Gardening Your Blog

This article was originally posted on grundyhome.com

A garden requires attention: one must carefully consider what will be planted and where, weeds must be pulled, and it will need regular water and fertilizer.

A blog is no different. I redesigned my grundyhome.com blog a while back. I can’t leave it alone. I tweak it constantly, changing links and rewriting copy. I do the same to Non-Profit Chas and pretty much any website I manage closely. If you read blogs through a feed reader, you may not notice these.

Design Your Garden

You must design your blog to be efficient and meet your content needs. Don’t add anything that you can’t support and that won’t bear fruit. What’s the purpose of this elements? Widgets are dangerous for this reason: there are a lot of useless blog widgets that take up space, distract your readers, and weigh down your pages.

And like any garden, it should reflect your own style.

Pull Some Weeds

Look at your blogroll – do those links still work? When you started your blog, you probably threw some content into an About page. Is that still correct and relevant? Think of this in terms of broken windows theory: every defect in your site hurts your visitors’ perception.

Feed and Fertilize!

This is the hardest part of having a blog. Creating valuable content and posting on a regular, consistent basis is the best thing you can do for your blog. I’ve struggled with keeping a posting schedule, coming up with content ideas, and finding new avenues to promote my blog. Now I set reminders and keep brainstorm lists to help me stay on track.

Watch it grow!

Check your stats – page views, visitors, feed subscribers – with proper cultivation of your blog you’ll see the numbers grow. It takes adjusting and consistency. After all, if you neglect your garden you can’t expect it to thrive.

Now, how you harvest your blog is a different post entirely…