affiliate ads. Perhaps use this site to promote other ‘lesser’ sites that can do more in the way of direct advertising and monetisation opportunities.

1) The right portion including “:: About Michael “, “:: Website Sponsors” could be made to look something different than what it is currently. Ok, that Michael made this site, this does not mean he has to focus himself.
2) Put your sponsors in the front. They are what your one of the top priority has to be. They paid for it.
3) The Newsletter section can be somewhere in the middle and right/left portion of the page. Focus on the Entrepreneurs, not your newsletter, which is your main focus, if I’m not wrong.
4) The top menu also did not quite appeal to me.
5) Regarding SEO, I focus on meta tags, and I say only one meta tag, which I think is not enough.
6) Instead of content which is currently in the newsletter section, you can focus any random Entrepreneur or Entrepreneur of the months types :)

Design: The site is well put-together. I hate flashing ads, though. They detract from the feel. I like the AskEntrepreneur section on the front page, but can you link the title to a whole page of questions and answers? The page was a little slow for me to load.

Content: Great resources. I’d like to see a Bookstore section where you refer other books on entrepreneurialism and retiring early. You offer tons of resources that illustrate the point that people can become rich young, but not enough ways and tools to do it. Include articles on each of the points you have on Making Money Online and break them out. How can people use these tools? People appreciate step-by-step, not just a short overview.

Promotion: finding more people to interview is one way, since they’ll definitely link to the interview. Working with other bloggers can build your promotion, but you seem to know that.

SEO: it’s fine.

Monetization: I think you do this in a way that is not annoying to the reader, which is important. Don’t overdo it or you’ll lose your audience. Just keep making sure everything you sell on your site is relevant.

I think Undine, above makes an important comment about being “unprofessional,” and I want to echo that but qualify it a bit. What people perceive you as aiming for determines how they will judge you. Your site comes off as ambitious in its look: at first I think “oh! this is going to be like http://www.fool.com, I’m going to get tutorials on what activities help me make money online and advice from all the professionals frequenting the site.”

But then the little things – starting with lack of a “Get started here” section explaining exactly how you can help me and what I should be thinking about as I peruse your site – start getting to me. Clicking on Ebooks and Courses transfers me to other products that I haven’t been sold on yet, because I haven’t been told where to start (credit to Ryan above for the “this site feels like it’s trying to get me to download the e-book comment:” that might be something you want to build up to as opposed to push outright). The “Making Money Online” section just throws ideas for monetizing at me. It doesn’t even attempt to tell me what approaches I should consider depending on where I am in life and what I want to accomplish, and then list pros and cons. It more or less throws information at me.

Ironically enough, that’s a strength in the interviews – the more specific the people being interviewed are, the better the interview. The interview with Matt Wegrzyn is where I want to start commenting. It’s a good interview – Matt gives a quick background, talks about his successes, and the narrative makes me want to try domain name investing. He tells his story and thus introduces me to a way of thinking about how to make money – he gets me ready to start the process. The questions are down-to-earth, the sort of thing anyone who wanted to know and was smart but not too knowledgeable about domaining would ask.

But as has been noted above, the interview looks sloppy. It looks like it was cut and paste from an e-mail. At the very least, this text:

Interview with Matt Wegrzyn of Bodis.com – a very young and very successful domainer. If you ever wondered how to make money buying and selling domains then this interview with Matt will inspire. Real step by step advice on making money buying and selling domains

could have been put in italics. A period ending the whole section and “step-by-step” and “If you ever have wondered” are just some of the little things that add to the professionalism aspect. Again, credit to Anthony Lawrence for pointing this out before, but it really is obvious.

Yung-chin is right about allowing comments. There’s little or no interactivity on the interview section, although you do allow comments when the link to the interview is posted on the blog. I don’t see a forum.

I also don’t see a place where I can be introduced to the rest of the “team,” and it might be nice to know them esp. if they’re contributing some of the content. One thing about this site is the question of authority – there are many sites like this, why should I pay attention to this one?

If the interviews are central to your site, then they need to look a lot better. I don’t see a problem with content: looking over the Volk interview, I think the questions are good, it’s up to the interviewee sometimes to provide the relevant information.

If I had to change your site around, here’s what I would do:

* put the blog front and center, to make it clear things were being updated and this site invited feedback and interactivity.

* change the design entirely. The “Retire @ 21″ logo looks stark and cheaply made to me. I’m sorry if I’ve offended, but I think something brighter with a cleaner sense of line (I look at the logo and it looks smudgy to me) would be better. I also don’t like, on the front page, how the “franchise inc” ad stands right next to the blog posts area, and all of that is lower down the page. I would cut that ad or make it a footer, it just seems completely out of place. And do note that the blog feels marginalized, as does the archive.

* You don’t need quotes around the tagline, and the tagline isn’t very good, if it isn’t misleading, as has been said above. Your tagline should mirror your about me – what are you going to do for me? My own thought is that you should say something like “Introducing You To the World of Making Money Online,” and then play off that tagline and give a few pages to a going-over basics section saying “depending on what you want to do, here are ideas and suggestions.” From there, you can introduce your reader to the interviews, and put links to the people you interview under the relevant way of making money.

* People have noted above how to fix advertising your feed – there’s nothing that says “subscribe to the feed in a reader.” Again, the feed is only important if the blog is important. The blog seems secondary right now. If you want forums eventually, you need a readership talking to you and each other.

* the e-book ads are too many and too often.

* please consider reorganizing the site around ways of making money: the Making Money Online section does a great job listing those ways, and if it had depth, you’d have a killer site and I’d read every interview there ever was just to see how things work.

I realize it sounds like I contradicted myself with the blog/reorganize the site advice, but I think you know what I mean. Your permanent pages will be complemented by blog posts on the topic, your permanent pages on a particular type of making money will be an introduction to that “theme,” and will link to all the relevant blog posts concerning that theme.

This sounds trite, but properly organized and updated content people want to read will gain attention. It’s always a fight to keep the archives relevant, and so when your site gets older, you can have “a look back” feature or just do a related posts thing like Darren does. But the organization will do wonders, as will an introduction to the topic of making money for total beginners, ones that have never even tried setting up a website.

Design: I understand the green for cash but it was a bit hard on the eyes. The navigation print is extremely small, but I’m not “young” so maybe your target audience can read it better than I can.

From an ad standpoint, having the ebook front and center is probably a good place, but from a reader perspective, I would have moved on. If you don’t put your content front and center, why should I?

Interviews – they need to be edited. People ramble when they talk but reading it on the page doesn’t work. You can sharpen these interviews without removing the personality and the content. Take out the repetitions, take out the vague sentences and punctuate properly. They also need to be shorter or presented in two parts.

These interviews could be your niche — people like to read about how other people actually made it.

You’ve put a lot of hard work into your entire site. Here are my thoughts and comments. I hope you find something of value in them.

Design: (1) It’s a nice looking site. However, your ebook screams “buy me.” It should be easily seen, but not the first thing a visitor sees. (2) I was frustrated by the fact that there are no complete paragraphs on your home page. Every time I started to read, I was cut off in the middle of a sentence and had to click a link. This made reading difficult and the visitor was left with too much navigation. There should be an enticing paragraph telling what your site has to offer and which makes the reader want to go looking for more to read, especially on your home page. (3) Your tag line also bothers me. “Young Entrepreneurs Making Money Online” sounds like the site is only for people already successful. I think a better line would be something like, “Be A Young Entrepreneur Making Money Online.” Those may not be the best words either, but do let the readers know you have something valuable to share with them. (4) There are way too many grammatical errors. One here and there is okay, but there are many. This gives your site an unprofessional and unreliable look. (5) “Ask Entrepreneur” is a good idea. But it should read, “Ask The Entrepreneur.” Also, get rid of the “view full answer” links. Make it easy to read by putting all Q’s & A’s on a separate page. (6) I think switching back and forth from “retire@21″ and “retire at 21″ is confusing, especially since the URL differs from the site name.

Content: How about titles such as, “Top 10 Mistakes Entrepreneurs Make”, or “10 Secrets To Online Success”, or “10 Best Ways To Jump Start Your Business.” Provide good advice that your readers will want to bookmark and read again and again.

SEO: Use Technorati tags. Use key words in titles and your opening sentences.

Monetization: Highly praise the products successful entrepreneurs use and have affiliate links to them. What products work for you? You could use Google ads, but I personally am not a fan of their ads.

Interviews: (1) Put a “Q” by all the questions and an “A” by all the answers. Sometimes your questions are not clear enough to let the reader know it is a question. (2) You tend to repeat the opening line. Readers don’t want their time wasted. (3) The questions don’t go into enough detail about the interviewee’s niche and the steps he/she took to achieve success.

Lastly, the fact that you are catering to the 21 crowd doesn’t bother me. Not every site is for everyone, and I find nothing wrong with targeting a certain group of people. But, I think your site is lacking the most important thing … quality advice! What advice you provide, is hard to find. And that makes me want to click to another site. If I am looking for a site to teach me how to make money online, I want to read something that will empower me. Unfortunately, your blog does not do that. When you write a post, try to picture a newbie looking for a lot of information, and ask yourself, “Did I really tell them something worthwhile and did I get them motivated into action?”

Best of luck to you. I wish you tremendous success!