Can’t get links or categories onto my sidebar

I realize that this question, and very similar questions have been posted all over the support forums, and after spending the better part of the day going through pretty much every post with no success, I have finally decided just to post. I am currently trying to transfer my old website indiespensablemusic.blogsome.com over to my new site, indiemuse.com. Both blogsome and my new site use WordPress, so I thought this was going to be a relatively easy transfer… if I knew that it was going to be as hard as it has been the last few days, I never would have made the switch. So far I have done everything from trying to mess around with the catch like one post said to do(which messed up my site even more), to reinstalling wordpress several times to my site, to switching themes from minima plus. More recently, I have been going through posts like the checklist that Dr Mike made, and putting in different template tags on the sidebar.php. Right now I have two links that appear on my site under blogroll, that i have deleted (they aren’t in the links manager anymore), yet they still appear on the site. I am trying to set my links to look identical to how they are on my old wesbite(listed above). I am aware that in order for the categories to hypothetically appear I need to add a link that goes to the category… still doesn’t work. Many thanks to whoever can help me get rid of this major headache.