Website Video Review 5: www.DietHack.com

This is a review to Diet Hack website.I have been trying to cut short this video within 10 minutes restriction by YouTube. I will finish the rest of my reviewing in text in this blog post itself. First of all, I would like to thank Gyanish Gungaram (also known as Yan) for inviting me to review his blog. His blog has a page rank of 3 given by Google when Google don’t seem to see any votings (linkbacks) from other sites. But his linkouts are simply enormous! Lots of links to the external good sites… And links to its internal site as well. However, when you look at the linkbacks shown by Yahoo, DietHack.com already has over 900 linkbacks from different sites!

(Before you start watching this video review, you will notice me saying “i believe” many times… I’ve just noticed that…)

Content Oriented Blog With A Strict Niche
This blog is basically a health magazine online! It contains interesting articles about health in a fun way. As I was reading this blog, I begin to learn new things from his blog itself. This blog is actually showing off to all the blogs out there that content is really the king! As I come upon this site, I am almost indulging myself into reading what’s for me in his blog! There is no need for a page for Top Post! Basically, the most recent posts are showing off to the readers already! And that’s why I believe the conversion rate from a new visitor into RSS subscribers is very high! I remember testing reviewing his blog for a few days because I was quite rusty in voice reviewing since I last did my review. His subscription is always increasing! Just imagine capturing 222 subscribers in just two months! Thanks to the professional blogger Jay White who must have done some marketing effort for Yan… But of course, the “product” itself which is the content has the greatest credit! Without a product, marketing is not needed anymore…

Reader Participation
It has a very low reader participation of almost zero comment. After all, it’s not unexpected to me because this site is simply article-oriented. It is like those auto-blogging contents where they rip the contents from RSS feeds belonged to other blogs… Those kind of blogs, though generating good contents, but are not really commented by readers since it is a little automated style. But for this diethack.com, as I searched Google about diethack, it is revealing me that Yan is even interviewing healthy people around the world! An example is “7 Questions With Productivity & Fitness Junkie Mark McManus“.

Suggestions

1. He might want to look at adding in Google Adsense to monetize his blog. Since he is using Blogger, it should be pretty much easy to add in Google Ads.
2. I have noticed he has added a Google Custom Search in his blog. I believe he has a lot of website reference about health related stuff. He might want to look into working out a Google Custom Search to make further money for his subscribers and new visitors to find out more relevant information.
3. Because he is already bringing in quite a good traffic judging from the Page Rank that he has, he might want to look at some affiliated posting using his commission junction account. This should help him settle more postings on one hand, and also to bring in more money on the other. Did he do this already? Remember to let his readers know the link is affiliated with bracket (sponsored) for transparent purpose to his readers.
4. Maybe he might want to look into using a WordPress instead of Blogger.com platform. I have noticed that he has changed his interface before back in March… Using WordPress, he can schedule his postings accordingly so that he don’t have to keep on working on his contents daily and may even miss out a few postings! He may actually work out his 5 postings to be posted separately on different days for the whole week… This will help him in making more time to study while satisfying his readers. it is good to schedule his postings, and his readers will appreciate it… Just think of this… 2 posts on Monday… zero posts for 4 days… and come in another 3 posts on Saturday… This will make him a slave for his own postings! He is probably dread doing this…
5. You might want to use fixed width for your website instead of percentage width… My screen is 1280 wide… Hence it is making your post quite wide… It still looks ok with that width, but not with 800 and below where the website starts to misplace its words and text…

Conclusion
This site has got a lot of potential in becoming a very powerful high trafficked blog. Just that I found it still under-utilized to its potential right now… It is obviously showing how much the blogger knows in his contents while he is not monetizing his blog properly yet… Hopefully, the suggestions above are good for him… In my opinion, there is no need for a website to look professional but it is about fulfilling what your readers want which is most important… This blog has showed it all that content is more important, even though all the pages are being hosted and done by advanced web programs in one way or another. Probably, his next step is to monetize it to reap a decent income from his hard work since July…