When I first started this blog I posted everyday. Sometimes 3 or 4 times a day. Over time that number began to slowly dwindle until like now it seems to take a few months between posts. For every intent and purpose this blog was dead. Or so I thought. But about a week ago I was looking at Google Analytics for one of my other blogs about keeping pet snakes and decided to look at the stats for this one.

To my surprise this blog still pulls in a fair number of visitors on a daily basis. Over the past month it has received a little over 2500 unique visits. You might scoff at 2500 visits but if you think about the fact that this blog has not been updated since October 9, 2008 (prior to that it was July 16, 2008) 2500 unique isn’t too bad. So after giving it some thought I realize it can’t hurt to spend some time bringing this blog back to life.

5 Steps to reinvigorating a blog

Update to the latest STABLE release of WordPress

Step one was to update to the latest version of WordPress. As always I followed the 3 step upgrade process on the WordPress site. I’ve never run into trouble with it but as always I make sure to backup EVERYTHING.

• I use the WordPress database plugin AND command line ssh to back up the database(s)
• The entire directory tree. Better safe than sorry
• Using the built-in export tool

Once those things were out of the way and I’ve verified the backups it was time to upgraded the underlying architecture with the new WordPress code. Like I said before I always use the 3 step upgrade process that WordPress has documented. If for some reason I run into trouble I can always look at the extended upgrade process they have documented.

A new theme

It goes without saying that every so often you should consider changing the look and feel of a website. This is especially true of blogs. That doesn’t mean you do it every day, but when it hasn’t been changed in nearly a year that’s a pretty good indication it is time to start thinking about doing so. As it is my goal is to bring this blog back to life not just freshen it up so that means I need to give it the spit polish treatment.

ABaN's old theme

Finding the perfect theme is not an easy task. What I was looking for was clean, simple, and functional. At the same time it has to be pleasant for readers. My old theme (in the picture to the right) did the job but it was well beyond stale. I began my hunt for a free WordPress theme at the WordPress theme site and after several hours of looking around I decided to use Plainscape going forward. Plainscape became the new theme for ABaN because it fit the bill for being clean, simple, and functional. Originally I was considering another one that had only been out for a few days but as I soon realized it had some issues that needed to be worked out.

Freshen up some old posts

There are far too many posts on this blog to retouch them all at once but by going through and reworking a few each day I will make some progress. Why is that necessary at all? Shouldn’t we just leave old posts as a testament our previous work? Yes, but no… The problem is that information is outdated in many cases. There’s also the fact that this blog has over 200 existing posts with well over 1500 comments. While that’s not a huge number it is enough to make the search engines notice it. Which means that it brings in traffic and the people who read the various posts are looking for up to date and relevant information. For a brief moment I did consider purging everything starting totally from scratch but decided against it, again for the sake of the search engines.

New content

Old posts are great, but what brings people back to any blog is new content. There are several ways to get new content.

• Steal it

If you’d like to piss people off stealing content is the way to go. People like Danny Foo, who had a mouthful to say on the topic and most other bloggers who work hard to come up with content are really appreciative of when someone steals from them. If you are curious if you might be the victim of content theft you can always try out copyscape and see if it finds anything.

• Buy it

There’s always the option to pay someone to write your blog posts for you. Once upon a time if you wanted decent quality you paid big money. Now days a few dollars per post will get you better than average content from NATIVE English speakers. No offense to those of you who don’t speak native English, but it shows up in your writing. Hell, I’m American born and bred and I have enough trouble with the language. A good place to look for someone to write on your blog is at Digital Point’s content creation forums. The price is usually more than reasonable.

• Create it

Finally you can spend you own time and effort creating your own content. At this point that’s where I am. There’s no way I’m going to steal it, but I’m also not going to buy it from someone else. Writing your own blog content takes time. There is generating ideas, researching the topic, writing the article, editing the article, and finally publishing it. In the end however it is quite rewarding to know that people are actually interested in what you have to say about something. Which of course leads to a willingness to spend more time creating more content.

Tell the world

If you throw a party and no one comes what was the point of having a party? Same is true with a blog. All the content in the world does no good if no one knows about it. To that end it is important to let people know about it. There are several ways to go about this.

• Make use of pingbacks and trackbacks
• Leverage the power of commenting on other blogs
• Join a few blogging communities such as My Blog Log and others
• Finally write a blog post about it

In our next article relating to this we will take a look at how to decide if your blog is worth relaunching. Until then God bless and be safe!