Last Updated on April 20, 2020

If your blog were a mousetrap, how would you have built it better?

I would have thought of blogs rather like being a kind of fishing rods (with all that linkbaiting talk out there). Yet, there comes Susan Driggers, author of Life is Risky, “the latest incarnation of her digital life”, challenging us to find new ways of improving our sites.

Simple, business 101. They, as in John Chow and Lee Dodd know how to run a business and that is how they run their sites, as businesses. If we want to succeed we are going to have to do the same thing. See our site as a business and learn what it takes to make it better. Sometimes we will have a great idea and the place will be an overnight sensation. More often though it will be a slow uphill battle, but a winnable one none the less.

Under the category tag Build a better mousetrap, we discover the ten rules of website promotion, out of which, one is quite interesting: “Steal from worth competitors. If it works for them, think of a way to make it work for you.” Do you agree with that?
Another interesting series is The 4 Ps of marketing, out of which, promotion seems to be a key factor for your site’s success.

As a proof to that, Susan managed to climb up to the top of Google for the search phrase life is risky. With more than 3 million results out there, this is an achievement worth studying: analyse her blog and try to find out the small, well-chosen elements which pushed her so far on the Google ladder.

Life is Risky is only 4 month old, but it already has a pool of 92 worth-reading articles, amongst which I would mention the reviews Susan does for other blogs. One of these reviews, namely What have you been thinking about today, brought her the nice prize of a blog redesign (a fine tuning of the layout and graphic elements which give the page a stylish, modern look).

So, my dear readers, life is risky anyway, so why don’t you just accept the challenge and do your best to build your better mousetrap? Or blog? Or whatever else?

This post is part of the Rolling Blogroll series. Congratulations, Susan, you can take your badge and display it on your site… sorry, on your mousetrap!