After part two in the series, I had completed most of the visual refresh. Now it’s all about content. I had a very good freelance writer I know produce a series of 20 articles. I’m going to start publishing those, and build up some back links. Busy day today but I put the first one, getting started as a freelance writer . I’ll publish a new article every few days, work on backlinks, and monitor progress in Google Webmaster tools. Busy day today so that’s all for now!

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I had about half an hour of time tonight so I picked up where I left off. As you may recall I bought an old freelance blog and I’m going to show you what I do to improve the site.

Here’s what I changed today:

• Changed the theme to Desk . The problem I had with the old theme pictured here, is that the header was far too large, taking up valuable ad real estate, and more importantly not adding much value to the site. This new theme is a lot cleaner, fun, and minimizes waste on the users screen.
• Optimized the blog title and headers: Not rocket science but I changed the tag line and optimized some of the header text. Inspiration for the text came from looking at search trends using Google Insights for Search
• Added AdSense code: The site was always making money through AdSense, I just added it to a few different spots. No fancy plugin used here, I just edited a few files where I wanted the ads to appear.
• Added the WhyDoWork Freelance Job Search Widget: Also pretty easy to do, I copied the code from here and put it on its own page.
• Added top menu items: The “Desk” template I chose had a menu, so I added a few key items: Home, Advice (which is the WordPress category where I’ll publish all the blog posts, a simple contact form, and the job search tool I created in the previous item.
• Installed some key plugins/tools: There’s a few plugins I always install. The first is a sitemap so search engines know about our content, I like the better wordpress google sitemap. Next I installed the fast secure contact form. It’s easy to use and configure. I also installed Google Analytics and turned on WordPress Stats just in case.

That’s it for today! Not bad for half an hour

Here’s what it looks like now:

Stay tuned for updates. Many more changes to make!

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Just yesterday I bought a very small but very old website (> 8 years) in the ‘work at home’ niche called SeekFreelance It’s currently not making a whole lot of money (best month ever was $30 via AdSense), and it has very few pages indexed in search engines.

I’m going to show you exactly what I do to improve the site . This is what it currently looks like:

Given it’s day 1 and I don’t have much time, all I’ve done so far is swapped in my AdSense code. Woo-hoo I got 1 click already . The immediate and glaring issues I see with this site already are the header size (it’s taking up all of the ‘above-the-fold’ space, and the content (it’s pretty crappy). That’s probably where I’ll start.

Stay tuned

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