Another Clickincome Clicksitebuilder Website Review

Random Tracks!

This site has been built by one of my mentoring colleagues here at Clickincome, John Newman. He and I are both quite passionate about music, and it shows here in John’s site. It’s focus is clear. It’s all about promoting and reviewing independent music. It’s been monetized with affiliates from emusic, which is sort of an “iTunes” (downloadable music site) for indie artists.

On Google, he’s currently at the top of page 2 for “Independent Music News”. Quite a good ranking for such an open and broad search term. Kudos to him. I’m sure that having over 80 inbound links (according to Yahoo) helps him achieve that.

The main page is done in a sort of a “portal” style. It’s got teasers and ads all the way down, drawing people in to the content available at the site, and promoting the emusic signups. Right at the top, there’s the setup for his “Swiki”, which is a community-driven, focused search engine. This is also a good way to set up to monetize the site, as the more people use the search engine and click on the Google ads inside, the more money he makes.

As he continues down, he’s got “teaser” blocks. The first CD review is a great example. There’s a copy of the CD cover, and to the right is the first paragraph or two of the review. Finally, there’s a “read the whole review” link. You engage the visitor’s interest with the first paragraph, and hopefully, that drives them to click in deeper to read the link. Suddenly your site is “Sticky” and it’s working to keep people at your site.

He does the same with his on-site blog. Read the first paragraph, click in deeper to read the whole thing. Scroll down farther, and there’s more reviews and blog links.

There’s a lot of content here at the site. Let’s take a look at some of the subpages.

The “Artist Interview” page is a cool one. There’s a short intro, and links to three interviews of independent musicians. John has a deep, inquisitive interviewing style that brings out more than just superficial answers from the artists. It makes for great reading!

The “CD Review” and “Concert Review” pages are also wonderful ways to discover some particular bits of indie fare. John is reviewing a pretty wide spectrum of musical styles, from bluegrass and folk to contemporary classical and orchestral. In both of these pages, John tackles these reviews with a thought-provoking look at the music, not just a hype-filled promotional article.

I also enjoy reading his thoughts and comments in his blog page. And, of course, there’s the Clickincome page, specifically targeted to the needs of the indie musician.

Overall, a great site! My hat’s off to him and hope he continues to find success!

Clickincome’s Clicksitebuilder Website Review!

Let’s take a look at some of the sites being built on the Clickincome Clicksitebuilder. Let’s see how they’re being made, and how they’re being promoted. Let’s all study and learn a bit from our colleagues!

Today, I’m going to review SilentFog.com. This is a site built by one of my mentoring colleagues here at Clickincome. He’s done a good job of both building the site and promoting it (it ranks on page 3 of a google search for “Scary Video Games”. Granted, that’s not page one, but it’s still significantly high!

He’s got 35 inbound links at yahoo (you can find that by searching “link:silentfog.com” at yahoo, or any other search engine). That’s a great start. Many of those inlinks come from his e-business articles at e-shoptalk.com.

One of the things that strikes me right off the bat is the color scheme. This is one of Clickincome’s stock templates, but he’s really chosen it well, and makes good use of it throughout the site. It really helps create the dark and eerie mood of a site about getting scared.

What I’m most impressed with in this site is, surprisingly, the writing. Maybe it’s because I know Phil, but I can hear his “voice” in the writing. I know some people that write in a much more formal tone than they speak. Phil keeps it real. He’s got this ease and style to his writing that makes me think that I could be sitting right there next to him, watching him walk through the foggy city of Silent Hill, and having him tell me about it as we’re playing.

He talks about his goosebumps and his heart racing and you can hear in his words how much fun this truly is for him.

Now, I, myself, don’t do “scary”. Frankly, anything more freaky than a Pokemon episode is too much for me. Still, I can see how getting your nerves dancing and your heart racing would be a good time, if you were into that. And reading Phil’s descriptions of the characters and how they interact with the monsters in the game makes that come to life.

Let’s take a look at it, page by page.

Home page:

A couple of simple graphics, a smattering of text. Just enough to catch my interest. Good job. This is also where the effectiveness of the template and the color scheme comes together for me for the first time, too.

The Gamer:

This is Phil’s “About Me” page. Nicely done, with some graphics included from the Silent Hill game, and a movie poster. This is where you first get to know the writer, and get to know his style.

The Video Games:

Here he continues on. A design hint for Phil: Embed the graphics in the text, rather than have the picture shrink the text table, pushing things over to the left. Not a big deal, but it would look nicer.

Here, he also goes into a number of sub pages describing the story line of Silent Hill. This is pretty descriptive stuff, and well done in his own style as well, but the navigation gets a bit confusing. Maybe a sitemap page might help. But then again, when I’m playing first person games, I end up a little lost as well, at least until I orient myself to the environment. I’d also encourage him to expand to other scary games as well, perhaps more of the “survival” genre.

Horror Movies:

This page has a nice haunting graphic on it, but not much else. I imagine that this part of the site hasn’t really been developed yet, in favor of the games. Put some good stuff up here, or take it down. Really, movies isn’t what the site is about anyway…

Clickincome:

Finally, he’s set up a site all about the Clickincome opportunity, and about how to set up your own website, about your passion.

All in all, a well created site. It does need some development, as I noted above, but a great effort! Don’t read it in the dark, if you know what’s good for you!