Spring Cleaning Your Blog

Many of you out there, like me, have been blogging for ages. Even before blogs or vlogs were introduced, when Twitter was considered a distraction for businesses instead of a useful marketing tool, when email was the only way of communicating with a list of customers....we were there FIRST!

We old-timers (I hate that word!) fall into two categories, you would have:

1. jumped from one blog to another over that period of time
2. stuck to one blog all this time because you don't want to lose your fan-base

If you're the kind who is from category A, then you're probably safe because most of the stuff that you have in there on your blog (mostly on the front page and sidebar) are pretty updated. The most recent entries are displayed, and the side-bar reveals a myriad of things that are relevant to your current audience.

However, if you belong to category B, you might have a bit of a problem there and the problem is this - you need to clean it up a little.

One, you may want to update the look of your blog. Seriously, back when I first started blogging for money, white on black...no, hang on, white against ANY dark background was the new IN. Apparently, it's good to make your readers squint and give them a headache back then. It was the 'in', you know.

But things have changed because people spend a lot of time in front of their computer these days and if they're like me, they'd rather walk the dog on a rainy afternoon rather than continue reading because it's not only painful, it's distracting. So, update the design of your blog to make it more....current?

The other thing about having a decade-old blog is that you might have added a few widgets, banners, buttons and codes onto the sidebar of your blog. Some of them are still working and continues to be relevant to your readers, but I would say that there's a 25 to 35 percent chance that you'll find some stuff that are no longer working.

Just as an example, the banner that you placed there in support of a corporation or charitable organization is no longer in existence. Or you used to use ikobo as a payment gateway but now you're full gear on paypal. And yet, the referral code remains right there on your sidebar.

Maybe it's time for you to spend a little bit of time working on these two things.