Rejuvenating a dead blog

Sometimes in our blogging careers we become tired with a specific blog and we kind of let it die, (don’t we)? We are all guilty of it at some point, takes some people 3 months to get bored with the blog, others 6 months but from what I have seen the majority takes a little over a year per blog project.

The problem is a blog can take 4+ years to truly ground itself as a valuable resource on the net. It can be done quicker and in a lot of new big idea cases it takes very few months to get a site big.

So after we are bored with a blog we tend to not put in the daily maintenance to the comments section, we stop posting, stop responding to emails and although advertisers may continue to pay for even several months after your activity drops off eventually they stop paying as well.

This is bad because we want to make income from our blogs even when we aren’t working them with our nose to the grind stone. Its tough to stick with one blog project for more then a year making several posts per month and hopefully making money by the end of that year.

This happened to me this last year right here on this very blog, this is actually the first post in a few months.

I figured since I was learning to do this myself anyways I could shed some light on what I am doing to rejuvenate this blog and get it popping again (I didn’t lose any rss or newsletter subs “actually gained some while I was gone” however comment activity dropped off as did all my advertisers (why wouldn’t they after all).

So your probably saying to yourself (Stop wasting my time and tell me how to rejuvenate my blog foooooool)….

Haha, ok, ok well here is what I have done so far in no specific order:

New Blog Design (No Advertisements now) – This one is kind of up to you, however if your rejuvenating a blog its activity has probably dropped off and I don’t see that advertisers will want to pickup where you left off last time. They will want to see the blog growing and thriving again. However I decided not to list any advertisements on my new design, I went with a more standard blogging / news look that I got for free off wordpress.com. It is of-course your choice, if you do go the no adverts route like I have be sure to change your advertisement page to reflect whatever changes have happened. You can read up on how to make a good advertisement page so you can get back into the swing of making the money.

New Comment Protection (& Cleaned up Spam) – This is kind of a big one, more then likely you have let your blog go and its admin panel is filled with thousands of spam comments (some good ones to hopefully) but who has time to search through them all and approve or dis-approve them? My suggestion is you just scrap all those spam / held comments, instead of wasting your time to go through them all and find the good ones just start fresh from here (comments don’t make or break a blog) so don’t be OVERLY concerned with that one. When you are rejuvenating your comments section and how your blog will handle comments from here on out one of the biggest tips I can offer you is re-Capatcha comment spam protection. I will assume on this rejuvenated blog you are using wordpress 3.0+ and if you are under the plugins section of your admin panel you can now search, locate and install tons of awesome working plugins all on the fly! Simply do a search for “comments” in the plugin section and it will bring up lots of options for capatcha and even threaded comments plugins! Try them out by installing them all on the fly! WORDPRESS I LOVE YOU.

Re-organized my Categories – Since the blog kind of has a new direction some categories are no longer necessary. Others need name changes and some need to be moved for more of a spring cleaning effect which I have written seems like dozens of posts on before. Checkout my haircut for your blog post that although a little unorthodox title does provide great info on doing just that (cutting the hair of your blog that continues to grow).

Re-did my page (About, Contact) – After not being in the blogging world for a few months I have changed my contact info, my life has changed, I have a new direction on things etc.. I needed to update my about page to reflect those new things and I needed to update my contact email so everyone can still get a hold of me (be sure to read my post about not losing your contacts because its a goldmine when rejuvenating a blog!

And that’s about it, this took me all about 3 hours or so to do here on InfectedByBugs and its still not perfect but its a start to getting this blog back to where it should be.

Here is a vlog about my current statuts!

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