Pedro Abreu
Hello Ralph!
Your blog looks nice! It doesn't have a confusing design and the ads are not so intrusive which doesn't irritate visitors.
However, the most important thing is content. As far as I could see you use articles that are available for free in article provider sites. That is a legitimist practice, of course. But it doesn't award you with the needed authority image that you should create of yourself.
This way you became just one of the many out there on Internet who reproduce pre-written content in a site/blog with the purpose of suggesting users to click on advertising banners and referrals. This used to work some years ago but it's becoming unpopular. Search engines easily recognize non-original content and drop sites like that into the bottom of their rankings.
The best thing is to write your own material and it must be something in which you are an expert. And being an expert is not enough. You must also be skillful in bringing your expertize down to paper, to express it in an effective mass communicative fashion.
Another disadvantage in reproducing others' material in your own site/blog is to not be able to modify, with goals of improvement, its content. Usually, those sites in which writers post their own articles (in search of a wider self-promotion) don't allow graphics to be used. They always impose the same format regardless the area of expertise.
That brings problems. Writers have to find out ways of making up for such a limitation - indeed a big limitation when you write about guitar technique and musicianship. Replacing standard ways of representing the guitar fingerboard an the music staff with pure text is an unfortunate task. Readers aren't too keen in learning new abstract ways once they got use to the standard graphic representations used in guitar music literature.
Another disadvantage is that visitors will recognize the specific writer of the article as the one who really "knows" about the subject. That will lead them to the authors' sites and you become forgotten history because you just served as a gateway.
My suggestion is:
DO YOUR OWN THING!
Are you an experienced and recognized guitarist?
If so, write about it. If not, don't even bother, there are better ways of spending your time.
The advantage of the WWW is that anyone can publish.
It couldn't be easier.
The disadvantage is that... anyone can publish.
Yes, the same reason! Writing criteria is fading away from the history of publishing. Non-competent writers are enjoying a publishing success and the really experts are being prejudiced by the phenomenon (when not supplied the same powerful marketing gears as these others).
Ralph, I don't know you personally neither have anything personal (or impersonal) against you. This review is purely based on what I noticed during my visit to your blog. I hope you don't get offend by my words. They are no more a professional view on the subject.
All the best!
Pedro Abreu
http://www.a2zguitar.com
http://www.bestguitarclips.com
