Ideas for Improving My Blog

When I visit your blog I am left asking one question: why would I visit?
I think you need some kind of angle.
Visit http://www.iwillteachyoutoberich.com/

Ramit Sethi took an angle and he has tens of thousands of readers.

You need to concentrate on one thing and just cover that.

First, your blog layout is way too busy and hard to follow. Cut out some of the useless crap.
Second, the content will only be as good as your writing. Write for yourself not others. Because the content is so subjective there will always be people that will not want to read for their own reasons.
Third, you can write about varying subjects with an underlying theme. Maybe from your perspective as it relates to what you do. Or some personality characteristic. For example, my blog http://thesalesmonkey.typepad.com/swinging-your-way-thru-the-jungle/, is about the sales profession. It is a wide and varying subject I can write about many different topics but the underlying theme is the sales profession.

Cameron, First off, great information on your blog. You have a good style of writing that will capture the readers.

I, too, had a similar issue. My site (www.inspiretomorrow.com) was designed to cover numerous topics. I had to find a common thread to bring them all together with. For me, it was creating the complete person: mind, body, spirit. This site became a safeplace for Christians to come and get lost for hours. Find something to tie all of your topics together.

Right now, if I am into travel stories from your blog, I am only going to stop by once or twice a month (if another focussed site hasn't taken me away). Since you are all over the spectrum, use a core belief and approach the reader that way. Example: the thoughts of an Air Force pilot; the ways of a conservative (or liberal); etc. Basically, you need to find a niche that will make a reader want to read every single article you post, not just the political ones.

Recently, I discovered I could not cover each topic in depth as I would like to. I wanted to grab a strong following of readers and going all over the spectrum was intense. I am redesigning mine to focus on my true passions. Basically, I needed to get more focus to find a larger market for my books. Although you love all these topics now, you may one day find you have a flair for just a couple or even one.

Lastly, design. Since you are using a blog format...add categories. Right now you only have home and about. Add one for each major topic you write about and catalogue your articles. It will help with search engines too. And to get great articles to help supplement your site and build a content vault, go to www.ezinearticles.com. Their articles are free to use on blogs (just read the terms). Also, placing a couple of my articles there drove lots of traffic to my sites.

P.S. Congrats on being involved with an awesome airframe. I am a C-17 Crew Chief out of Charleston. Small world.

You've got 6 times the blogging experience that I do and have obviously mastered a LOT more of the tech aspects. That said, I'll tell you what I'ld like to eventually do with my blog because I think you are already tech savvy enough to pull it off. You already have a ton of good content, the problem seems to be organizational rather than content. There are several ways to reorganize your blog that I think would make it more user friendly. Tags might be one way or maybe pages, I'm really not sure which would be best. If I had your blog and interests, I would leave the main blog/home page as it is, then subdivide it into categories using tags or pages.One for war with a sub category for turning it into peace. Another for self improvement, with sub categories for physical, mental, financial and "other". And finally, a page/tag for personal interests like coffee, books(Divided into fiction and nonfiction) etc..
A "blogroll"(Lists of blogs you recommend!) divided by category, for clarity.
Last, I want to recommend 2 books that I think you'll find VERY enlightening. The first is "Infamy" published in 1967 I believe. (I forget the authors name but it stands out in my mind from the 1200 other books I read while "in college") And also,"Air America" (The movie was based on just a small portion of the book and obscured the point of the book instead of clarifying it!) If you complete either of those books soon I would not be a bit surprised if you wanted to contact me later. Dreamin2u(at)gmail is the easiest way to do so. Good Luck!

Your design is clean and simple. I think it could be beneficial to make the center column wider. Your article space appears narrow, and this is the focus of your site.
I also questioned your subtitle. Why is it "a resilient life"? I didn't read every article, but in the ones I read I didn't find a connection. Maybe a subtitle that ties together your variety of topics would be better suited.
As far as covering an array of topics, I think that is fine. If you continue to write well about interesting topics, your readership should increase.
Finally, to get more comments is tough. However, end articles seeking feedback from your readers. That might help.

Hi!

I write about a variety of topics on my blog The Young Pro (http://www.auburnpub.com/blogs/the_young_pro.txt) And I think what keeps my readers coming back is that whenever I write, it's always authentic. It's like when they read it, they can picture me standing in front of them telling the same story. Now, for me writing in a stream of consciousness like that is just how I write. But I think that keeping it authentic, genuine, or from your heart is how you can easily talk about a number of topics and not lose your readers. Which after reading a few of your posts, I think you're on the right track. I especially enjoyed the 20 things to do in your 20's post as I'm headed into my late 20's and I love to read about that kind of stuff. :)

The only other things I would say is to think of your blog like a brand. Is everything you put up there cohesive? As in the ads that are displayed and the photo on the top, does all of that stuff send the message you want to send to your readers? From going through a couple of your posts it seems like it's not just your thoughts, you're giving advice too. (20 things in your 20's, building mental toughness, and how to make coffee) Maybe build on that and blog about things that you wish you had done or that you learned. Your title "The Resilient Life" tells me that maybe you've been through some tough times and you've come out on top. If that is the case, perhaps you could write some posts along those lines.

Just a couple thoughts. Keep blogging! :-D

Many people are jumping on the survival bandwagon these days due to the current environment. Everyone knows there is something wrong from the educated to the unwashed masses. Your interest profile matches survival advice to a T. You can even explain away the coffee and wine enthusiasm to a more upper class profile of the genre. The physical fitness plays right in. In fact you may find it an interesting intellectual challenge to apply new and old tactics to emerging situations. Tailoring new developments to personal use much in the way Gerald Michaelson made his "Sun Tzu for success". Opening up this genre to a more analytical approach to me seems to be a fantastic opportunity. If I had the time I would do it myself. The only recommendation I have for the layout of the site itself is to make it more compact with large links to previous material. It has a little bit of a sprawling feel either fill that space on either side of the text or link to continuations. This if you follow it and give those of us with level heads but don't want the "survivalist nut" label will be really successful. Perhaps giving it a title like "Advanced Strategic Personal Protection". There is a big audience out there for you and all you have to do is a little tailoring. It's yours go get it.

Your blog could use a few tweaks. For example, if you are writing about fitness, you could add a few facts, graphics, simple facts organized in tables etc. Diversity of subjects is not a problem i you do it right, look at Tim Ferriss's blog, http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/ he writes about anything and everything and calls it 'lifestyle design'. Yours can be similar to that, 'lifestyle tailoring' or soemthing to do with 'fine, cultured' lifestyle.

To get more traffic and higher quality commentors, I recommend writing guest posts in popular blogs covering the topics you write about. Observe the blog's format, and write a very high quality post that fits in their format. Make sure to add factual data, simple tables, graphics, quotes, links etc to back it up. If it's a well written post giving good, useful information, there is no reason for those people not to accept it.

Check out charliehoehn.com this guy started out as a nobody, took the effort to write guest posts on a few very high traffic, top notch blogs, and now he's cashing it in.

Ramit Sethi (another popular blogger) says it takes him up to 18 hours to write really good guest posts on other people's blogs. He grew his blog reqder numbers by hundreds of thousands, and all that traffic helped making his book a NY times and WSJ best seller.

I highly recommend reading the free ebook by Charlie Hoehn: http://www.slideshare.net/choehn/recessionproof-graduate-1722966

He helped people out on the blogosphere and they formatted his text into this very nice slideshow format.

What about creating a series of blogs? That way you could have a blog for every subject that you like to write about.

I am actually going to concentrate on some design issues:

1. I think you need a custom designed theme. It hurts your professionalism to be on a generic theme.
2. I see that you are running google ads. Is your goal to make money off ads? If not, why run the ads. They are just distracting.