How to Clean Up Your Blog


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Is anything outdated on it?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?



16 comments :

  1. There are great tips. Personally, I like reading a blog with a clean look and am turned off by all the extra stuff on the busier ones. Also, those plug ins wreak havoc with my laptop! Argh. I am always forgetting to add my labels, so thanks for that reminder.

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  2. As usual, all great tips. I've been trying to focus a lot on going back and adding keywords to popular blog posts. Hopefully Google will continue to pick those posts up, and at an even greater rate!

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  3. Great post. I got rid of a page earlier this year because I wasn't adding anything to it. I figured if I wasn't adding anything new, then why bother.

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  4. I try to do that every few months just because I hate it when info is so useless.

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  5. These are great tips! I really need to go in and clean up my blog and this is a great list to start with :)

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  6. great tips! I need to work this more into an ongoing routine. All things to think about- nice post!

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  7. There you go making assumptions that I actually clean my house ;) I don't have any ads or pop-ups on my blog. It's just mainly for me. But I do like it to be "clean" and uncluttered (I like my house that way too, it just is so much work, especially with five boys around!)

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  8. I definitely need to clean up my blog's pages! So werid! When I started blogging you really do think certain ones are keepers!

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  9. I have really resisted adding ads to my page. I really want to keep it clean and honest and I don't like not having control over them. Good tips!

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  10. I keep saying I want to go back and edit old posts from when I first started and knew nothing about blogging, but I just haven't found the time. These are some great tips and some points I had never even thought about!

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  11. Great tips, I haven't been writing or reading blogs a lot the past few weeks and I haven't ever done a clean up of my blog...life just gets in the way but I really need to do some of these things soon!

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  12. These are all really great tips! I need to go clean mine out at some point later on this year (e.g. after boards, haha). I need to find a way to update/promote my old content so it gets another chance while I'm off traipsing all over the country! :P

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  13. Another great blogging tips post! I haven't ever thought about cleaning up my blog but I do keep it pretty minimalist because I dislike seeing a ton of ads, badges, etc. on other blogs. However, my drafts folders could probably use some cleaning. Lots of unfinished posts there!

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  14. Great tips!! I haven't had the time to clean up my blog, but this post really makes me want to check on things! Thanks!

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  15. Very good tips to keep in mind! I hate pop up ads by the way D:

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  16. I hate pop ups too! Unless I am making thousands a month on a blog, I am going to avoid putting pop ups on mine, LOL

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