You know, everything needs maintenance to run smoothly, so does your blog. A blog that is taken care of will have a good performance and readers find it comfortable to browse around. I cannot tell you how many times I encountered a blog that has good contents but is infested with spam. Such a shame! Of course you don't want to be that kind of blogger who doesn't care about his/her blog. If you haven't done any maintenance yet, this is a good time to start. Trust me, it is so worth it in the long run. Here are some things I do in regular basis, just to give you some ideas.
Check for broken links
It is important to make sure that all links on your blog are live. Dead links are annoying, well no one likes to be in a dead end, right? The good news is, there is a handy tool which can help you with that. My favorite is deadlinkchecker.com It does a thorough checking and it doesn't require lame captchas, for those of you who are new here, I hate captchas.
Resurrect your old blog posts
Oh, of course you remember the sleepless night it caused while you were writing them! Don't let your hard work being forgotten. If you happen to write a similar topic, make sure to link them to your new blog post. Or better yet, use a cool app at the bottom of your post to showcase more of your post. If you don't promote your own content, who else will? It's actually a good start to promote from within your own blog.
Beware when installing free templates you find online
Even though there are tons of good free templates you can find, some of them are free for a reason. So be careful when choosing one, no matter how cool they look. What we are talking about are templates embed with with ads, so don't be surprised if you notice them appear all of the sudden. Annoying? Of course! Not to mention that you have no control of which ads to appear, the creator is being sneaky because he/she is getting income from the content you wrote. I have nothing against ads, my own blog even has it, but I don't think it's an ethical practice to sneak them to someone else's blog.
Weed those spam comments
You know, there's nothing more heartbreaking that seeing an awesome blog with great content being infested with spam in the comment section. This is the reason why I strongly recommend using third-party comment system. Sure, it's not perfect either (nothing is, really) but so far it helps me a lot in filtering spam comments and it makes my blogging life easier.
Blogger comment system is actually decent, but it's still not strong enough to prevent the invasion. Those rats used to come when you allowed anonymous users to leave comments and now they're sneaky enough to bypass the username requirement. In that case, you have to weed them everyday. Well, I have better things to do, I am sure you do too!
I use IntenseDebate for my blog. I like it because it allows my readers to leave their latest blog post links after commenting with CommentLuv plugin. Discuss is also a popular choice. If you used self-hosted Wordpress, you have more options to choose from like CommentLuv, Lifefyre, etc.
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That's all for now, folks! I hope you find this post helpful. Now, let's chat! What do you do to maintain your blog and how often do you do it? Please share!
