Keeping Your Blog Lean, Mean and Ready

Our host today is Chris Scott. If you're interested in getting in front of the readers of Site Sketch 101, check out our guest posting invitation here.

Today I am going to write about the number one reader of your blog. The person that will always pay attention to your blog no matter what you write or how you write it. The person that will be unfailingly devoted to your cause and will always anticipate your success. No, that person is not your mom. That person is you.

Every blog has an author-stalker. The person that is always there and functions as a sort of janitor who cleans up any messes left behind like incorrect spellings, bad rhetoric, broken links, etc.

There are good blog janitors and bad. Today I am going to write about what you must do to be a good blog janitor. I’m going to share a few tips that will sharpen your blogging custodial skills which will keep your blog clean, lean and ready for the masses:

• Read old posts, especially ones that serve as landing pages from search engine traffic.Mark Twain once said that “a man cannot be comfortable without his own approval.” As your writing skills increase as a result of your incessant blogging, you will notice that very old posts don’t quite meet your current quality standards. Change them. Breath new life into them with your ever-evolved copy writing skills.
• Check your links. Some blogs suffer from a very poor linking structure. If you are using WordPress and you change the permalink structure, you may have some internal links pointing browsers in the wrong direction. You can use Google Webmaster Tools, a free service, to identify broken internal links on your blog.
• Add pictures to rivers of text. No blog post should be pictureless. If you don’t have membership access to a stock photo site, you can always use Creative Commons searches or just search on Flickr with the Creative Commons search option.
• Vet your commenting queue. It is tempting to let Akismet do all of the work but all comments deserve at least a glance from human eyes. Sometimes spam filters miss things but services like Akismet actually learn from errors – those errors can only be pointed out by an attentive blog janitor. Your spam filter may also be marking comments that are not spam. That might be costing you interactive readers. No one likes to be rejected!
• Update your Web design. This may seem like an obvious one but the best bloggers don’t stick with an initial design no matter how exceptional it seems to them. Tweaking small design elements is a must if you want to keep your layout fresh and efficient. Just last week I spent about an hour re-designing the comment template for blog posts on my blog. I’m much happier with what I have now but that doesn’t mean I won’t feel the same way in a year or even a few weeks from now. I’m hoping after many years of tweaking I will finally be content with a design that is truly brandable and unique. Rome wasn’t built in a day.

Now that you have the knowledge, whip out the old broom stick and start sweeping. Maybe someday when you become a blogging billionaire, you can hire lackeys to do all your custodial work for you. But unless your someone like Steve Pavlina or Chris Brogan, you better get used to doing the work yourself!