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Should it stay or should it go

I’ve slowly been getting rid of junk on my site. Mostly they have been widgets from blog networks. I have two left on my site and I think they are about to get the axe.

BlogCatalog
I already got rid of MyBlogLog. It drove about 3 visits per month. BlogCatalog is better, but not by much. In the last 30 days, BlogCatalog has delivered a whopping 22 visitors out of 22,000. Given the traffic it brings, is it worth the real estate it takes up on my site? Probably not. BlogCatalog, like MyBlogLog, is slowly getting filled up with junk websites and spam. 0.73 visits per day isn’t worth the extra time do download a widget for every user. I’m also guessing I’ll get just as much traffic without the widget.

Bloggers Choice Awards
I’ve already taken this off my site. I always felt bad begging for votes. I was hopping to use winning in 2008 as one more arrow in the quiver for getting a book deal. Win or lose, I wasn’t planning on putting a link up for 2009. The contest has no rules so it encourages gaming. I’m taking this one step further and am going to avoid participating in any sort of contest which requires readers to vote. If I’m going to spend goodwill amongst my readers, I’m going to do it for something more valuable like subscribing to RSS or putting in links. Also, it appears I can pretty much stay on page one for travel without having to put in any work for 2009. I wont win or be in the top three, but who cares.

Entrecard
Between ads I’ve run and organic clicks, Entrecard brought in 255 visits in the last 30 days. A little over 1.5% of my traffic. I don’t drop cards, and I refuse to do so. I can’t earn much in the way of credits from advertising. The information on the site doesn’t make buying ads very efficient. This is probably looking at removal at some point, but probably not just yet. Remove the ad buys, and you are looking at about 175 visits, much of that I guess is due to me being semi active on the forums.

Various Directories
I have buttons for various directories on my site. I plan on keeping them for now. The reason is simple: they score well in Google for keywords I’m working on, so I want my site on their list. Also, the images are very small and they provide some sort of social validation of the site. Being among the top 10 says to someone visiting for the first time that I’m for real and not a fake. They are much smaller than full blown widgets and eventually can be buried near the bottom of the page.

Once most of this is gone, I’ll need to rethink navigation and what I want to put on the site. It is an area I haven’t given enough thought.

By Gary

3 dimples. 7 continents. 130 countries.

2 replies on “Should it stay or should it go”

I’ve cut all that stuff out, it looks tacky and returns nothing to the site.

Hey that’s Neil Duckett… one of the very few blogs I am acquainted with. What are the odds?

Good idea about getting rid of that stuff, I totally agree with you. Blog catalog gets me a few visits, but I don’t even have their badge on my site anymore. I don’t know how good this Entrecard thing is going to work out. I get my first ads on others sites in a few days. It seems like a hastle and against my “keep it simple stupid” rule.

Glad you got your adsense working! Must have hashed it out with Google.

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