You probably clean your house at least weekly. Or at work, you likely arrange your desk as needed so things look good as others pass by.
So why wouldn't you take a few minutes each month and go through your blog and clean things up.
This month for my blogger tip, I'd like to suggest a few ideas!
Take a look at your side bar, if you have one
Is anything outdated on it?
Maybe you have Ambassador buttons or affiliation links you are no longer affiliated with?
Maybe the organization of it needs a little work?
The same goes for your footer, make sure everything is cleaned up and looking great!
Clean up your page
Have you been to a blog that has so much going on, it turns you away from it only after being there a second?
Did you know you have 1-3 seconds to capture someones attention? If they are a new viewer, you want those first few seconds to be appealing.
Ads
I understand a lot of blogs do make money with all those pop up images and ads. But many blogs will just add them to have them. If you have pop up's take a look at your ad stat numbers.
Are you making enough revenue off them to make it worth turning away many new visitors? If not, I'd suggest turning them off.
Or you can have them time delayed to pop up after 30 seconds or 1 minute. Which will distract the new visitors much less, would be a great option to add.
Highest Page View Posts
I bet you have written a few posts that have stood out and continually receive a steady amount of page views. Take your highest one, and open it up and improve on it. Edit punctuation as needed, maybe re-word things. Clean it up, make it stand out even more so it can be even more to your advantage!
Go in and add better images, or make sure you have pinnable images added. Or remove images that don't look great.
Keywords
As you seek out your most popular posts, even if you don't have time go through and edit them all. Pick a few and go in and add great keywords to them. So that in future months as Google crawls your site, it will pick up on them and your posts might pop up more in search engine searches.
Most important, make sure you keywords for each post are relevant to the post, so you don't run into getting blacklisted or buried in the search engines, for unfair keyword practices!
Make Your Site Load/Run Faster
Maybe you need to remove some plugins you no longer use. Possibly you need to (file) size down some images to make them load faster. Take a look at the things that are making your blogs home page load slower, and fix them.
Draft Folder
We all have them, posts we came up with idea's on and never quite finished. Or maybe they are works in progress. Possibly they are things we have totally forgotten about.
Go through your draft folder and see which ones you actually may use. Delete ones that you have no plans on using or have forgotten about.
This might even give you ideas of new things to work on.
Your Blogs Pages
Through the years I have created great pages for my blog that at the time I thought were keepers. But as I got into blogging more I realized they weren't that important and weren't getting the page views.
Do you have blog pages that you love, but when you look at their stats the traffic just isn't there?
It's hard when we love something but others don't, which is what google analytics can be very helpful for!
If you have pages that have been up for a year, and you look back at the traffic and it's so minimal that you can tell that there is no point. Consider deleting those or changing them.
If you're looking to monetize your blog, then use your traffic to guide you through what is working and what isn't. (Pages less than 3-6 months old, may not have been up long enough for search engine's to notice them, but 9-12 month old pages are a great indication of what has been or hasn't been working!)
Those are just a few tips to help you out.
Do you need to do all the things I listed above each month? Nope, I don't think any of us have time for that.
But if we are serious about growing our blogs, we do need to consider a little maintenance as we have time.
Personally, I like to pick one thing or one category to work on each month.
My blog isn't perfect, far from it. But its come a long way. One thing I have noticed is the cleaner I keep it, the more traffic I get and more of that traffic tends to become return followers.
So tell me, do you do any routine maintenance on your blog? Do you have any additional Blog Clean Up Tips to offer?
