May 27th, 2014
Five Quick Ways to “Deep Clean” Your Blog
Taking apart a typewriter is complicated. Just look at all those parts!
When your blog has been in use for a while, it can need a deep clean just as badly as any tool you use and could see collecting dust. Luckily, it takes much less effort to tidy up, and a few minutes of your time can make a big difference.
Before the coming months sweep you away into a flurry of activity, schedule in these quick tune up tasks so you can trust that your online life will be ready to work when you and all your new inspiration, log back in.
1. Spruce Up Your Bio
You might have updated your bio the last time you adjusted your blog or website’s content or changed jobs. That’s a great start, but the key to a great bio is something that you might have overlooked.
Instead of telling people who you are, tell them how you help them.
While your personality and self expression is important, a huge reason behind why people seek you out online, and come back, is that you help them. Maybe you help your readers learn hard skills, dream bigger about their lives, make dinner with less stress, or help them to see the value in little moments through stories you tell.
No matter how you help, if your bio on social media doesn’t showcase your unique value, you’re selling yourself short.
It’s your job to make it easy for your ideal reader to recognize you online, so edit your bio to focus on how you help people. Then update it in your sidebar, about page, twitter, pinterest, instagram, facebook, linkedin, etsy, and anywhere else you hang out online.
Estimated Time: 20 mins
2. See your site through new eyes. No, literally.
When you look at your blog for the millionth time, there will be some things that slide right past you. This is completely natural – you dreamed all this up, afterall. But that makes it difficult for you to see what could be distracting or confusing to readers.
“Peek” is a free service by User Testing that sends you a video review of your website. You type your URL into a form and soon you’ll be sent a video of a user navigating your website for 5 minutes while narrating their overall impression and experience of your site.
It’s a free way to discover common issues, questions, and ways that are invisible to you. Being in touch with your user’s experience makes you a better site owner, and better able to help your people.
Estimated Time: 5 mins
3. De-Clutter Your Sidebars
Do you really need that extra widget in your sidebar? While you’re used to seeing all kinds of information on your site, too much sidebar content actually distracts your reader and devalues the content you’ve worked so hard on.
Remember that when readers come to your website or blog they’re looking for visual cues to what’s important and how to participate. If you have lots of links to other people’s websites (that aren’t sponsor ads) you’re signaling that participating in your community is important – and they might leave your site before falling in love with your writing to do that.
When it comes to your sidebars, choose less confusion, and less distraction!
You’re the best judge of what’s important enough for your sidebars, but aside from basic navigation (search, archives, and categories) and your bio, scan through what you highlight and ask yourself “How does this help my reader and I?”. If you’re not sure that it helps both of you in a significant way, you probably won’t miss it.
Estimated Time: 10 mins
4. Renovate your categories
When you first started to define your online presence, imagining the kinds of posts you’d write was probably at the top of your list. But most of us either aren’t writing our first blog, or our focus has evolved over time. If your blog’s categories are in a time warp, it’s hard to stay focused on writing posts that line up with your current focus and direction.
If your categories are being haunted by ghosts of your blogging past, it’s time to renovate.
The simplest way to categorize posts is to rename the title of your main categories to fit the new way you blog, and then to delete categories that are no longer useful. If you went through a food blogging phase, and stopped, you can delete that category. None of your posts are deleted when you remove a category, your posts just aren’t grouped together under that heading anymore.
Bloggers who have a self hosted WordPress site (i.e. not through WordPress.com) – yet again – have the most flexibility. There’s a great plugin called “Bulk Move” that lets you move posts from one category to another in one click. Just try not to get too drunk on power.
To start out, scan through your categories and delete what doesn’t represent you anymore.
Estimated Time: 10 mins
5. Post one less post, and pitch a guest post instead
Audience building is a huge concern for most bloggers, and many a writer has spiralled into burnout pumping out posts multiple times a week in the hopes of breaking big. Sound familiar? No matter if you’ve seen it happen to dozens of your friends or lost your favourite blogs to burned out writers with high expectations for themselves, blogger burn out is a real thing that deprives us of important teachers and community members.
You’re a hundred times more useful to your people if you post slightly less in exchange for being here in the next 2, 5, or 10 years!
The way to break out of burnout and feeling like you’re writing to a tiny audience is deceptively simple. Stop focusing all your time inside of your world, and bring new people into it!
So next week, instead of posting one of the posts you would create, find a blogger you admire who writes on topic that overlaps with yours. Send them a thoughtful email with an idea for a post that you could write, tailored specifically to their audience. Then follow through with the spirit of growing both of your communities.
Guest posting on other websites takes a little effort, but doing it consistently creates an unparallelled opportunity for you as a writer. And it can give you the chance to give and help your readers, by returning the favour and letting other people help them too. That’s what community’s all about and the bigger yours is, the more people you can help.
Estimated Time: 30 mins
Great list! I just hopped over to Peek and am waiting for my video :) Guest posting has always made me nervous but I think it’s just fear of rejection… maybe I’ll take the leap this week.
I feel the same way, Colleen. It’s really hard for me to put myself out there and pitch guest blog posts. I’ve found it helpful to try and remember that it’s the practice of being friendly, knowledgeable and helpful that’s important, not getting chosen. Who knows, it could spark interest in you from someone you admire, and that could lead to great things in the coming year or two! So I try to think of it as part of a larger scale process instead of as an automatic win/fail, and remember that no matter what happens, it’s about the other person’s life, family events, and general stress level when they reply to me, not my worth as a person or a blogger. Give yourself self compassion in big doses, deep breaths, and jump on in! Wishing you lots of luck!