I love the Christmas and New Year’s Eve periods because in between the festivities it always feels like time is slowing down. And I enjoy that slow pace because it enables me to look back at what I have accomplished during the year and the small things I need to adjust. I don’t believe in resolutions – mostly because I cannot keep them ? – instead I prefer having a look at the past, check what went wrong to then do the work on those things I need to improve in the present.
If I am talking to you about this, it is because I believe this mindset applies to blogging too. More than often we are thrilled to hit the publish button for an article only to immediately forget about it right after it goes live. The internet makes everything so fast paced that even us, content creators, don’t take the time to look back at our work. We are always in the look for new, fresh and trendy ideas when steady traffic is generated by evergreen content – in other words, content here to stay, that people can always refer to or find you through it.
Imagine Google directing you to a two-year-old article still relevant today; you click on the link only to be redirected to a 404 page not found message, wouldn’t it be frustrating? It is to avoid this kind of inconvenience I would suggest you go through your archives. In digital fashion, it is usually the duty of the production team – the people in charge of making your journey easy on a site by building up every page you visit through coding and verifying all their links are working. Among all the hats bloggers are wearing, I don’t think a lot take their production assistant one, hence why today’s post is dedicated to it. If a fashion company has the budget to hire a whole team devoted to it, working on such a detailed task requires time. During the year, I bet you get busy producing content, monetising your blog, finding collaborations and shooting pictures. I know Christmas can also be hectic hence why I would suggest to take the days from the 26th on to discreetly revamp your blog.
So here are three things you can do to brush up your blog before 2018 starts.
Check all the links work for your content to stay relevant
If like Glam Observer, your site is aimed at helping people, then you must have many evergreen articles. So, for this one instead of going through your archives, go to Google Analytics and look at the posts who continuously generate traffic. Visit them and click on every link they have to check they are directing to the right articles. When I am reading a post on a site, there is nothing that annoys me more than a link not opening in a new tab. I like clicking on a link knowing a new one will open because that way I am still on the page I didn’t finish reading. It also helps me coming back more easily to content I need when I am doing some research for writing. All this to say, make your links open in a new tab! Finally, you might find you wrote a more relevant post than the one previously linked, so it might be great to update your old link with a new one. The dwelling time on a site depends on your content, and if people enjoy what you do, they often end up clicking on your links so don’t neglect that task.
Chase after typos to improve your past articles
The reason I put checking links as the first task is that it takes less time than checking typos, but above all, it will make you correct your most visited articles first. Remember evergreen content are the first posts people find you through and as such, they act like your shop front. You wouldn’t want to visit a store with an ugly window shop right? Then, it is the same with blogging. When someone arrives on your site after a Google search to read your article, they are likely to leave quickly if the copy contains too much typo. Reread your posts, correct them and copy and paste them to Grammarly for a final check.
Do you remember reading the old pages of your diary and cringing at your writing and thoughts? That is what you might feel taking a trip down your blog’s memory lane. Chasing after typos, you will end up reading your old and new blog posts only to realise the way you wrote three months ago is not the same as today. Are you still making the same grammar mistakes? Are you using the same sentences over and over? Â Can’t you enrich your vocabulary? What about syntax? Without realising it, not only you will correct typos, but you will also rewrite some parts to make your articles clearer and smarter.
Reorganise your categories to help people find what they are looking for
After rereading your articles, you might realise you need to reorganise your categories. Maybe you ended up writing more about a topic, and now you find yourself with a bunch of articles requiring you to create a new category. Re-organising your categories could also mean letting go of some or changing their names to direct more precisely your audience. To assess what you need to do, click on every category you created and scroll through the articles. If you have created a category and there are only one or two posts in it, you should consider taking it down or making it a sub-category. On the opposite, if you have a category with many articles, start by looking at their relevance in this section. If like us, you are creating quite specific content; sometimes you need to create sub-categories to tell your audience you have this type of content available for them. One sub-category could also be your trademark like our Fashion Career Interview Series that is now some of our most viewed posts. Doing that job could unexpectedly boost your traffic, so take time to have a look at your categories.
What do you do to revamp your blog? Let us know in the comments below!
