Blog Update 1

• Chris Guthrie
• Blogging
• June 21st, 2010
• 10 Comments

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I relaunched this blog in January of this year and it has been growing substantially over the past few months. One of the things I’ve also been doing is steadily making changes to this blog. So today I’m going to cover some of the changes I’ve made and their impact on my blog. I will do more of these posts in the future but nothing overwhelming.

1. Facebook Fan Page Block added

If you look to the sidebar you’ll see I’ve added the Facebook fan page code block. I added the page on Friday and have already added 6 people without mentioning it so it looks like this will help add more Facebook fans (better than I thought it would). Before that point I had only advertised the Facebook fan page via the small Facebook icon in the “Connect with Me” section of my blog and had only gotten 22 fans in total. So my current as of this writing is only 28, but now that I’ve added the block and have mentioned this on my blog I’m hoping I can get to 100 by the end of the month. Join up here! I’m going to start doing some promotions for only Facebook, Twitter etc. so join up now so that you can see them when they go live.

2. Popular posts tab displays first

My sidebar used to display three tabs in this order: Recent Posts, Popular Posts, Recent Comments. I decided to switch the Recent Posts Tab with the Popular Posts tab because by doing that, my visitors could immediately see my most popular articles instead of what I just happened to write recently. This actually lead to an increase in the average time spent on my site and I’m sure it has lead to more people subscribing to my blog as well. If you do have a tabbed column section on your blog sidebar like mine you should consider making the switch.

3. Fixed recent comments tab

When I started messing around with my sidebar tabs I noticed that my recent comments tab wasn’t even working and it must not have been working since I relaunched my blog early this year (testing fail). So I’d like to remind readers that if they see something broken on my blog please email me and let me know. Perhaps no one ever clicks this tab because I have received emails from other errors on the blog. (I may remove this tab and replace it with a tab showcasing my personal favorite posts instead – thoughts?)

4. Added Recent Tweets Widget

I am trying to increase the number of people that follow me on Twitter so I added a Recent Tweets widget to my blog. Surprisingly you’d think it would be harder to get people to subscribe to my blog than to follow me on Twitter, but as I write this post I currently have 1,646 RSS readers but only 915 Twitter followers. You should follow me on Twitter! Most of the stuff I write about is related to internet marketing and business but I also include some fun updates as well. (Note: I don’t follow everyone that follows me on Twitter, so that’s why I don’t have 30,000 followers and follow 29,900 people. I prefer to get to know the people I follow on Twitter instead of just following everyone that follows me like so many people do.)

5. Experimenting with my newsletter form code everywhere

I already discussed one of the experiments I tried out on my blog, but I’ve also been doing a ton of other testing to see which pages convert the most people into readers / subscribers. The next post I have planned for this topic will be very in depth and worth reading so stick around. I highly recommend Aweber and not just because having a newsletter is crucial to stay in touch with your readers, but also because the reporting tools that they offer are top notch.

6. Advertisers are seeking me out!

I don’t run any traditional advertising on this blog and have mentioned in the past that I didn’t plan to anytime soon. I believe that in the beginning while I was building up my blog it was important to be different than my peers that typically have excessive advertising, product review posts every day and pop up ads all over their blogs. I think that this strategy has worked out very well in converting typical visitors into full time readers; however, this strategy has resulted in an unintentional effect – advertisers are seeking me out! I’ve talked with several different companies that want to advertise on my blog but haven’t accepted any offers yet. It is very interesting to have advertisers come to me instead of the other way around and I must say I wish this were the case for every other website in my portfolio . In any case, I may start to make money from this blog beyond just my resources page but I’d be interested to see what you think about me accepting advertising sometime in the future. I would of course use it much less than my peers, but in either case please share your opinion in the comments.

7. Standout Comments removed and replaced by Action Comments

I had a plugin called Standout Comments which allows visitors to sign up for my newsletter, receive email updates via comments and follow me on Twitter; however, there was a nasty bug in the software that prevented people from being unable to remove themselves from email comment updates after they first checked the box. This issue has since been fixed but needless to say that’s a huge failure in my opinion that should have been caught in testing. I also think that perhaps too many options overwhelm people and so instead I switched over to a plugin called Action Comments which was a freebie I got when I purchased Action Pop Up last month for $47. Action comments just focuses on offering people the option to sign up for my newsletter and in the interests of keeping it simple I moved to that plugin instead (See more info on that script here).

8. Upgraded to WordPress 3.0

I’ll write a post sometime in the future that shows off all 25 plugins that I use on this blog and why I use them, but in the meantime I upgraded to WordPress 3.0 without any issues. I also retested my first free public WordPress plugin: Best Blogroll and it still works like a charm.

Help me improve my blog:

Some of the changes I’ve made have been recent and others I implemented month’s ago and just never discussed them before. I plan to constantly update my blog and I will do these posts on occasion in the future to let you know what I’ve learned and what you can implement in your own blogs. In either case, I know there are still things I can do now to improve my blog and I’m asking you to help. Please share some suggestions below and if you share something I implement in the future I’ll link to your blog in my next update post to thank you for the inspiration.

See you in the comments!

Tagged: Blog Update

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