5 More Things to Do When Spring Cleaning Your Blog

September 12th, 2006

5 More Things to Do When Spring Cleaning Your Blog

Yesterday, we looked at five simple steps to take note of when conducting regular maintainance on your blog - most on the more technical side of blogging (e.g. backups, 404s, sitemaps). Today, we’ll look at five more. I’ve to admit these are on the more subjective side of “maintainance” though (i.e. less maintainance and more blog tip-ish), so it would be great to hear your thoughts on these.

Highlight Old (and Hopefully Popular) Series of Posts
This step probably won’t apply until your blog is at least a year old (aiks, I’ll have to wait a few more months too), when your quality posts start sinking in your archives. While setting up a Most Popular or Best Posts section attempts to mitigate this problem, if you’re a prolific writer, you might still have tons of posts as relevant now as they were last year - even if you can’t find space for them in your Best Posts section. A good example of a blogger taking this step is Problogger’s Darren Rowse. Last month, he highlighted a series of posts written one year before that.
Identify Outdated Posts
On a related note to the above, you might also want to take note of posts that are no longer relevant today. This way, you’ll obtain a (practically free) stock of topics you might want to rewrite on in the near future - which will then help cement your position (e.g. search engine rankings or general authority) on the topics in question. One example of an easily outdated post is a product/service review.
Recognise Your Top Referrers
Even though I’ve not done this myself yet, I’m sure you’ve seen many examples of this. Often, this comes in the form of a post linking out to your top referrers, and is fundamentally good blogger etiquette. However, it does come with a couple of pretty unavoidable and mostly insignificant problems. One: Like any sort of outbound linking, a small number of bloggers you don’t link to will feel slighted (only in the spur of the moment in this example). Two: Your readers might just call you out (only jokingly here!).
Optimize/Change Affiliate Ads
I’m not sure about most of you, but I tend to take the place-and-forget mentality from contextual advertising into affiliate ads. I tend to dump Amazon, Clickbank, etc. ads inline into posts, and forget all about them until months later since it isn’t possible to regularly optimize them given the amount of work involved (you’ll have to manually change aff links for each post compared to a single template change for contextual ads). So, if you’re anywhere like me, you might want to look at your affiliate links during your regular maintainance sessions, and make some positive changes. For example, you might want to swap out a poorly performing product/service for a possibly better alternative (especially information products, i.e. e-books).
Update/Optimise Navigation
As the only real maintainance-type point on the list, I’ve kept it as last as it can be difficult to do due to the lack of information and subjectivity regarding navigational problems. It isn’t exactly easy to determine whether your readers are being forced to make two, three or four more clicks to access the content they want, if they are being forced to do that at all. And if that’s happening, is it good or bad? Think page view inflation, which some webmasters still deem beneficial for some reason or another.

And assuming that it’s bad, then what? Are you going to dig into the path records of your readers to see how they moved around your blog? This tends to be crazily time consuming, and is often not worth the trouble. But there are a couple of simple steps you might want to consider periodically. One: Stop using “Continue Reading” / “Read More” tags or more specifically, suspend the practice of showing only excerpts on your front page, if your articles are now short enough to display in their entirety. You may have been writing long articles a few months ago, but not now. Two: Place prominent links to your most popular articles. This way, a reader who arrives by word-of-mouth won’t have to wade through all your posts just to find what they were told to come for.

And… that’s all I have on things to do when going about your periodic maintainance sessions. Anything else to add on the list?

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