New blog features (and win a prize for commenting)

Have you noticed anything different about my blog? The changes aren’t really drastic, but are a long time coming. Over the past few months I’ve been keeping track of what I’ve seen on other blogs and of comments people have left me, and I finally bit the bullet and got everything on my list done!

I’m quite excited about a number of the new features.
Here’s a list of the main things you’ll notice around the blog:

• Tagline changed in the top left banner from “How I’m Getting Famous Online & How You Can Too” to “YouTube Marketing Tactics”
• Pages buttons/links at the top re-ordered
• 3 more of the recent blog posts added to the list on the main page (now 8 showing instead of 5)
• The “Blog” page now just shows the 10 most recent blog posts and then you can select pages of older entries at the bottom (it used to load every previous blog post in one page)
• When a category is clicked on, it used to only show one page of results with 8 or 9 blog posts, but now it includes all blog posts in that category over multiple  pages (10 per page)
• Changed the font throughout the blog from Comic Sans to something more professional looking
• Removed the smaller “Recent Posts” block on the right side of the blog (since recent posts are already listed on the page)
• Added the YouTube subscribe widget to the right side, under the newsletter signup block so anyone can easily subscribe in one click
• Added the Facebook social plugin to the right side, under the YouTube subscribe widget, that shows how many people “like” me on Facebook and recent posts on my Page.
• Removed the “Places To Connect With Me” block on the lower right
• Put Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and two YouTube buttons where the Google ad banner used to be in the top right
• Removed two of the ads from the “Blog Sponsors” section (GoDaddy & DreamHost)
• Added retweet and F Share buttons under the title and again at the bottom of all the blog posts and remove other sharing options that were at the bottom
• Started off the comments section on the blog posts with a Facebook comments section
• Added a plugin that puts the comments submitted on the YouTube video that’s embedded in that blog post, into the comments section of the blog post as well
• Add a pagerank button/banner to the advertising page to show that this is a PR4 website

As you can probably tell, there’s definitely a big focus on social media connectivity.  I decided to remove the sharing buttons for other sites like Digg and StumbleUpon because they’re almost never used… most of the people I know and network with only use Facebook and often Twitter so I wanted to keep the focus on those two.  I think that sometimes giving too many options can just overwhelm people or take away from what you really want them to do – and I really want readers to share my posts on Facebook and Twitter. 

I also felt that it was more important to have people checking out social media accounts than to receive the little bit of profit I was getting from my Google Ads banner.  I’d much rather have readers connecting with me on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, or of course my two YouTube channels, than just viewing, or on a rare basis clicking on, the ads.  I think the benefits from getting more connections/followers/viewers on those sites outweighs the small amount of money I was making from that.

And a feature that I’m really excited about is the Facebook comments at the bottom of every blog post.  Although this blog has been getting a good amount of traffic lately, the comments on it really haven’t picked up much.  I think that by having a really easy way for people to comment that doesn’t require them to input their name, email, and website, that hopefully more people will opt to leave a quick comment.  If you’re already signed in to Facebook on your browser (and most of us are) it will automatically detect that, allowing you to just type in your comment and hit enter without any other sign-in required.  Pretty cool!

And to get the ball rolling, I’m giving away a FREE Classic Calendar from Staples Canada to someone who leaves a “Facebook Comment” below.  The 11″x17″ 12-month calendar can start on any month you choose and you can add up to 26 images to it.  I have a promotional code that’s valid until February 19th so you just create the whole thing on their easy-to-use website and then enter the code to get it for free!  One entry per person and only for things written in the Facebook Comments section TODAY & TOOMORROW (February 7th & 8th) so leave a comment below right now to win it and thanks in advance for reading/commenting!