January 2009 Blog Updates

January 9, 2009 by Collin LaHay
Filed under: General 

So it has been forever since I made a post just stating the changes I have made within my blog, part of the reason being that I was procrastinating on cleaning up my blog for a long time. Well, I have finally tied myself down this week and have done a lot of theme changes, cleaning up a lot of broken things, and have ultimately gotten rid of the useless things I had running on my blog.

Blog Changes

  1. Removed my advertise page
  2. Removed the 125×125 advertisements from my sidebar
  3. Removed the “Categories” from the sidebar
  4. Removed the “Archives” from the sidebar
  5. Removed my Recommended Posts from the sidebar
  6. Removed the Tag Cloud from the footer
  7. Removed my MarketLeverage and Neverblue Ads affiliate banners
  8. Removed my Entrecard widget
  9. Removed my Top Commentators widget
  10. Cleaned up my top navigation, reducing it to just three links

I removed my my 125×125 buttons as well as my advertise page because I am going to be redoing my monetization for the blog in the future. My blog has never been my ‘big income earner’ and it most likely never will be. As I am moving forward with my blog, it is going to be purely about link building strategies. My content has always been the focus, so I am going to stop trying to suck an extra $100-300 per month from my blog when I can more than easily make that amount from my link building to my other sites which actually earn money. I am however keeping my top banner as it is in a premium location and I know there will be companies that cater to link builders as the demand has already grown since I started my blog, and I want them to have a well targeted niche to be able to promote on in the future.

I removed the “categories” part on the sidebar because when I started this blog, it was going to have a mixture of internet marketing techniques (hence the old name of the blog, Mixed Market Arts), however I am moving it to be purely focused on link building strategies. Therefor, the only useful category in the future would be the link building category, and that is why I replaced the “categories” area on the sidebar with a list of the most recent 20 link building posts on my blog, as well as a premium link to the link building cookbook.

I removed the “archives” part of my blog, which is where it would list blog posts from different months/years. I removed this because it was useless from an SEO point of view. These posts were all duplicate content, and since I have the All in One SEO plugin, these pages just 301 redirected to the homepage, so I was just wasting pagerank linking to 20 internal links.

I removed the tag cloud for the same reason… duplicate content. I will be writing about the many different link building software programs that I am currently experimenting with, and the ones I actually use myself I will be reviewing and mentioning down in the footer in the coming month(s).

I removed my affiliate banners because they were taking up a huge portion of my blog and did not convert into members as well as my reviews about the companies did.

I removed my Entrecard widget because it was doing nothing more than taking up space. I was receiving maybe one visitor per day, and generally it was the same group of people visiting my blog and dropping their entrecards. The traffic was low quality (for my niche), didn’t convert into that many subscribers, and was only getting worse month after month because I did not partake in the entrecard community.

I have 1800 entrecard credits saved up, leave a comment if you want them

Last but not least, I removed my top commentators widget. I know this will most likely reduce the amount of comments down to just my most dedicated readers, but I am fine with that. My top commentators was 5-8 external links on all 300+ pages of my blog. With those links now gone, my entire blog will have more authority and rank higher, with stronger inner pagerank.

Blog Focus

Like I said above, I am moving away from a blog that talks about a lot of different kinds of ways to market your website and increase website traffic, to more of a purely focused link building blog. The reason for this is because I enjoy link building and am really good at it, and there are few other link building blogs on the web that offer anything more than “link theory.” This was the reason I started the link building cookbook, and is now the reason I want to focus my entire blog around the niche.

I finally received sitelinks for a Google search for the term Collin LaHay, so now I am focusing all of my link building and content efforts to rank my blog for the big terms in this niche. These would be link building strategies, one way link building, link building services, and the big keyword that I am starting with, link building. I am already starting to rank somewhat for the terms, so now with my anchor focus purely on my keywords now that I have sitelinks for my name, I don’t think it will take that long to rank in the top 5 for link building.

Comments

9 Comments on January 2009 Blog Updates

  1. Chris M on Fri, 9th Jan 2009 5:54 pm

    2. Hey Mr Backlink,

    Good to hear that you’re making some changes around here, it’s always great to change things up. I tell you, I can relate to what you’re talking about when you say that your site isn’t a big money spinner, but it could be used to fuel other websites – I have done something very similar. I had a website which got great traffic, but converting the traffic was near impossible, so I rather fed my readers out to other websites I owned and I saw a lovely increase in revenue, so good luck with you strategy!

    I’ve got an Entrecard account, if nobody else you know wants the credits and you’re at a loss, I’d happily take them off your hands :) I think my account is – http://entrecard.com/user/1111/ but I could be wrong :P

    Anyway, I look forward to the changes and will continue to read your blog each time you post :)

  2. Sacramento Weddings on Fri, 9th Jan 2009 6:23 pm

    3. I’ll miss the “top commentators” widget the most…LOL

    Your blog loads 3x as fast now, on my dialup!

  3. Brenda on Sat, 10th Jan 2009 6:15 am

    4. Would love the Entrecard credits. My account:
    http://entrecard.com/details/13185

    Thanks!

  4. Kindle Reviews on Sat, 10th Jan 2009 9:12 am

    5. Collin,
    I’ll still comment, Top Commenter or not. Thanks for giving the reasons for the changes to blog. It kind of helps me with my own blog since I’m not so knowledgeable when it comes to the technical side of blogging.

  5. Karthik on Sat, 10th Jan 2009 8:58 pm

    6. This is my first time in your site…I had a problem with my comment widget and when I google searched about it,your post about that site came in top 10 :)

    An awesome site really with tons of useful information,and I am going to subscribe to these valuable posts about link building.

    I am trying my luck with entrecard,and would be happy to get come ECs as well :P

    http://entrecard.com/details/82275

  6. Win Prizes on Mon, 12th Jan 2009 12:13 pm

    7. Hey Collin, it’s me Mike from bloggin-ads. Haven’t been here in a while now and it seems like you cleaned up the blog a whole lot. It looks great…especially now that Entrecard if off the blog :D

    -Mike

  7. TheImpulse on Mon, 12th Jan 2009 10:02 pm

    8. Decided I would come out of the lurker state to commend you for the recent improvements and clutter clean-up.

    I would also like to thank you for the endless supply of useless information I have found here that has helped me get a better understanding of link building, and if I didn’t understand, I was always able to find and explanation somewhere else. So thanks, I appreciate it. :D

  8. TheImpulse on Wed, 14th Jan 2009 1:39 pm

    9. Sorry about that post above. I meant useful, not useless.

  9. vitiligo on Sun, 19th Jul 2009 12:43 pm

    10. Thanks for your time.. I appreciate it!

Tell me what you're thinking...
and oh, if you want a pic to show with your comment, go get a gravatar!