Ralph Carlson Blog

Blog Post Maintenance needs a system

My style of blog post maintenance is ‘out of sight – out of mind’. This works fine around the house where I can hide things in the closet and so long as my wife doesn’t dig too deeply, there are no consequences. I always believed that I could maintain my blog this way with no consequences also. What I didn’t know is that in the blogosphere, nothing is out of sight. Until recently, I am pretty much a self-taught blogger. I picked up some wisdom along the way about self hosting and WordPress and I couldn’t avoid hearing about SEO but my skills were hit or miss until  I discovered a clear and detailed manual for creating bullet proof blog posts. (Imagine that I even have a thought about something like a bullet-proof blog post- the mind boggles) Now I have a system and a checklist to evaluate my posts before they go live. There was so much that I did not know to do that adds great value but  little time to the process when you make it a part of your routine.  One example is enriching your URL with keyword-rich post slugs. Who knew.  I thought that letting WordPress use your title was perfectly fine.

Do it by the numbers until it becomes second nature

So over the past week, I have been running my posts through the checklist. For once I feel that I begin to understand some of the technical side of blogging. David Doolin, who produced the guide, says that if you have been blogging for a while, you should routinely revise and edit old posts using these same principles. So this week I looked back and selected a post that I liked from about a year ago. I knew that the title was bad and I hadn’t even heard of SEO when I wrote it so I was sure that I could make it better. I spent an hour working it over and republished. It got a new title, new SEO Title and summary and I changed the tags and keywords to be more focused. I also did some editing which I think improved the content.  The revised blog post is called ‘ How I learned to be a Man in my Marriage’. The old title was  ‘ What it means to be a man’.  I think the new one is better.  Do you?

What is your experience with Blog Post Maintenance?

I am sharing this experience because I was oblivious to the harsh realities of blog success and when you don’t know what you don’t know, you can miss a whole lot. If this is new to you – the idea of a system for setting up your blog posts for success- then please take my suggestion and learn more about it. David Doolin has a blog which is chock full of blogging wisdom – mostly technical, always useful and  sign up for his newsletter.  Then you can get his report.  Leave me a comment if this helps you grow in your blogging. If you are an old master, you probably stopped reading but if you are a blogger in learning mode and you too have started to revise your older posts, leave me a comment to tell me how it is going for you.