Written on May 14th, 2008 at 09:05 pm by Darren Rowse
Andy Beal Shares His Blog’s Tipping Point
Andy Beal - author of a great book by the name of Radically Transparent - today shares his blog’s ‘tipping point’.
The biggest tipping point for me was a redesign of MarketingPilgrim.com.
I moved from Blogger to WordPress and also had a custom template built.
Within 30 days of the redesign, I had twice as many RSS subscribers and enough new advertisers to fully cover the cost of redesigning the site.
27 Responses to “Andy Beal Shares His Blog’s Tipping Point”
Danny Mac
May 14th, 2008 9:21 pm
These are awesome, Darren. I hope they’ll be continued throughout the rest of the week/month?
Darren Rowse
May 14th, 2008 9:22 pm
yep - there are a few more for the next week or so.
Andy Beal
May 14th, 2008 9:37 pm
The first design was hacked together by me. Within a few days of the new design going live, I had a new advertiser.
The professional design instantly raised the credibility, despite the hundreds of posts already published. It goes to show that first impressions count!
Lightening@Lightenings Blogworld
May 14th, 2008 9:38 pm
This is a great idea Darren. It’s interesting how big a part blog design can play in how people perceive you.
Muscle Post
May 14th, 2008 10:00 pm
So glad to hear there are more of these coming. It would be great if they could be a regular occurrence on the site!
What better motivation is there than successful bloggers describing what put them over the top? Excellent feature!
SystemsThinker
May 14th, 2008 10:11 pm
This is eerily timely. I was just explaining to someone days ago how websites have “tipping points” using exactly that phrase. Synchronicity! It’s a crucial concept for understanding the world and certainly for understanding the web. Thanks Darren.
Mandy
May 14th, 2008 10:20 pm
This is interesting as I am thinking of a new design change for my blogs.
It’s great to read these and see how successful bloggers found the right balance. I hope there are more!
patriciaJ
May 14th, 2008 10:32 pm
Do you have before and after photos? That had to be some redesign? What tips for redesign do you have that we can use on other blogs.
Roni
May 14th, 2008 10:35 pm
Hi Andy! I hope it’s ok to ask a question. I actually started out on Wordpress, lost my site in crash, rebuilt with blogger and now I want to go back. (this was all over a course of 3 years).
My big concern is loss of my posts and all the incoming links. Did you address that somehow? Did you import? Change your permalinks to match the wordpress URL scheme?
I could go on with questions but I’m just curious what you had to sacrifice to do to make the move, if anything at all.
Rob Brydon
May 14th, 2008 10:38 pm
This is totally where I’m coming from. I have a Blogger template that looks pretty good, but I’m missing a lot of functionality that WordPress provides.
Please take this advice if you are just beginning. Don’t start with Blogger. Start with WordPress. I have had to make significant CSS changes to allow for something as simple as a three column design.
Mr.Gadget Australia
May 14th, 2008 10:40 pm
I should have moved to Wordpress 3 years ago….can’t believe I stuck with Blogger that long.
The main reason was the thought of migrating all existing posts to the new and how to actually do that. Gave me a headache thinking about it…
In the end just kept a link to the old blog and started Wordpress fresh!
Wordpressing since only December last year!
Andy Beal
May 14th, 2008 11:34 pm
@Roni - I moved from Blogger to Wordpress at the time of the re-design. At the time, there wasn’t a sure-fire way of moving and keeping the same URL structure–now there is, I believe.
I manually reviewed and identified the top 200 posts–both for rankings and traffic–and MANUALLY matched each URL structure.
With a good blog developer/programmer, you should be able to switch platforms without much issue.
Andy Beal
May 14th, 2008 11:36 pm
@patriciaJ - it was (not) a thing of beauty! Before: http://web.archive.org/web/20050930201151/http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/
Tony
May 14th, 2008 11:57 pm
good lookin site, thanks
David at DavidNordmark.com
May 15th, 2008 12:36 am
I’d be curious to know who exactly redesigned your blog? I think it looks great. Did you hire a company or an individual? Could one of us hire this individual :)
Thanks for the post!
- Dave
Andy Beal
May 15th, 2008 12:54 am
@David - you’ll find a link to Onelotus Creative in the footer of my blog–they designed the site.
paul merrill
May 15th, 2008 2:52 am
The pity is that my Google rss reader does not convey site designs.
I’m too lazy to switch all my feeds over to NetNewsWire.
Everyday Finance
May 15th, 2008 3:18 am
Hey there, I’ve been preparing to do this but have been dreading the implementation. I went out and bought WordPress for Dummies and I’m almost through it. While the author refers to a 5 minute process to set up a blog through WordPress, there are about 100 steps and some decisions to make along the way, like which host, domain registrar, use.com or .org, etc.
1) Does anyone have a top resource for walking through a WordPress start to finish? Is it pretty easy to do? Anyone actually follow the steps in the book and it worked out?
2) Also, thoughts on keeping my old blogger blog active and starting fresh vs. trying to transfer my content. i.e. Do you automatically get the new site ranked in google searches, retain old page rank, etc.? Or is it worth leaving the old blog, refer readers to your new one and still reap income from the old blog.
Any help on this would be great. I feel like I have some strengths with writing ability, content, readership but I’m majorly lacking on the functionality/implementation piece right now.
Thanks
Dan at Everydayfinance
Tammy Takahashi
May 15th, 2008 4:28 am
I’m really glad to hear this. I just had my first book released and was considering moving and redesigning my blog/website in order to focus on that. Hearing how much of a positive change it had for Andy Beal gives me confidence that the change will help me too.
Tammy Takahashi
May 15th, 2008 4:36 am
Oh, I forgot to add, Andy’s book sounds awesome. I’m putting it on my shopping list. I’m also going to tell a few of my friends about it who have teenagers.
John Lessnau
May 15th, 2008 5:44 am
It seems these social marketing, tipping point, books are the new hot topic:
Groundswell
Creating Massive Impact
Radically Transparent
There are probably a few more I am missing.
Sandy Naidu
May 15th, 2008 5:51 am
I quite enjoy reading about these blog tipping points…Glad to know that there are more coming…
The Masked Millionaire
May 15th, 2008 1:38 pm
I’ve been considering a blog re-design. I need to get off my butt and do it before January 1. Maybe it will be my Christmas present to myself.
Live From Las Vegas
The Masked Millionaire
Vanessa
May 15th, 2008 9:59 pm
Hi Andy/Darren - Sounds as though one needs a whole lot of HTML knowledge to be able to maintain such a site and to keep control over it by adding content oneself rather than relying on someone else to do it…?
Charles Smith
May 16th, 2008 12:57 am
This reminds me that my site needs a redesign/cleaning. My blog’s mini tipping point was one article and video that got me a lot more views and a much better google ranking. It was luck really, and I had no idea people were interested in J-Turns.
Michael
May 17th, 2008 6:46 pm
I recently installed a new theme on my blog and so far my traffic has gone up and my RSS feed count has gone up. Maybe this will be my tipping point!
Eric
May 19th, 2008 1:22 am
It just seems like a thousand things could go wrong in the transfer and you have to be pretty good at code.
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