How to Revive your Dying Blog?

If you have tried your hand at blogging, I am sure you know how difficult it can be to maintain a blog and increase the traffic.

Due to this, many times people give up on their blogging journey just because they are not able to give enough time or resource to their blog. Of course, when you begin your journey you have the ultimate driving force called motivation but eventually when you get to learn more about the work, time and energy that you have to put in to make it work, hits the reality pretty hard.

Most of the people consider blogging as a notebook. You have to write regularly and that is it. Nothing less, nothing more. While in reality, it is a lot more than that.

You need to give in a lot more time and take care of a lot more things such as Google ranking, social media marketing, monetizing and what not.

Due to this, many people abandon their dream of becoming a blogger and leaves the blogging chapter behind. While it cannot be confirmed why people leave blogging, it can definitely be boiled down to some of the reasons such as not enough time, not enough resources, or not enough knowledge.

No matter what the reason is, the moment you stop working on your blog. It begins to die.

Can a blog die?

Well, for starters, a blog is like a plant. You lay the seed and start nurturing it. It grows to become a sapling and with continuous efforts, it eventually becomes a flowering tree. One thing to note here is the words “continuous efforts”. That is the key to keep a blog alive.

Just like when you stop watering your plant, it begins to die, when you stop giving time and efforts to your blog, it begins to die while showing a downward trend. This downward performance of a blog can be considered a slow death of your blog.

How to tell if your blog is dying?

It is not very hard to tell if your blog’s performance is declining. There are many ways by which you can predict the trend of your blog. The best and the sure shot way to do this is by the Google Analytics. This tool once enabled can tell all the stats that you need to see how your blog is doing. Visitors, live visitors, traffic sources etc. can be easily be seen from Google Analytics. The tool also gives graphs which helps in easy understanding the trend of the blog.

If you do not know how to work with Google Analytics, you can use other signals too. You can see the engagement your blog is getting, for example, the number of comments on your blog as compared to what you used to get before, social signals of your post, etc.

And if you aren’t sure how to do any of these, the best and the easiest way to do this is by answering this question “When was the last time you worked on the blog?”

If you are taking your time to recall the date, I would say your blog has already begun to die and it would be wise to make sure it does not die out completely.

How to Revive a Dying Blog?

As I said before, blogs are like plants. If they begin to die, it is best to act quickly and look into the matter and determining the reason for the same. A dying plant can be revived by watering it or repotting it and one can only determine the reason for it once they examine the plant. Only then they can determine the reason for the declined plant’s health.

Just like it, you will need to examine your blog and need to find the reason for the declining performance of your blog.

So, let’s dive in and see how you can improve your dying blog’s performance.

1) Update Your Content

The first thing that anyone should look into when they plan on reviving their dying blog is by updating their existing content.

The reason this works is that when you have a user base and wants to maximize it, one of the most important things for this is having updated content on your website.

If you want a user to stay, the best way to do so is to serve them updated and fresh content in the first place. If the user sees or lands on a page or a blog which does not have accurate or updated information, then user automatically creates a bad impression of the blog and most probably looks for an alternative for the blog and do not trust the blog’s information.

What to update?

Here is a checklist for possible things that you want to have a look and things that you would want to do.

• Start by reading the blog from the beginning just like a user would read. This will give you an idea regarding the opener of the blog. Is the blog able to hook in the reader to read more or not?
• Check on the data that has numbers that need to be confirmed once again if they are correct or not.
• Check on the text and opinions that no longer reflects your views. Change the text which does not have any base or anything to back it up anymore.
• Update the outdated things. Multiple times this happens with tech bloggers that they wrote a review of a product and now a new version of the software is here, and that makes the old version’s steps are of no longer use. This happens the most with tutorials related to software as if a new version arrives of the product with an updated UI, it will render the old process of not much use. In this case, it is wise to update the blogs as per the new UI.
• Images and screenshots which are no longer correct anymore should be removed and updated images should be uploaded in their place.
• The bloggers should also check if the blog is able to resonate with the reader and if not, they can try changing it.

2) Rework the Keywords

considering that you have been blogging for quite some time, I am sure you know how important keywords are for SEO. If you don’t know what keywords are, think fo them as words and phrases that will help you get the relevant traffic and the intended audience on your blog pages.

Keywords have a huge role in bringing traffic to your blog. If your targeted audience is not able to find your page, there is no point of writing a perfect article as there will be no one to read it. That’s not what you want, right?

So, to make sure that does not happen, go ahead and give some time to keyword research and make sure do this before revamping your content so that you can stuff in some keywords while you are updating your blogs.

Another way is to check your stellar articles, the ones which are getting most engagement and see what is the reason behind their impeccable performance. If you will look closely, you will be able to identify the keywords in the article. See if these keywords can be placed in other blogs as well or not and place them accordingly.

Also, while working with keywords, do keep in mind not to overstuff the keywords on the blogs. Doing this will give a negative signal to the search engines in terms of SEO and spamming is something you do not want to do.

3) Fix or Remove Broken Links

When we start blogging, many times we add links to other blogs or outbound links that were relevant at that time. But sometimes these links are changed or removed and this results in breaking the link we have added to our content or blogs.

Not only this is bad for the user reading the content, but it also affects the SEO of the website and ends up in bringing the web results in down in SERPs and that is something we do not want to do.

You can use a plugin like the broken link checker to determine what all links are broken on your website and this tool is available totally free for use.

While you are doing it, also check the context of the links. Are those links still relevant and is the content of the page same as of what it was when you linked the website? Check all these things and make the necessary changes there.

4) Increase Readability of Your Posts

There is a very good chance that when you start writing your posts, you were not much aware of readability and spacing between paragraphs and sentences. Due to this, many of your earlier blogs are mostly chunky and all in all big paragraphs which does not have good readability at all.

You need to fix this as well. While you are updating your content, make sure you are paying attention to the readability of the blogs. Also, give it a read as a naive reader would do and not like the author who already knows the content already.

Make it reader-friendly by breaking down huge paragraphs into smaller ones and maintain the flow of the topic without adding unnecessary breaks in your text.

Another way to increase the readability is by adding variations to your posts. To put more emphasis on some words, bold certain letters. Change the Heading styling and maintain the Heading 1, 2, 3… hierarchy of the titles. You can underline some text if you want and you can add some important information in pull quotes. This will improve the overall readability of the post.

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