See if this sounds familiar: you read, heard, and/or decided that all companies need a blog, so you included a blog when you had your website built. You wrote every day for a couple of weeks and then didn’t have anything to say any more. Or you had someone doing the blogging, but when they left the company no one took it over. Or you hired someone for a couple of months but it seemed like something you could do in house, so you took it over, and that’s the last anyone heard of the blog.
Technorati calculated that about 95% of all blogs are abandoned blogs which are no longer updated.
Now, blogs can do wonders for your website. They can send you traffic, help you rank for many more keywords than your homepage will give you, increase your company’s authority, and let you interact with your visitors. But that’s only if you update them.
The best thing to do with an abandoned blog
If you have an abandoned blog, the best plan is to update it regularly and remove it from the ranks of abandoned blogs.
Contact us for help doing that.
Plan B for abandoned blogs
What about Plan B? If you’ve decided for whatever reasons not to continue updating your company blog, should you delete it, or leave it hanging around on the web?
- Does it still send you traffic? We have former clients who still get much of their traffic from blog posts we wrote for them years ago. If your abandoned blog is still doing its job for you without further effort on your part, let it continue doing so. (And think a little — if it’s still doing that for you as an abandoned blog, what could it do for you as an active one?)
- Does it make the company look bad? A blog with dates showing how your company started off boldly and then petered out can look unprofessional. A blog with large amounts of spam comments (something that happens pretty quickly at abandoned blogs) can look downright nasty. Your information may be out of date. Visit the blog and make an honest decision about whether it shows your company’s best side or not.
- Can you refresh it? If you had a good blog at one time, you may be able to repackage it. Good posts from the past can be rewritten as white papers or collected into ebooks. You can even remove the dates from existing blog posts, update any outdated information, and make it look as though it’s current.
If you decide that removing the blog is your best plan, unpublish or delete all the posts. Just removing it from your navigation won’t keep old posts from showing up online.
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