RevieWOW

Productivity501, as the title suggest, is a blog that’s constantly being updated with tips and information on personal productivity. The red themed blog is manage by Mark W. Shead, a consultant using technology to solve business problems. At the first glance, the blog do looks neat and not too many advertisement is being placed. It has a clean look using a common red blog theme.

Contact page is one of the most important element of a blog, and it should be easily seen on a blog. However, there is no contact page for Productivity501, but Mark placed an email address of his in the about page. The about page isn’t highly visible too, it is placed at the sidebar below the fold - standing as a single link. Since it is just a single link, I would suggest Mark to place it at the top of his sidebar, on top of everything else. It wouldn’t affect too much of his RSS feed as it will still be highly visible.

Besides that, Productiviy501 also doesn’t have any copyright statement at its footer. Although his content will still be protected even without it, that will confuse users who want to use his materials - whether all rights are reserved, or it’s licensed under creative common etc.

Productivity501 is suitable to almost everyone as it’s targeted to human beings, personal productivity. Just like the “7 Ways to Wakeup in the Morning” (I don’t like the Amazon ad in this article) and “How NOT to Wake Up” article, it is about how to wake up effectively in the morning which will really be helpful to just anyone else.

Productivity501 has already a very good readership with more than 3,000 feed subscribers, but in order to improve it more - Mark should make his blog stands out more. This is when a custom blog theme comes useful. Parts of design that should be improved includes the font size.

In order to generate more backlinks for his blog, Mark started a contest that offers an iPod shuffle to its winner. The concept is just like John Chow’s successful link bait, by reviewing their blog - but Mark make his rules much more strict. He will only announce the winner after he receives a total of 150 reviews. The good is that he gives out free site wide links to all reviewers on his sidebar, but not sure how long this will last.

For the sake of building links for this new blog, this review is done.