First let me say there is no scientific way to go about maximizing blogs. It’s all about common sense. When I look at my blogs I ask myself, “What do I need from my blogs in order for them to remain on my To Do list?”

I have to streamline my old To Do list to make room for new and exciting ventures. My blogs are going through a type of American Idol judging. Those that didn’t survive the consolidation cut are out of the competition. Of those remaining they must meet the following criteria:

1. They must be profitable
2. They must be low maintenance
3. They must provide quality information
4. They must be easy to navigate (this is a big problem on most of my blogs)
5. The advertising has to be efficient
6. I want them to look good

Let’s take a look at my must haves:

Profitability

This is a no-brainer. Profitability comes in two flavors in my book. One is cold-hard cash and the other is nourishment to the soul.

The cash aspect is self-explanatory. If the blog makes money, and I’m talking about more than enough cash to pay for itself several fold and keep me living in the luxurious lifestyle that I’ve become accustomed to…oops, I’m taking creative liberties here. What I really mean is that it must make significant contributions to my mortgage, utilities and groceries. I won’t have time to nurse along blogs that are limping financially.

Soul nourishing blogs, like NJFM, stay because I wouldn’t be me without it. Where would I place my early morning I’ve-got-writing-on-my-mind posts? I don’t have too many soul-nourishing blogs. Hmmm, let’s be honest, I only have one and a half soul nourishing blogs so that means the rest must make money.

Low Maintenance

Low maintenance means that I write it and forget it (except for the soul-nourishing blogs). My moneymaking blogs don’t accept comments, questions or advice. I do the research, write the article, provide supportive links and let the cash roll in.

Maintenance includes upgrading the software when required and running Xenu periodically to make sure there are no broken links . Oh, yeah, and write a new post on occasion. My goal is to write no more than 2 to 4 posts per month for each of the money making blogs. Remember, the purpose of this whole consolidation thing is to free up my time to learn and make mistakes elsewhere.

Quality Information

On all but one of my online sites, I took care of this requirement when I created the site. Tidbits and Stuff, however, has quite a bit of ‘splainin’ to do. I mentioned before that Tidbits was my first site and I used quite a bit of free content from article directories.

Although I made sure the articles were quality articles, they are articles from article directories. I will either delete the free articles and redirect the links to the home page or I’ll write another article on the same topic to replace the free article. This involves making a list of all of the free articles and addressing them one by one when time permits.

Ease of Navigation

I’m guilty of having difficult to navigate sites. Back when I was hand coding sites, I made sure the navigation was easy and all content was accessible though the menus. WordPress has made me lazy.

I have a host of WordPress categories that are not accessible from any of my menus. Not only that, my categories and blog posts need to be streamlined. I had fallen into the bad habit of writing, writing and writing without paying attention to the menu structure. I think NJFM is the biggest culprit (NJFM is also last on my blog maximizing list).

In an attempt to put a band-aid on the broken leg, I inserted Google’s site search tool in the right-hand column on NJFM (I’m adding this to all of my blogs/sites). What I like about the tool is that it allows me to find posts that I would otherwise have a difficult time finding.

This tool can prove to be lucrative on my moneymaking blogs because I can earn AdSense for Search income by using Google’s search feature. Granted, I only earned a few pennies so far, but pennies add up.

Efficient Advertising

Because the blogs/sites have survived until now, that means they’re all making money. My goal is to maximize their money-making potential. Some of the methods include:

• Utilizing Widget Logic  for selective ad display
• Searching for affiliate products that are a hand-in-glove fit for each site
• Adjusting the AdSense ad block size/color and location for best results
• Investigating a few of InfoLinks new features
• Potentially selling ad space

I want the advertisement to be efficient without making the blog look spammy. There is a way to maximize income without losing too much screen real estate to advertisers.

Looking Good

If I had to choose between quality content and good looks, I’d choose quality content any day, but there’s no reason I can’t have both.

There you have it, my non-scientific list for maximizing my blogs.

1. Copy the post from the old blog
2. Paste it into the new blog
3. Copy and paste images from the old blogging directory into the new blog’s image directory and make the appropriate image location changes in the post. I don’t want the new blog to access images from the old blog location because eventually, the old blog will be discontinued. Once the old blog is gone, so are the images.
4. Insert a 301 redirect in the old blog’s .htaccess file.

A Little More about 301 Redirects

If you own your own domain and pay for your own hosting, you should have a an .htaccess file in your root directory. This text file is the key to a smoothly running  and secure blog.

By inserting a few lines of code, you can redirect your visitors from your old blog to your new. Since I’m taking my time and moving one article at a time, I choose to make a separate entry for each post as I move it.

For example:

Let’s say that I move my I Love NY post from my old blog located at www.oldblog.com to my new blog located at www.newblog.com. The URL for the new post now looks something like this: www.newblog.com/I-love-ny.

When a visitor goes to the old blog and looks for the post, I want them automatically redirected to the new blog so I insert the following line in my .htaccess file on the old blog:

redirect 301 /I-love-ny/ http://www.newblog.com/I-love-ny/

Easy peasy. If you use this method, make sure your character spacing is correct. Adding one too many or too few spaces in the URL or between URLs will prevent your old blog from displaying. You’ll get an internal server 500 error message (I’m speaking from experience here).

If you get the message, go back to your .htaccess file and either fix or remove the last entry until you can figure out what you did wrong,

Once I have all of the posts transferred to the new blog, I then go back to the old blog and include a final redirect, which points the entire domain to the new domain as follows:

redirect 301 /index.php http://www.newblog.com/

What to Do After it’s Consolidated

After the blog is consolidated, I allow the old blog to sit there until the domain name expires. Fortunately, my blog domains don’t expire for several months so it gives me enough time to make sure that everything is properly transferred.

According to this article on Google’s webmaster support blog,  Google recommends (remember this is a recommendation, not a law) that you keep the old domain active for 180 days after the transfer to avoid confusion.  I think that recommendation is especially important if you are consolidating large sites. In my case, I have two blogs of about 100 posts, but the rest are all 30 posts or less.

Hmmm, 100 posts, I might have to re-think my 30-day timeline for consolidating 14 blogs.

Next: Blog Maximization

If the moneymaking sites don’t make money, I recommend getting rid of them because unless you figure out how to make it profitable, it becomes a time and emotion drain. Sites created out of passion or a genuine interest in the subject matter is a whole different story.

The Story of a Pig

It’s not really a story of a pig, but in an attempt to honor the title of this post, I’ll refer to my Visit Hudson Valley site as a pig.

You see, I created the site back in 1996 when I was exploring the inner workings of site creation. Back then one of my favorite pastimes was eating in restaurants and discovering new foods. Being relatively new to the area, I searched online for local restaurant listings, but there weren’t any. Remember this is back in 1996 when folks were still afraid of the Internet.

Since I couldn’t find a site that had the information I was looking for, I created one. I loved creating sites, playing around in databases, taking pictures, eating out and so on, so Visit Hudson Valley was a labor of love. As time went on and life happened (in particular the illness and subsequent death of my mom), I lost interest in a lot of things, including creating websites.

Revisiting the Pig

Over time, my interest in the Internet returned and I re-created Visit Hudson Valley (yes, re-created VHV because when I lost interest I allowed the domain to expire and the site was totally offline for a few years). Around that time I created Tidbits & Stuff and a couple of other sites. My interest in the various sites ebbed and flowed, waxed and waned, peaked and valleyed (no pun intended). You get my drift.

Over the past two years I allowed Visit Hudson Valley to sit there in its own sty (lost interest again, but this time I didn’t take it offline). I didn’t update any of the databases nor did I add much content. It just sat on the Internet unloved and uncared for (queue the violins). Last month I earned a whopping $4.82 from the site. It was never a huge moneymaker, but $4.82 is pretty bad even by VHV standards.

A New Tube of Lipstick

This month I slapped a little lipstick on the pig in the form of a new blogging theme and I’m working on updating the databases (there are about 5,000 entries across all of the databases so it will take quite some time to go through them all).

By changing the blog theme and adding a couple of entries, I’ve more than doubled my last month’s earnings in the space of 1 week. Let’s face it, when you only earn $4.82 it’s not hard to double those earnings.

Lesson Learned from My Pig and Lipstick

All too often we take our sites down because we’ve lost interest. I’ve found that interest, just like so many other things in life is cyclical. If you were once passionate about something, give it time, your passion will return. It may take a month, a year or 3 years, but it will return.

All I know is that when folks search for “things to do in the Hudson Valley,” or, “Hudson Valley Maps,” or “Hudson Valley Restaurants,” my little piggy shows up somewhere on the first page of Google’s search results. That wouldn’t happen if I had taken the site down a second time when my interest waned.

In this situation, it’s much easier to make an old pig look good with a little lipstick than it is to create a new pig from scratch. Before you ditch your old pig, let it sit for a while. When the interest returns, pick out a nice shade of lipstick and apply.
 

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As I clicked around the new interface I found that I had a few sites listed under my account that were not mine. Most of them are HubPages accounts of fellow Hubbers. Since creating a HubPages channel, it appears that I get more than I wanted. Granted, I only get the number of page views and not add clicks but that can be a little disconcerting.

If I have their page views, I’m sure other Hubbers have mine. Since I don’t make much money at all from HubPages it doesn’t bother me too much but if such things can happen with HubPages, what other info is being misdirected?

Another Weird Entry

I found a Blogspot blog listed under my Google AdSense. For the life of me I couldn’t understand why this particular blog was showing up as one of my sites. After visiting the site, I saw why. The person copied not only one of my articles, but the images too.

The article was an Ezine article that was free for the picking and the images were also free images selected from stock.xchng. The issue occurred because the person copying the page didn’t upload the images to his server. He linked directly to the images on my server so every time his page loaded it would search for the images on my server. This is a problem.

If several websites decided to do the same thing, it would place undue burden on my web host. After all, I’m paying my host to display my images, this other guy isn’t. Not wanting this to continue, I searched online to see how to stop this guy and anyone else from burdening my servers. In doing so I came across this post, How to Deter Image and Bandwith Theft on David Airey’s site.

By following David Airy’s directions, anyone hotlinking to images on my Tidbits and Stuff site will get this:

A Side Note

I believe the image hotlinks occurred prior to my installing the CopyProtect plugin.  Since installing the plugin the incidence of plagiarism has decreased significantly.

Now to create images and implement the code on the rest of my sites. Sheesh. There’s always something to keep us busy!

Here are some that I use:

• SI CAPTCHA Anti-Spam: This is a utility plugin and is necessary for cutting down on spam comments.
• Smart Ads: With Smart Ads you can automatically insert ads in the beginning and end of each of your blog posts. You can also insert advertisements in the center of your blog posts, but in order to do that you have to manually insert the code where you want the middle ad to appear. On NJFM I only use the manually inserted ad function. You’ll see it on older posts .
• Widget Logic: I think this is one of my favorite plugins. I was introduced to this one by a fellow who wanted to purchase ad space on my blog, but he only wanted the ad to appear on the home page. With Widget Logic, you can configure the widgets to appear on certain posts or categories or tags. I use this widget most when I’m working on a mini-blog that I want to appear as a website. The blog consists of 5 or 6 pages and on each page I place an ad that compliments the page’s content.
• WP-Ban:  I use that to cut down on spam. When I receive comment spam, I take the spammer’s IP address and insert it in the WP-Ban configuration page. It then bans that person from viewing the site. When I check the stats, I see that it has protected me from over 8,000 spam comments. It’s amazing how some IP addresses continue to make so many attempts (I use this in conjunction with Akismet).
• Google XML Sitemap: Every blog should have two sitemaps; one for readers (HTML format) and the other for search engines (XML format). This plugin makes sitemaps for search engines.
• WordPress Mobile Pack: I use that to for making my blog mobile compatible. I’m not too much of a mobile device user, but I believe it’s working (my eyes don’t like small screens).
• Move Comments: I don’t use this one often, but it does come in handy when you want to take a comment and move it to a different post. Sometimes readers aren’t quite sure which post is the best place to add a comment. If they inadvertently place a comment under the wrong post, you can easily move it to where it should be.
• Add This Social Bookmarking Widget: I recently started using that one. I’m not so sure if it’s worth it, but I decided to leave it on for a couple of months to see if I notice a difference in traffic.
• CommentLuv: You see this one in action at the bottom of your comment. It displays and links back to the commenter’s latest blog post.  My biggest issue with CommentLuv is that there seems to be daily updates. Just about every time I sign onto my WordPress account, there’s a need to update Comment Luv.
• Maintenance Mode: I use this when I’m about to make major changes to my blog. Maintenance Mode displays a screen notifying readers that the site is undergoing maintenance and to check back at a later time. You can configure the message and the maintenance duration.
• WP-Copy Protect:  Protect your content from plagiarists.  This plugin makes it more difficult for plagiarists to copy your posts.  (This plugin was added after this list was originally created. Read more about the plugin in this post).
• Broken Link Checker: This plugin will notify you when it finds broken links.
• Limit Login Attempts: This plugin helps to deter hackers by limiting the number of times they can try to guess your login password.

Just for Fun Widgets

These are widgets that do nothing for gaining traffic or optimizing your blog. These are ones I use because I came across them and liked them.

• Quotes Collection: I use it here on NJFM because I like hearing, reading and sharing inspirational quotes.
• LinkWithin: You can see this one in action at the bottom of the post. It’s rather effective in prolonging the reader’s visit.

Although widgets can add much-needed functionality to your blog, they also slow down the load time of your site so use them wisely.

Ok, I’ve shared mine.  I know that everyone has a favorite widget or two.  Time to fess up and share yours.