We finally hit 50K+ sessions on our gardening site.
I want to apply to Mediavine or Raptive and get approved on their ad platforms, so am trying to do deep clean of the whole site to make it look more authentic.
Up to now we’ve been mostly focused on publishing and updating content.
But when you start aiming for Mediavine/Raptive, the site needs to look and feel like a real publishing business. Not just a pile of posts.
So we’re working through a “make this site obviously legit” checklist - I was given this in another forum I’m part of, and we have some of these already, but here is the list if anyone else wants to check it out:
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Privacy policy, T&C, Contact and About pages
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Static homepage, with hero section, not just a list of blog posts
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Mix of content, not just list posts
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Cookie consent
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Social media links
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Relevant categories for your content, include these in your menu
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Make it clear what your niche is - using the hero section, about page, categories, menu..
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Try not to have AI images/content slapped all over the homepage and your recent content
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Display content date, author, categories
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Sidebar (they’ll want to display ads here)
Additional:
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If possible, have a business address, but not always possible!
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Email sign up form
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Have more than one author contributors, but at least an author page - if that can have their social links, bonus!
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Unique, appealing, thought-through design that doesn’t look like all the low-effort blogs out there
We’re switching it to a better static homepage with a proper hero section so it’s immediately clear what the site is about and who it’s for - I’ll have to paste the before and afters below, since my one team member did a pretty good job.
The other big piece of updating is rewriting content so it doesn’t sound like AI - mainly just updating the images to real images we can find online, as well as working through the more popular and most recent posts and updating the text to make it sound more human (if it doesn’t sound that way already). I guess a better way would be to say less robotic.
If anyone here has gone through the “get ready for Mediavine or Raptive” phase, I’d love any other tips. Really hoping I can get on one of these higher tiers to increase the ad RPMs.
