Suppose you used to be a blogger with a healthy blog, but because of some unforeseen accident, your site has suffered a blog heart attack. Your content production has collapsed and there are only faint indications your blog is still alive. If that sounds familiar, here are five steps you can take as part of your blogging strategy to administer CPR and try resuscitating a near-death blog.
If it's a personal blog, start at Step 1. If you're evaluating what to do with a business blog, start at Step 2 - you simply need to get it going again!
There must be some reasons – good or not – why your blog needs resuscitating. As a result, it makes sense to see if your blog might not be dead already. Maybe the topic or format has run its course, and whether you realize it or not, there are “do not resuscitate” orders you should heed. Check your Google Analytics. Is the blog is still getting traffic? Is anyone asking what happened to the blog? If not, maybe it’s simply time to move on to another project.
If you’re moving ahead to save your blog, start with some type of regular content, even if it’s once a month. It’s imperative to demonstrate – more to yourself than to anyone else – you can sustain a regular pace. One way to do this is to go with very short content, even if that’s a break with your past practices. At this point, consistency with whatever schedule you decide upon is an important step to re-establish life in your blog.
Rather than making a big production about your absence, simply restart publishing. Unless there’s been a significant brand promise you’ve breached with your audience by letting your blog flounder, just get started publishing again as if nothing happened. After you see some signs of life and decent vital signs, then perhaps go back and catch readers up on what was going on during the blog’s absence.
Unless your blog is deeply introspective and doesn’t depend on anyone ever seeing your content, you need to get your old audience back in the game. Get the word out on your typical social media channels (assuming you haven’t let those flounder too) and start the work of re-building your readership. Perhaps tweak the blog to ensure more than ever it’s easy to subscribe via email and simple to share your content on appropriate social media networks.
If you’ve kept up with your blogging lite schedule and starting to see reader interest once again, think about re-launching your blog. Is there a new design that better fits where you’re going now? Are there new types of content that fit better with your interests and schedule? Do opportunities exist to add new channels to your social media sharing that will help dramatically grow what you’re doing with the blog? If so, go ahead and dive in with a big splash and a dramatically different approach to what you’ve done before.
If you have been successful at resuscitating a near-death blog, what worked for you? And I you’re thinking about the need to get a blog of your own going again, what’s been standing in your way? - Mike Brown
