_{Day 216/100}

Hey—It's Tim. 

I’ve been looking at our blog and feeling something I haven’t wanted to say out loud:

We made a mess.

Not a scandal. Not a tragedy.
Just a founder’s mess - the kind you make when you sprint, win a few, and convince yourself the noise is part of the music.

We shipped north of five hundred posts in about three weeks last year.
Some of those pieces genuinely helped people choose or succeed with Penfriend.
Most… didn’t. They were fine. They just weren’t for our buyer.

Time to take a knife to some blogs.

This is the part where I stop advising you to “focus your funnel” while quietly hoarding every post we ever published like a dad who won’t throw out cables from 2009.

So here’s what I’m doing, in public, where it counts.

Owning the mess

I pulled a full export of the blog.
Every URL. Every title. Last updated. Entrances. Assisted conversions. The works.

Then I walked myself through the same rubric I’ve been preaching:

• Does this help a buyer decide?

• Does this help a buyer succeed?

• Is it in our voice, with proof and receipts?

• If a stranger read only this, would they understand what Penfriend is for?

If the answer is “no” to the first two, it’s gone.
Not “someday.” Not “maybe after the next release.”
Gone to a private archive with a redirect that tells Google and my conscience the truth.

I’m deleting a few hundred posts.

Not because they’re “bad content.”
Because they are not our content.

If I’m honest, it’s about 400 blogs.

The cut list

What leaves: broad, safe, nice-to-have explainers that don’t touch MoFU or BoFU. Trend-chasing pieces that felt smart for a week. Anything that can’t be tied to a problem we solve or a purchase we actually see.

What stays: decision pages, comparisons, implementation walk-throughs, “how we did it” build logs, and the odd magnetic top-of-funnel that naturally routes to a product path - by design, not by accident.

I’m mapping 301s, collapsing orphan categories, and killing thin tag pages that pretend to be hubs.
If Internal Link Me from 2024 left a spiderweb, 2025 Tim is sweeping.

The refresh plan

Eighty percent of what survives gets a hard refresh.

Not “updated for 2025” lip gloss.
A rewrite with fingerprints:

• Our voice, not a committee’s.

• Screenshots from real builds.

• Quotes from user calls where we learned something painful and useful.

• One clear job per page, one person it serves, one action it earns.

I’ll record the work.
What I cut. Why I kept. How the internal links change.
Where we ask for the try, and where we deliberately don’t.

By Christmas, the Penfriend blog should feel like a field manual -
not a museum of opinions.
You show up with a problem; you leave with a plan.

Why this matters for traffic

Traffic that doesn’t touch momentum is a vanity metric.
I’ve known that. I just didn’t run the site like I knew it.

The bet is simple: fewer pages, higher intent, stronger signals.
Let’s make it easier for both people and crawlers to find the spine of the product.

If I’m going to say “own your platform,” my platform needs to look owned.

So it will.

What I’m doing this week

• Full inventory labeled Keep / Refresh / Remove against decide-or-succeed.

• Redirect map written before a single delete goes live.

• Three refresh briefs on my desk with exact gaps, quotes to add, and screenshots to capture.

• Category tree trimmed to match product paths, not vibes.

• One “how we did it” post in the works to document the process you’re reading about.

What you can do today

Open your own list.
Ask one brutal question of each URL: Would I bet a coffee this helps a buyer decide or succeed?
If no, then get rid of it.
If yes, no post is perfect, make it better.

See you tomorrow.

✌️ Tim "Mr. 301" Hanson
CMO @Penfriend.ai

Same brain, different platforms: X, Threads, LinkedIn.

P.S. If I was to record this entire project, reply TEND THE GARDEN, and I’ll take it as a yes.

Penfriend.ai
Made by content marketers. Used by better ones.