Updating Your Blog – Se7en’s 52 Weeks of Getting Things Done… Part 2

Last week I began our year of Getting Things Done Series, and oh my, we are going to need a year. I did get something done almost every day this past week, including deleting thousands of photographs. Tell me I am not the only person who has seasons when they delete so many photographs… and the further back I go the more I wonder why I had to hang on to so many photographs. I don’t anymore, its not that I don’t take photographs, but I do take far fewer that I did five years ago, say. Anyway, I digress. Sticking with the theme of Getting Computer-ish Things Done in January, I thought we could talk about getting a whole ton of blog stuff done. It turns out that there is a long list of things we can do to keep our blogs up and running smoothly… not to mention looking appealing and welcoming to the visitors that pass us by. This is the week that I am going to dive in and upgrade and tidy a couple of things on blog. Things I have been putting off forever and really it is time to just do them…

1. Refresh That Ancient About Page: Just stop reading this post for a second and take a look at your about page… and take a look at when you last updated it. I can just look at the age of our kids on that page and I know it has actually been years… years!!! I used to update mine annually… I kind of blogaversary tradition, in fact this past year when our blog turned se7en+1 years old… there should have been a big “rah, rah.” All I actually did was take a photograph in order to update our about page and then simply forgot about it.

2. Refresh Those Other Important Pages: Those other pages alongside your About page… for example your media page and your contact page probably need an upgrade too. I know mine do, and this is their week.

3. Feature The Work You Love: I need to rearrange the appearance of our blog significantly, the face of our blog just doesn’t represent the focus of our blog anymore. For example, once a year we build a library for an underprivileged school in our region… it is a major project, and we get help from followers all over the world… but a glance at our blog and you wouldn’t know that was a project of ours at all. It is definitely time to think about a redesign.

4. Clean Up Your Side Bar: Times change, seasons change and in the blog world, that which is cool this week, may not be cool in a year, or even a couple of months time. What most of us do is just add the latest and greatest trend to our sidebars. Go ahead and look at your sidebars and lose those things that really no longer belong there.

5. Review Your Categories: There is a lot you can do to refresh and renew a blog. When I began blogging I had exactly se7en categories… and it was easy for visitors to find what they were looking for. Not to mention, when we began blogging we had se7en kids under ten, now we have eight kids age se7en and up, and the things we blog about have a very different focus.

6. Explore Your Blog Stats: It’s time to take a look at the Dashboard page of your blog, not to mention Google Analytics. Take some time this week and really look at your statistics. Just knowing your stats is an interesting exercise. Click on the tables, look at the reports… spend some time there and familiarise yourself. Try things, explore… look at your blog over the past month, the past year… look for the highs and lows. Just do it!!!

7. Help Your Readers to Find The Posts They Love: It is one thing to expect your followers to find answers to their questions in a hundred posts, it is quite another when they are looking amongst thousands of posts. Your stats will tell you what your most popular posts are and that allows you to think about ways to give your readers more of what they are looking for, and how to answer the questions they might have according to that topic. I need to make a plan to make the posts our readers love the posts that they can easily find.

8. Get Your Blog Noticed: Another thing that you can glean from your statistics page is where where your readers are coming from. Yes, you can find out which country they are coming from, in fact which cities your readers are coming from and what language they speak. But here I mean, which other social media your readers come from. For our blog, by a very large margin, our readers arrive from pinterest, which means that I need to pay more attention to our presence on pinterest. Not only do I pin things that I think folk will be interested in, but I make sure that I pin posts from our own blog that would interest our pinterest followers. Go ahead… pin a couple of your own posts. Folk that follow you on pinterest don’t necessarily follow your blog… you have to show them a couple of your latest and greatest posts. And if this has you thinking about your other social media, never fear there is definitely going to be a post on how to practically achieve your social media goals.

With all this talk about improving your blog, the question that is crying out for attention is when… when on earth do you find time to blog and raise more than a handful of kids and actually sleep. That’s a question I am going to tackle in next weeks post in our 52 Weeks of Getting Things Done Series…

1. Week 1: Decluttering your Computer