Cleaning the Cobwebs Out of Blogs: Reader Engagement and Content Value

As blogs grow, action needs to be taken with blogs to make them engaging to readers, rather than leaving them full of old flotsam. From time to time I remove out of date content as I want readers to be able to find the good stuff. Today I have archived over 100 posts in my Spring clean. It’s a value-adding marketing move.

While I am crying into my keyboard over posts I love and don’t want to part with, I’ve stuck to the game plan. If you have a blog which is a few years old and needs a broom taken to it, be brave. Here are the benefits:

I can see what ideas and series worked and didn’t. So I know what not to repeat in 2014.
Book and event promotions which under-performed can be assessed so the mistakes aren’t repeated.
I’ve located and removed posts that can be re-written or re-used at a later date.
Posts which have performed badly have been retired to another blog. Some may go to the big blog in the sky…
I’m finding weird phenomena where some posts have been shared more than read. I know now, that I need to investigate how these share buttons really work.
Old events are removed. (However, all guest posts, videos and Written Acts of Kindness Awards have been kept out of courtesy.)
Off-topic or personal posts are gone.

So if you have come here looking for an old link, you may get a 404 error. Triberr tends to leave posts up which are four months old, which means you may experience a wild goose chase. My very apologies for any time lost on your part. However, 122 well-performing entries with great content, are better than  a dusty archive of “what was” any day.

P.S. If you want to back up your WordPress blog for safety, or to move it elsewhere, go to Tools then Export. It will do it easily. At the other end, go to Tools then Import. Just be aware, I couldn’t take my entire blog to my new self-hosted one as it’s limit for taking in content was 11MB and my blog backup up as 14MB: without images! All images on my Project Sandbox backup blog are linked back to here.

Filed under: What's On Tagged: 404 error, audience, blog, management, quality, readability, size, Triberr, writer, writing