I generally start my New Year Goal Setting a bit later than most people. November, December and early January are always very busy for me offline as well as online and I like to do my planning when my head is clear.
As a result, my mind is only just now starting to formulate my plans for the coming year. However, one thing I have already started doing is working out what I need to “prune” as I clear out the dead wood from my life. A long time ago I read about the Feng Shui concept that you have to clear out the clutter, in order to make room for new things and as a keen gardener, I can relate to that. Sometimes you have to prune to make room for new growth.
One of my New Year Resolutions is to make sure that this year I become more productive in less time. To do that I need to offload some of my commitments and the first things I am looking at are my blogs. I am also looking at the Networking I do, but I will share my thoughts on this in my next article.
I have been blogging for several reasons:
- To create backlinks for my content on Squidoo and Wizzley
- To write about things that interest me
- To test out various SEO techniques
And you know what I have come to realise? That to be able to maintain a blog and keep it fresh, you have to be passionate about the topics about which you write.
However, I have gone stale. Only one of my blogs gets reasonable traffic, but it no longer makes sales. The product that was earning the most has been withdrawn and I have found nothing to replace it. And, I have to be honest, the main topic is one that I chose because I knew it had the potential for traffic, NOT because I actually like the topic.
I have another blog, where I do believe in the topic, but I just do not have the motivation to keep it going. At least not in its current format.
Anyone who knows anything about Blogging, will tell you that you need to update the Blog regularly and it needs to be optimized for keywords. So cue a lot of guilt when you have not updated for awhile.
So, let’s get you off that guilt trip. If you don’t enjoy Blogging then don’t blog. Simple!
Life is too short to be spending time on stuff that:
- you don’t enjoy
- doesn’t make you any money
- uses up time that you would rather spend doing something you DO enjoy
Ah, I hear you ask, but what about all that unique, useful, optmized content you spent all that time creating? How can you bear to delete it, if you decide to ditch the Blog?
What? That content that may be unique, useful and optimized, but which no one ever sees?
If you are anything like me, then the thought of actually deleting content in which you have invested a lot of time in creating, is not a happy one. But I have come up with a plan….
When I told my friend Kate (Mukunda22 on Squidoo) what I was planning, she called it “repurposing content” and repurposing is exactly what I have been doing. I have been taking single blog posts about a specific topic, trashing the posts on the Blog, combining them and then republishing them on Wizzley. This will also work for Squidoo.
Whenever I have seen advice being given about transferring content, the general consensus has been to wait for the old content to be de-indexed before you republish elsewhere. But I have to confess that, because the Blog I am currently “repurposing” gets hardly any traffic anyway, I have just transferred the content I am reusing to “Trash” on the Blog, to remove it from Google’s sight and I have published the new pages immediately.
However, BEFORE I re-published I did some new keyword research.
Keywords change over time and, assuming you researched your keywords before you wrote the original posts, it makes sense to redo the research. If you never did any research then now is the time to start 
Once you have identified what keywords you should be using, grab the URL on either Squidoo or Wizzley, and also create the title of the new page.
Create the new page just as you would any page on Squidoo or Wizzley. The only difference is that you will be able to create the new pages a lot quicker, because you have already written the content.
It is just a question of deciding how to divide up the content into the various modules. You will probably rewrite bits and pieces and you may update the content, but on the whole this is usually a pretty fast process.
Keep the new pages tightly focussed on niche specific topics. To give an example – the Blog I am “repurposing” before I delete it, is Going Green Ideas. There’s various categories on the Blog, each dealing with a specific Going Green niche and I have been able to combine posts from various categories and create the following pages:
If there’s any posts that I have written, that I feel cannot be re-used on a new page on Wizzley, but which are giving backlinks to my Squidoo lenses, then I will simply copy them to either my WordPress or Blogger blogs.
Of course if you have a blog that is making money, then it is surprising how you can be motivated to keep it going, even if you are not too keen on the topic. And some of us want to write about stuff we like, even if it is NOT making anything. But if you have a Blog that is just dead wood, then you may like to think about how you can repurpose the content and create a bit more time and space in your life to do other things.
Only time will tell whether this works or not, but an analysis of my stats on Wizzley tells me that the first two pages I have published have already received far more views than they ever did on the blog!
This post is a summary of the topic I discussed with Joan and Kate on Giant Squid Open Mike on Tuesday January 04, 2012.
About AJ
I have done this with a blog that was going nowhere. It’s good thinking to re-purpose the posts – and in my case, they will be written even better once I do them over to put someplace else. Wizzley is an excellent site for writers and I’ve enjoyed reading your pages. I never knew they were “used”.
I wouldn’t worry to much about ditching the Blogs I had one that received an incredible amount of traffic and I will try to do with it what you have said.
I put my Squidoo address on it so if they want to find me they can. I lost my passion for it and it really never made me any money anyway not that, that is the reason as I only started it as a hobby.
The other Blog is just a hobby and I will keep it up but thank god I don’t have to keep updating it like the other one. I just don’t have the time and there are other things that I have to do, but recycling your blog is a good idea.
It is very hard to be original these days, and judging by Pinterest there are a lot of people that like the same things as me, which means that one of my Blogs has a lot of competition.
So whether it receives traffic or not, it doesn’t make it a successful Blog. I hope that makes you feel better about your decision
Go where your passion is
I’m also considering various blog directions in 2012 and am glad I found this post today, great food for thought!
I’ve also lost interest in my first blog, and had considered transferring that content so I don’t lose both the backlinks and all the time invested in creating it. It never occured to me that I might ‘re-purpose content’ by publishing an article at wizzley or some similar place rather than just transfer the posts as they are. Good thinking.
I have several blogs that I write for a while, then I leave alone for a while. Not sure if I am ready to dead wood them yet. But it is also a way to get rid of or update stale posts on blogs that are not getting traffic even if you leave the blog up.
Thanks for these thoughts. I have some dead wood on the Internet. Thanks for your tips on how to clean it up.