How to Revamp Your Blog In 30 Days

October 24, 2007 – 12:58 am

Lazy

So What Happens When You Don’t Blog for 7 Months?

You wake up one morning realizing that you have wasted any credibility that you spent time building! And that’s about what happened to me this morning. After 7 months of switching jobs (moved up to Director of Marketing), watching relatives graduate (most importantly my brother, Garrett Keimig, graduated from George Washington) and flying back to Boston for 5 weddings in 4 months - I have decided to get back on track. After all, blogging is not only the best way to keep in touch with your industry but it’s also one of the best ways to develop your understanding of the topics you blog.
One thing is for sure, when you stop blogging you loose credibility… and you quickly start dropping from blogrolls and blog lists. At one point I had made Top Rank’s BigList but I have since lost the privilege. It will be my first order of business to pound out some worthwhile posts over the next few weeks so I can get myself back on that list. Nuff said.

How Quickly Can You Recover After Not Blogging?

If you’re a freelance search marketer or if your livelihood is driven by blogging then a complete overhaul should take you within a week. But for someone like me (an in-house search marketer), I plan on this blog revamp to taking me 30 days. I have prepared a list of tasks for me to accomplish over the next 30 days - I hope to keep on target and get through the list within the time I have carved out for myself.
For each grouping of tasks I will blog about my experience in accomplishing these elements. I hope that this list and the posts around this list will be useful (and motivating) for other in-house search marketers (or other) who have let time slip by and gotten way behind on maintaining their blog.

My Task List (in no particular order)

  • Upgrade Server to Fedora 6, PHP 5 & MySql 5
  • Update Version of WordPress (version 2.3)
  • Ditch the default WordPress theme and finally design my own look (for my own brand)
  • Install Search Marketing WP Plugins (great list of WordPress Plugins at ProBlogger)
  • Add an RSS Button (hey you think that might help my subscriber number?)
  • Create a detailed About page. If people are going to read your blog then I bet their going to want to know who you are and why they should listen to you.
  • Update all my social profiles and list the links to let people Add Me as a contact. Right now, most of my profiles are a joke and would only serve to get me fired from my current job.
  • Setup Alerts for my name, my blog and my company.
  • Find My Voice!! It would probably surprise readers of this blog to know that I am pretty outspoken, controversial and ridiculous person in real life; I need to transfer what allows me to be noticed in real life to my blog. I have, up to this point, been running from my real voice.
  • Limit my blogroll to blogs I actually read.
  • Force myself to post a minimum of twice a week.
  • Add a Contact Me page.
  • Add a Service page. While I work as in-house marketer, I still take contracts and I should let the public know this.
  • Add in Testimonials to Service page.
  • Comment more… I need to engage myself more actively in the conversation.
  • Get involved in Blog Carnivals (I think everyone could use this advice - A-List or not).
  • Add in weekly and bi-weekly columns.
  • Add in the occasional video content & podcast.
  • I need to start interviewing other professionals, getting guest bloggers and building user Q&A.
  • Create HTML & XML Sitemap.
  • Discuss my non-search projects - successes/failures.
  • Start sharing more data around successes/failures in search marketing (where allowed by clients).
  • I need to stop worrying about being the best blogger and I need to be myself.
  • Add Archive and Top Posts section to blog.
  • Create Free Guide for others to download and distribute.
  • Effectively utilize Twitter, Status Updates & Tumble Blogs.
  • Create a Contest.
  • Add in (but limit) blog widgets.
  • Add in Google Analytics & AdWords Conversion tracking.
  • Create a Tool.
  • Submit articles to content networks.
  • Set end of year (2008) goals for subscribers, visitors & page views.
  • Send out a press release of the revamp and the new services I am offering.

Think I am foolish for believing I can get this all done in 30 days while keeping my day job? I do… I will keep you updated on my success/failure in hitting this deadline.

What Did I Miss?

I built this list pretty quickly but I am sure I missed a bunch of stuff. If you were doing a complete revamp, what would you have added to the task list that I didn’t include?