Other’s here have stated that the header and site design aren’t slick. In some ways you have a Craigslist thing going on here where a lack of slick design may be a valued aesthetic to your existing users (ie readers trust you because you’re not overly commercial).

Cleaning up the graphic design with that caveat in mind is probably worthwhile, but there are two issues I would address first:

1) Because your topic is money, you have to get past each visitor’s internal scam blocker to convince them to stay and become a return reader.

2) You need to help your visitors and readers find their way with a little navigational support.

When I first visited your site, I assumed it was a get-rich-quick site because it was money oriented, the title is vague, and it wasn’t from a name I recognized. I stayed and read the posts because of this contest, became hooked (added you to my feedreader), and realized my initial impression was way off. I think if you get people past that preconception, you’ll see a huge increase in quality traffic.

To combat that natural defense, I would take one of your reviews and put it in the top right of the banner – “[Free Money Finance] offers an inspiring mix of timeless investing wisdom and money-making ideas. – Business Week Magazine”. That’s an introduction to your site from brand I know.

The next issue I would address is the navigation. Other’s have mentioned that it’s hard to find your way around and difficult to find your subscription options. You can address this by de-cluttering your sidebars and moving some of that content (such as Money Blogs) to separate pages. It seems there are two category lists which are competing: The left sidebar starts with Best of FMF, the right sidebar has a simple list of categories. This could all be combined into a cleaner archives page.

Posts:
I think your content is great and based on your reviews from major players in field, greater money minds than mine think so too.

You asked about the red – it’s a bit too harsh. When I read it in my feedreader, it’s just indented and that works well. Another common (and fancier) approach is to add large quote marks to the background via css.

How to drive traffic:

It looks like from the footer on the posts you’re handling the obvious social networks.

Consider partnering with financial sites (such as mint, or even banks/other financial advice sites) to syndicate some of your best/latest articles while linking back to you. This takes considerable legwork to find the right partner, but your content is good enough to get you in the door.

Again, putting that recommendation from Business Week at the top of your site is going to lower your bounce rate and turn a higher percentage of visitors into real readers. It’s also going to greatly improve your StumbleUpon ratings.

Generating Revenue:

It looks like you have site sponsors that you sold yourself. Also consider selling sponsorship of your RSS feed, where the sponsor gets a small plug at the end of every post (in your RSS only).

This is an area where a slicker graphical redesign of your graphics may help sponsors want to partner with you.

Normally I don’t care for donate buttons on blogs, but in your case, where profit is going to charity, I think it would be appropriate and work well.

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Posts: Again, the colors you choose affect the readers in subtle ways. Red, combined with the green and yellow is not an appealing combination to me. It might stand out but does it have to be that dramatic? I would recommend a more subtle treatment of the text and present it in a shade that’s closer matched to your core 2-3 colors in our design. Nothing ruins a design faster than the use of too many colors. I normally choose 2, maybe 3 color colors with one sparsely used accent color. Then if you need to you can use a few lighter or darker shades of your core colors. Currently you have vibrant green, bold yellow, muted red, dark blue, white, black, with many weights and colors. You need to cut this down to a simple pallet of colors that compliment each other.

Traffic: Get intimate with your competitors and comment on their posts. There are a lot of sites in your niche and you have your work cut out for you. Check out http://getrichslowly.org/blog/ for a start.

Revenue: I hate Google ads on sites. Let me just get that out of the way now. I am blind to them so I think you’re wasting that prominent real estate in your left column. There are a million more profitiable and targeted ways to drive traffic. I actually just forwarded a link to a friend today with a recommedation to read one of the best articles I’ve seen in a while about making money with a blog. (Sorry Darren, even better than the posts you’ve made on the subject) Check it out!

http://www.dailyblogtips.com/ways-to-make-money-online-with-website/

As for traffic increase consider advertising on personal finance blogs and christian personal finance sites, submit articles to stumble upon and other social sites.

Create a mascot for your site and logo (maybe use a moosetracks’ Moose).

Bright Green + Bright Yellow = Strained Eyes

I’d suggest using a site like kuler.adobe.com or colourlovers.com to find more complementary colors.

a) Finding the subscription button took effort.

b) Navigation on the site was difficult.

Suggestions:

1) Devote one of your side bars to navigation and a subscribe button on the top. Right or left your choice.
2) Colors on the design are at odds. You got red, blue with green and yellow. It makes me a little turned off right away. If you want to keep the green/yellow look go ahead, but replace the red text with a dark green and perhaps try a lighter shade of yellow as your post background. Also stop using the blue. Also consider increasing your font size it is hard to read.
3) Drop the star on the top banner. It doesn’t relate to your site that well. Try instead a golden dollar sign perhaps.
4) Move that blog roll to another page and cut back the number of posts showing on your front page. You want to encourage navigation deeper into the site, not just keep them on one page (This should also refresh your Adsense ads and hopefully encourage more clicking).
5) The content is good, you just need to make getting around easier for people.

Best of luck,
Tim

Your header smacks of cheap clip art and standard fonts. Ditch the star and use something more directly related to money. Try Flickr for Creative Commons licenced photos.

“Free Money Finance” sets my spam-sense tingling: it looks like the title of yet another unwanted piece of email. It sounds like three search-engine friendly terms bunged together, rather than a complete phrase.

Your sidebars are too cluttered. I was looking on the top right for a search box and it took me a while to find it. Shunt the ads on the left down and put the “Best of FMF” there. Move all the “Making Money”, “Career Posts” etc to a single “Listings” page. Ruthlessly cut everything which you don’t need on your sidebars. And having only ads above the fold gives your blog an unfairly tacky look.

POSTS

Rather than posting short articles five times a day, try posting one long, in-depth, strongly researched article and one short snappy “makes you think” snippet. Otherwise, casual readers feel overwhelmed by the amount of information.

Always, always proofread – if possible, get someone else to read every article before you post it. Spell checkers won’t pick up errors like this:

“(including selling your blood — admittedly it’s not a “business”, but I just had to through in this idea to show how some people are so creative when it comes to making money)” – from “11 great ways to make more money”. That should be throw, not through. Careless spelling and grammar mistakes make your writing look sloppy and cheap, even when the content is valuable and strong (which yours definitely is.)

Be consistent with formatting. Your use of quotes is fine, though you might consider italicising as well as using maroon text – I’m sure some of your readers are colour-blind, and may have trouble distinguishing maroon and black. But I noticed that on the front page, the formatting of ordered lists varies:
In “Eight Sure-Fire Ways to Sock Away $100” the Wall Street list is at single spacing, and indented. Your personal list is at (I think) one-and-a-half spacing, and indented. But both your lists in “You can win a few copy of Build or Remodel your own house” have items double spaced and are not indented.

You might want to consider using bold formatting to bring out key sentences and words. If a reader is scanning an article quickly (and most readers do not sit and read every word), bold text draws the eye to what’s important.

HOW TO DRIVE TRAFFIC

Firstly, be willing to put in a lot of work. Search the internet for forums which you can contribute to. Be an active, helpful and useful contributor – don’t post links to your blog in every post you write. Look out for anyone asking questions on a topic you’ve recently written on, then offer a helpful reply with some quick tips and a brief “I’ve also written about this in depth on my blog, recently – you might want to check out [url directly to your article on the topic]”.

Befriend other bloggers who write about finance and money-saving. Email bloggers who you enjoy reading – not as a sales pitch, but just to say thanks. Make sure the URL of your blog is in your email signature, then they can check it out if they want to. Link to other bloggers. Offer a leg-up to newbies and little guys in particular; they’ll be hugely grateful and willing to reciprocate.

Encourage readers to participate: there are lots of tried and tested ways to do this (contests, comments, “Ask FMF”, etc.) But how about something more direct? Post asking for some readers willing to keep a financial diary of their earning and spending, and have it analysed and commented on by you. This will provide you with:
– Several very engaged readers who will hopefully draw in others
- An easy source of ideas
- An ongoing series to draw other readers back

GENERATING REVENUE

Make a much bigger deal about your profits going to charity. I didn’t see anything about this on the site (I probably didn’t look far enough – but how many readers will?) Jaded readers who think it’s “Just another money site to help the founder get rich quick” will be impressed.

Have a “Donations” page so that readers can easily donate via Paypal. Occasionally (monthly?) ask readers to estimate how much they’ve earned or saved as a result of your advice – and ask them to consider donating a small percent (10%?) to your site.

OVERALL

You have very strong content: your write well, your knowledge is excellent, and you have a huge amount of information on the site. The design is letting you down by making Free Money Finance (a) difficult for readers to navigate, (b) look like an overwhelming number of posts at first glance and (c) look “cheap” and unprofessional.

I would suggest considering a complete relaunch. Yes, it will require a lot of work but you could:
- Change the URL and name of the site. “Free Financial Advice”, perhaps? Or think of something snappier and less spammy that uses the FMF acronym, if you want to keep that. (“Free Money Fun” … “Find Money Fast” …)
- Get a professional-looking title. Find an eye-catching but not garish image that epitomises your content and style. A stack of dollar bills? A coin dropping? A money pig..?
- Have navigation links under the title bar. This is a great place to put links to your contact info, “About FMF” page, archive page and donations jar.
- Have a “listings” page or similar with most of the information from the left-hand bar.
- Spread the word. Get your readers excited about the upcoming relaunch. Announce competitions, invite guest posters, offer the chance for readers to be diarists, have an “Ask FMF” series … get imaginative, creative and engaging.
- Slash the number of weekday posts. Have one long post every day (or even every two days) and one or two short posts per day at most. Five a day might be good for search engines and obsessive fans; it’s overwhelming and even annoying to most readers.

To end on a positive note, I really like the site, and the very strong content. I’ve been incredibly picky and critical above because I’d actually like to see you make the most of your knowledge and writing abilities, and to reach lots of readers. Hope none of it has come across as too harsh. Very best of luck to you!

Now, for the things I would change:

The first thing I would do is move the subscription tools (At very least FeedBurner. If you can capture a visitor’s email address, you can keep them coming back. Personally, I would put it at the very top of the page.)

I am not familiar with TypePad, but, if available, a block quote system similar to that of Problogger would work well.

Another thing I would do would be cutting down on links. Currently, you posts are in the middle of two “link highways”. As you have a page dedicated to categories and Archives, I would narrow the categories displayed on the right of the layout and remove the archive, leaving the page.

I would also move the blog roll from the layout and place it on a page and remove the recent comments widget. That would allow your reviews (credentials) to be move in to a more visible position.

Using a different color for the top banner and background would make the blog more inviting.

Also, a more branding-friendly logo would be a wise addition. Something that would show what the blog is about, if it were placed on a T-shirt, for example.

I am not sure quite how much of an issue this is, but I’ve noticed the your use of smiley’s in your blog posts. While I know useful they can be online, they may not be appropriate on a money and investment blog.

As far as monetizing goes, it looks like you have a pretty good set up. The one thing I would do is to see if more targeted ads could be found. When I visited, the Amazon widget was displaying ads for jewelry. While it may be something the richer are interested in, they probably aren’t going to sell well on Free Money Finance. It would be good if you could become an affiliate for the organizations you discuss on your blog, for example, Chase and American Express on the “making money with your credit card post”.

All told, I would say you have a good blog with great content, and with a bit of layout redesign, you could both great content and a great blog.

Design: Your sidebar color choices interrupt the flow of the eye. Our gaze follows a natural rhythm, scanning the lines of text and graphics. With your current design, my eye hits a “FullStop” with the yellow on the right side, then my gaze naturally tracks left again. But since both your content and left sidebar are white, nothing stops my gaze, and I go right off the page/monitor. It’s disconcerting. If you must have one white sidebar, make it the right one. The eye will move back to the left much more naturally. (Personally I’d make both of them yellow)

I’d add a horizontal navigation bar under the header. Use it to link to your about page, archives, contact info, things you currently have buried. There’s just too much “stuff” in your sidebars. Move your categories to pages, and link to them from the horizontal nav bar you’re going to ad ;) One “best of” sidebar list is plenty for people to look at…. nearly your whole archive is showing in your sidebars.

Your subscription buttons/email form are buried in the left sidebar: Move them up, maybe to the top of the sidebar. Get rid of the individual subscription buttons. Just use one RSS button (plus the email subscription option) and let Feedburner do the rest. On the right sidebar, consider breaking up the sponser ads: try something like sponser ad, recent posts. sponser ad. recent comments. And I’d like to see something related to your blog at the top of at least one of the sidebars – not just ads.

Posts: The red in your blockquotes clashes with your theme… if you want a color, try green. I’m a big fan of images in posts – even small bullet style graphics help liven things up. I especially liked your word association post, by the way. Fun!

Traffic & Revenue: Try adsense images in the posts themselves. Put together a “free offer” related to your topic to drive traffic – it would fit well with your “free money” theme. Put some of your info together an ebook or mini course, and offer it for sale.

I hope this helps! I’m redesigning my own blog at the moment, and looking at yours helped me recognize some of the changes I need to make, too.

I would also make the font a little bigger in the side bar. It seems kind of small to me. I had to squint to read it.

The only other major improvement I would make is putting the about, contact and archives page on top – maybe, right below the header.

There’s a plethora of info on your site. It’s easy reading and enjoyable.

Good luck.

Posts:
I’m not sure if its possible but when you quote text try to make the background a different mellow color (A light whitish/tan maybe) or make the text a less bolded out color like blue or green instead of red.

How to drive traffic:
Have you tried creating an account on a personal finance forum with questions and discussion forums related to your topic? Find one an then lurk around for a few days, see where things go and the general feel of the community, once that is done create an account using a name related to your blog (Or use your real name, but I see you choose to be anonymous) and put a link back to your blog in your signature, then just start posting. Posting in discussions and answer questions, try not to self promote but if someone asks a question you’ve written a post about feel free to point that out.

One more design suggestion, you have way to many links in your sidebar, try removing some, and you really should try reordering your sidebar widgets with an idea of how a user will use your site, not trying to put all the ads on top is the key.

Anthony

1. Put the RSS subscription at the top of the page. Actually replace the Google Ads with it. I am not a big fan of Google Ads being very prominent on a site. I know they have to be seen, but I guess I’d recommend doing two columns of graphic display ads, even if they are affiliate links.

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2. I think you are ok here; it’s not something so hateful it would turn someone away.

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3. I don’t know what you are doing already, so it’s hard to comment, but here are my recommendations:

- I’d say moving the RSS feed up to increase subscribers will help increase return visitors and forwards.

- If you are not networking in Social Media circles, I would network with other financial professionals that can help you promote. I believe removing the Google Ads will help in the Social Media Marketing arena as well, as some are averse to promoting sites with prominent Google ads.

- Adding a newsletter where you can send updates regarding the site as well as affiliate offers will help both traffic and revenue, as well as increasing the value of the site by developing a valued in-house list.

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Make sure you are covering a full spectrum of financial service offerings and promote those to your in-house list (see #3 above). Two niche I would recommend are 1) a Mortgage reduction offering as these are very hot right now due to the mortgage rates being higher and people wanting a way to reduce their mortgages without refinancing, and 2) partnering with a mortgage company so you can be well compensated for your leads. I happen to have two solid contact for both of these.

Regards,

Anthony Kirlew
Founder, Web Traffic Team
Founder, Consumers Advantage Mortgage

Here is your review FMF:
Page load’s slow
Too much green
Don’t digg amazon ads.
Too many links over 150 of them!
Your keywords arent bad but description is worst , dont use too many commas google will NOT display you.
Consider professional design
Remove sitemeter for public (its not working)
Work on inlinks you have only PR3 with 50K visitors thats something smelly …

Design

The design is, let’s face it, manically cluttered. Personally, I hate this kind of design.

But it has its advantages, particularly in sites with lots of content where readers like to browse randomly. If you’re lucky enough to have that kind of reader, then I’d definitely stick with the slightly cluttered look as they tend to get engrossed in looking, and click on lots more articles as a result. If you’re looking for a good example of a cluttered site that just works, check out Lings Cars, a phenomenally successful UK-based car leasing site.

Having said that, cluttered shouldn’t mean unplanned. You need to put some serious thought as to how best you want to organise your clutter and how to highlight the areas you really want people to click on. Everyone’s noted that you need to move your subscription options to the top, and I’d have to agree – it’s a no-brainer. But you should also consider things like whether you really need most recent posts near the top of your homepage, and whether the search box might be better nearer the top of the page on such a busy site. You might also want to increase the profile of your reviews, to give you more credibility in the eyes of new readers (especially as people tend not to trust ‘cluttered’ sites at first glance).

I’m in two minds about whether you should increase the use of graphics in posts. The weekly money cartoon really stands out, but I wonder if too many pictures on the homepage would make the site just too confusing. Perhaps expirement with gradually increasing the number of pictures throughout the site.

Finally, you really need to put something at the bottom of the homepage which leads readers automatically on to more posts – something like “Next 10 posts” would do fine and give readers who are still undecided on which link to click on a hint as to where to go next.

Don’t be scared into thinking that because your blog is hosted by Typepad, you can’t do cool things with the design. If you’re looking for inspiration, check out sites like the Times Online blog for examples of just what you can do with Typepad: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/blogs/

Posts

You specifically asked about quotes. I don’t think the current method of highlighting them in red works well. I’d consider putting them in italics and perhaps putting a border around them. If you want to increase the graphical impact of the site, perhaps a graphical quote mark in the top left of the quote box might work.

I notice that lots of the posts are short and sweet. I think they are valuable, but you should also consider more in-depth articles. They give people something substantive to read, something to get engaged about, and can be used as linkbait to drive traffic. Linkbait in particular will help Google rankings – I can’t think of much reason why anyone would want to directly link to any of the shorter articles currently on site. If you don’t have the time to write them yourself, make good use of guest writers – the finances for college graduates post of 21 Feb is a great example of this.

How to drive traffic

I’d recommend leveraging the userbase of other similar sites. If you’re not familiary with Money Saving Expert, you should be. It’s a massive UK based forum (several million are signed up to its weekly email) covering (surprise!) ways to save money and organise finances. Get involved in the forum there (in a non-spammy way), make real connections and word of mouth traffic will follow.

Additionally, take advantage of your own community – get them to evangelise for you. Ask them to tell their friends, whatever it takes. Remember, you’re providing a service they already think is useful – they shouldn’t take much persuading before they’ll tell their friends.

Generating Revenue

You currently don’t have any Google ads in the body of each post, and I think you should. If you stick to the heavily text based style you have right now, a 336×280 rectangle in the top left of each post, just under the title, would bring in some significant revenue. It may also free up the top left sidebar for other content, like subscription options. I’d also make sure you have an ad at the end of each post too – it gives people something easy to click on once they’ve read the post.

How much revenue are the current sidebar ads bringing in? You need to assess these carefully and be ruthless about what to keep, and what to junk in favour of a new ad format. I don’t have access to your figures, but I wonder if the Amazon ad on the left sidebar is really bringing in as much as an ad from another ad network would. There are loads of ad networks out there – do some research, sign up to lots, and keep playing around with them until you find the best performing. Then keep testing some more, to see if you can improve revenue still further…

Depending on how… um… ethical you want to be, you might also want to take advantage of the confusing design to intersperse ads randomly around the sidebar. I’m not sure I’d recommend this in all honesty, but you should consider it.

Affiliates – you are in the perfect market to find well paying affiliate offers. Seek out the best – preferably ones you would personally recommend – and relentlessly promote them using individual tailored posts – comparisons, reviews, whatever you can think of. As with ad placement, keep testing and trying new ideas to see what works.

DESIGN
First impressions are not great.

Plenty can be done to this design. Perhaps some less garish colours to start. I think something financial should try and look fairly serious, how about trying a blue scheme like Forbes or perhaps a Black and white design.

The banner could be a lot more exciting and elegant. Perhaps build some sort of brand that could be replicated and used as a theme throughout in order to improve consistency and overall image.

Use banner ads that are all of the same size. This makes the site look tidier and more professional.

POSTS
Posts are generally quite informative.

I would try a different front page layout with a more magazine styling as you update so regularly, few people will read everything so it would be nice to see the latest 5 or so posts quickly and easily.

Images in the content to break up the text and bring a bit more life to the page.

GENERATING TRAFFIC
Try guest writing for other big blogs in the financial niche and network with some of the other writers. You could maybe negotiate a banner exchange, or a guest post on each others blog.

Although there are loads of them going around a the moment, competitions always seem to do well.

INCREASING REVENUE
Adsense may be a good performer, but you have not really got that many ads on your blog. You could definitely work a banner just after your first post. You could put a few more ads in the top of the right sidebar. Affiliate links for credit cards might do well.

Adding an About link at the top of the page would be helpful and lend more credibility.

I think the red font is fine for the Q&A.

As to generating more revenue, perhaps creating downloadable ebooks would be profitable.

When talking about the sidebars, I think the font is too small. It can be a bit difficult to read. Also, if you’re keeping the right sidebar, consider making it a bit wider so that you can place two sponsor ads side by side and free up some space and have a cleaner grouping of sponsor ads.

And it has already been mentioned a number of times, but you really need to have an RSS section somewhere prominent near the top.

Change your layout of your most popular articles. Take the categories that you listed your most popular articles in and move them to the top left or right sidebar. List only 5 for each. More is less. Maybe, you should limit this section to 3 main categories. This way someone can go right to what they want to read.

Your sidebars were so clutter. Take out what you don’t need. I am not a big fan of recent comments because they don’t tell me much. Take contact, about, etc and make tabs under your header. Lessen your category list perhaps using subcategories with this list. Move the search button up to so I can search within your site. Make the search button be defaulted on your site not Google to keep people within your site.

Change your Blogroll to “Blogs that link here” and direct it to another page. It was so long! Perhaps of blogs that you read would be more interesting to your readers.

I liked your content but I found it hard to keep switching link to link to find out what you were talking about. Although providing links within an article makes the article more concise, I would just like to know a little more about what I am linking too. After I read it, I have to “go back” to the original article. I find this a little hard.

Add “related articles” at the bottom of the posts allows me to go deeper into your site.

I like the gray box or quotation marks for quotes. I don’t like the red.

I know you want this site to be anonymous but I would like to know who you are and make it more personalize. A personal touch is really important. Your about site also had a lot of link for me to find out about you. I was jumping all over your site. Personally, a couple of paragraph about you would have been fine.

I am very visual and love pictures. Add them to your posts.

As for ads on your site, tell people right up front that ads are for charities (perhaps a graphic above the ads) with a link to which charities you donate the money to. People may be apt to click on them knowing the money is going to charity.

How about adding an Amazon bookstore of books that you have read or can recommend? People love to read how to grow their wealth.

Move “subscribe” up to the top left side along with feed subscriptions. Insert a feed symbol like feedburner has for your feed too. Just a visual thing to alert people to subscribe to your feed.