LooseSuits

For people reading this not familiar with your site, your most recent focus has been: making money online, SEO and metablogging.

Your niches...

I'm going to be honest with you: those are three of the most oversaturated niches there are. I'm not saying you shouldn't write that sort of content, but you'll have to make a hell of an impact somewhere to see a measurable response.

The readers of these niches (and I apologise to you, because I know I'm grouping you in here) collectively have less attention span than a hamster watching paint dry. You need to be consistently excellent instead of following the crowd.

Money

Money-wise, you're advertising to some of the most advert-alert people on the internet. These are guys who spend all day either monetising sites trying their hardest. You might want to mix things up a bit. Throw in a random interstitial. Randomly use those damned annoying underline-thingy-ads.

This is another reason I'd find being in the MMO niche extremely dangerous. At the top, you have a few guys making stupid amounts of money for doing nigh-on sod-all. I remember at one point in the distant history feeling slightly competitive with you over site income and traffic.

I've long since given up aspirations of taking over the world and to be honest, I'm a much happier person for it. I don't feel I have to write when I don't have anything to write about and I don't feel I have to shove ads under people's eyelids.

My point is if you're not making money online, you must occasionally ask yourself why you're writing about it. I would find that predicament too depressing.

Content

I'm sure this has dawned on you but you're pretty limited in your scope for new content. Everything has been said on the subjects and as soon as something new happens, a million people have written about it before you've head of it.

I don't know what you can do about that.

So how about providing something other sites don't? A regularly updated guide. All the little voices in the MMO arena squalk "I'm rich and here's how I did it" - but there's actually a lot less "how" and a lot more "here's what I'm doing now; click my links biatch". It's a horrible MLM-style pyramid.

You're not at the ProBlogger level so you can't speak with absolute authority (as if they can) but you can show how you're trying to get there. Long term experiments showing traffic vs income graphs, marking significant actions. Show what works and what doesn't. In doing so, you'll save people a lot of time.

Conversely if this doesn't work, you'll have more great content that doesn't get enough interaction and that won't help you psychologically.

Getting more interaction

Firstly, spruce up your comment form. It's basic and there's a captcha waiting there to scare people off. Turn the form into a two-stage process so they only see the bare minimum to begin with and ask the rest once they've posted the content of their post. zdnet have a great version of this: just a textarea and a button. It's great for luring people in, getting them invested in the process.

Additionally, with the two-stage process, you can do far more with the user. Once they've posted, you can ask them if they want to subscribe to the thread, if they want to subscribe via RSS or want one sugar or two.

Give it some styles too. Visually draw people in.

There's also a LOT of gumpf between the end of content and the comments. Rearrage the metacrap. Move Digg/contact/email and rss subs to the top of the sidebar. They'll get less attention but they're not delivering what you need anyway.

To conclude..

If I took over seopher.com tomorrow, I'd do the following things:

• Examine if I really want to continue writing in the current niches. Are they sustainable? Can I succeed in them? Are they fun to write about?
• Regardless, is the way I'm writing affecting the way people tend to comment. I'd take a look at something popular and try to emulate its style to see if that worked again. Perhaps chuck in some questions.
• Ask myself how important monetizing was. How much does it degrade viewing/interaction performance? It that worth it?
• Work on getting people from the end of my content straight into the comment box.

Some good advice there sir and something I've certainly thought about. I think tagging the niche I operate in is hard, because I don't really discuss making money online (because I don't really make any), instead I focus on metablogging and marketing - two things I actually do and enjoy.

It's just finding content within this niche that has sufficient mainstream appeal to attract new readers... That's the trick.