How to ‘Wake Up’ a Dormant Blog

Has it been months or even years since you’ve published a new post on your blog? It’s no secret that blogs thrive on fresh, high-quality content. So when you neglect to publish content, the blog may sink down into the abyss where countless others remain, only to receive a small trickle of traffic. But before you delete your dormant blog, you should first attempt to wake it following the steps listed below.

Change the Design

The first step in waking up a dormant blog is to change the design. Both search engines and human visitors will take notice of your blog’s new design, increasing its engagement while giving your blog a fresh new look in the process. Assuming your blog uses a content management system (CMS) like WordPress, Blogger, Joomla or Drupal, you can easily change the design by downloading and using a new template or theme. It’s a quick and easy process that requires virtually no coding experience.

Check the Links

If you haven’t published new content or updated your blog in a while, there’s a good chance that it contains broken links. This is particularly true in cases where the blog has an excessive number of external links. Because even if you entered the appropriate URL into the link, the website/page may now be gone or changed, in which case visitors will see a 404 error page. Using a tool like www.brokenlinkcheck.com, check your blog to see if it has any broken links. If it does, either remove or update them to the appropriate URL.

Write New Posts

Of course, the single most important step to wake up a dormant blog is to write new posts. Don’t just rehash the same content that you’ve already written and blogged about, but try to come up with unique and new topics that are relevant to your target demographic. Ask yourself: what type of content is my target audience most interested in reading?

Check out your competitors’ blogs and social media accounts to see what topics their readers are interested in. Not that you want to copy their content, but you can glean topic ideas by seeing what topics are popular and relevant.

Build Backlinks

In addition to the “on-page” techniques listed above, you should also build backlinks pointing to your blog. Fresh backlinks will show search engines that your blog is “alive,” and in return, they’ll be more likely to increase your blog’s search ranking.

Here are some ways to build backlinks to your blog:

• Social media postings
• Upload YouTube videos
• Comment on relevant blogs
• Submit press releases
• Submit guest blog posts to other blogs
• Answer questions on sites like Quora

Have any other blogging tips that you would like to share with our readers? Let us know in the comments section below!