AP 0425: How Do I Make My Blogger Website Mobile-Friendly?

AskPat 425 Episode Transcript

Pat Flynn: What's up everybody? Pat Flynn here, and welcome to Episode 425 of AskPat, thank you so much for joining me today. We have a great question today from Amanda, but before we get to that, I do want to thank today's sponsor, which is actually LegalZoom.

LegalZoom.com is a website I've used several times in the past. They've helped me incorporate some of our passive income, trade market, and all that good stuff. And you shouldn't have to choose a random lawyer who charges expensive hourly rates when you need legal help, but the legal system is really complicated, so what other choice do you have to protect your family or start your business? I would start with LegalZoom if you haven't yet, they make it super easy. They're not a law firm, and that's how they provide such a great value. They don't rely on charging you by the hour. Instead, you'll get transparent pricing and customer review so you know exactly what you're getting up front. So whether you're doing LLCs or trademarks or any of those sorts of things, check out LegalZoom. If you go to LegalZoom.com and enter the promo code “Pat”, you'll save even more. So again that's LegalZoom.com, promo code “Pat.”

Alright, here's today's question from Amanda.

Amanda: Hi Pat, my name is Amanda Schmitt Grady, and I operate and own the website, MommyMiaMonologues.com. The website has been doing very well for the last couple of years, and that's really thanks to you. I started listening to you in the beginning, it must have been 2011, 2012, somewhere around there. But you really motivated me, and the truth is I haven't actually made a post to my website, I don't think, since September of 2013. And I'm still generating just amazing, in my opinion, income, given that I'm not actually doing anything. I make my money through Amazon Affiliate and Amazon Associates program.

My issue right now is sparked for two reasons. I'm motivated to get back into my blog, and one of the reasons that I'm aggravated is that Google has made me aware that my rankings are going to drop if my platform is not mobile-friendly. Now I use the Blogger platform, and it's not very easy to customize, and yes they do offer a mobile option that you can enable, but it's not exactly . . . it's not very appealing to the eye when you look at it. It's really not good. But I go back and forth between enabling it and disabling it through Blogger. I don't really want to transition to a WordPress platform because that seems, I just don't know. But if that's my only option, I will, but it just seems like a lot of work. If you can give me any ideas how to make my blogger platform mobile friendly. I know that's not your specialty, you're more of a WordPress guy. But I would just really, really appreciate it cause you're pretty much the only voice out there that I trust. I would really appreciate it if you would answer this question. Thank you, bye.

Pat: Hey Amanda, thank you so much for the question. I appreciate you and your trust, and I will do my best to help you here. I know I have a lot of people in my audience who are still on Blogger. And I say “still on Blogger” because you said yourself, you know that's not my specialty, and I typically recommend people head on over to WordPress because things like changing the themes and all that sort of stuff is made easier. There's more support for it, more customization, more plugins, so on and so forth. So you can better serve your audience with WordPress, but I'm not going to try and convince you to switch.

I think this is a crucial moment for you because there are a lot of websites dropping in the rankings, just like Google warned you, because of non-responsive or non-mobile-friendly things. And so I would recommend you check out and see what that experience is like for you, so that you will know how it changes later. But go to your website on a mobile device. If you don't have one, find somebody who has one. Go to your website or go to the Apple Store, and see what it's like there. And you can see what that's like, and you'll see how much that actually effects the user experience. But you can also see how much better it can be.

And for you on the Blogger platform, I did a little bit of research right before this answer. And like WordPress, there's different themes you can use for Blogger. So I would recommend finding a theme out there that works for you and your content that is responsive. And there's a pretty cool article I found on this website called BigLittleGeek.com. If you look up, “Big Little Geek 2015 Responsive SEO” that will give you the nine best responsive and SEO-friendly Blogger templates for 2015. So get hooked up with any of these nine templates. And there's all different kinds and choices to choose from. Those will help you be responsive. And what that means is that no matter what size device people have, you can literally see it being responsive if you take a full screen on your desktop and shrink it down, you'll start to see the bits and pieces of the website change. Some of the larger images might go away, some of the buttons might drop underneath instead of before when it was on the side, share button some sort of stuff. That's the cool thing about responsive, smart passive income right now is responsive as well. And that has allowed me to stay in the higher rankings for certain key words that I have been ranking for. I would highly recommend you do that, because SEO is less about what key words are you targeting, or even less about backlinks now or any sort of traditional SEO things.

Now it's all about user experience and engagement on your website, and in particular, how much people come to your site and then leave right away which, if you don't have a mobile-friendly site . . . and I recommend you check in your analytics to see how many people are coming from a mobile device. That might actually get the fire lit under you to get this done even faster, cause I have 33 percent of my audience views my website on a mobile device which is huge, that's absolutely huge. So I have to make sure I cater to them because that's all you can do. You can't force them to not view your site in the way that they want to view it. You have to go to them, and so that's why responsive is a great way to go.

And like I said bounce rate, the rate at which people leave your site upon first arrival, is important. You want to decrease that number. You want to increase the time onsite and also the number of pages people go through. So when you look at these nine responsive SEO friendly blogger themes or templates, as they call them . . . I don't know if you call them themes, I haven't really explored Blogger . . . But I would recommend you research and try to find even more. And make sure before you switch to one, if it's anything like WordPress, you can just switch one, and if you don't like it you can switch back or switch to another one without having changed anything else, but just the look of it and how all your content fits into that template.

So it shouldn't be too scary to change it over. You might have to tweak some things here and there, and you might want to hire somebody to do this for you, to make sure it's done in the right way, if you wanted to do that, if you were just worried about it too much. But I wouldn't let this stop you from serving your audience, and you've got to do this. SEO is all about the user experience on your website now, so you've got to make it user friendly for your mobile viewers, you just have to.

So Amanda, I hope that answers your question, and it gives you some thoughts in terms of directions of where to go. So I guess to sum it up, find SEO friendly responsive templates that will help you switch the look of your website to include a look that's great for people who are coming on a mobile device as well. And then I would also, potentially, try to find somebody who could help you. If you go to Elance.com which I think is called something else now actually . . . let me check because I know they got purchased by somebody or something happened. Elance.com is still Elance.com but it joins the Upwork community. So that's where you can hire people to help you. You can probably find people who specialize in Blogger as well. And if you have a little extra money coming in from Amazon stuff . . . and there's one thing I want to mention about that Amazon stuff in a second . . . perhaps you have enough money coming in that you could spend a few hundred dollars to get somebody on the freelanced websites, to help you change your existing theme and make it mobile responsive. So that's another option too.

Now what I was going to mention about the Amazon links, great job on that. It's really cool to see a lot of you out there who are succeeding with affiliate marketing and Amazon Associates is a great place to start. Well there's a website out there at Geni.us. You go there, you set up an account. What it does is it allows you to become an Amazon Associate. You have to register in these different countries. But essentially, whatever it is you want to promote you go through a Geni.us link, and when people click on that Geni.us link, it determines what country they are from and redirects them with your affiliate link or Amazon Associate link for that particular country. Because currently, if you're just an Amazon Associate in the US, and you have someone in the UK click on your item they are going to go to the UK Amazon store. Amazon.co.uk I believe it is. And you're not going to get any credit for it because they're not in the US. But Geni.us is the name of the brand, I use it, and I share a lot of links, and I've actually seen some pretty good income coming in from the UK now specifically. I'm signed up for all the other stores too but the UK is actually the one outside of the US that is making the most. It just makes it really easy and no matter where their from, there's an opportunity for me to get an additional affiliate link or commission from that. So you can check that out. Again it's Geni.us, so just a little extra tip for those of you out there who made it to the end of this show.

But anyway, Amanda thank you so much for the question. I really appreciate it and your support as well. We're going to send you an AskPat t-shirt for having your question featured here on the show. And for those of you listening, if you have a question you'd like potentially featured here in the show, just head on over to AskPat.com, you can ask right there on that page thanks to the widget from Speakpipe.com.

I also want to thank LegalZoom for making it super easy for us to just figure out a lot of this legal stuff. LegalZoom. They're not a law firm, but that's how they're able to provide a lot of value to you. They don't rely on charging by the hour. It's incredibly economical to get started with some of the legal stuff you need to do both in business and in life. Incorporation, LLCs, trademarks, living trusts, and more, Legal Zoom is definitely the smart choice. They got people on hand to answer your questions. If you need legal advice, they're a network of legal attorneys that can provide straight-forward guidance you need in most states. But don't let the legal stuff become an excuse, go to LegalZoom.com today and start building your own future the right way. To save even more, enter “Pat” in the referral box. Check out LegalZoom.com, promo code “Pat.”

Thank you again for listening in, and to end this episode, I want to end with a quote. And this is from Drew Houston, who was featured in one of last week's AskPat episodes as well. But this is a quote from him, he is the CEO of Dropbox, and this is a quote from him at a commencement speech at MIT in 2013, I think. He said, “I was going to say work on what you love. But that's not really it. When I think about it, the happiest and most successful people I know just love what they do. They are obsessed with solving something that matters to them.”

Cheers, take care, and I will see you in the next episode of AskPat. Bye