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Blogging can be a hard thing to do once it becomes your main source of income. Many bloggers work for years without taking a vacation which can affect their mental and physical health. Going on a vacation without a backup plan can be risky, but it’s sometimes necessary to shut everything down and be offline for a couple of weeks, even if you have to work hard to revive your blog when you get back.
While it is hard to make a blogging comeback, it’s not impossible to do, as it can often make your blog even better than it was before. So how can you revive your blog after taking a break and maintain the same level of quality you once had?
How To Revive Your Blog After A Break
1. Check Your SEO
Before creating any new content, make sure your blog is in a condition to accept it. You have been away for weeks, if not months, and in that time, the internet hasn’t stopped working because of your absence. On-page SEO and SERP should be checked for any anomalies or changes.
Has your ranking improved since you left for a break or did your articles dip because of a change in trending keywords? This analysis will provide the essential grounding for the following articles that you will create soon.
2. Create Milestones and Goals
Having a plan of action is just as important when you revive your blog as it was when you first started it. What type of content does your current audience like the most? Which topics are the most trending and give you the biggest reach?
As someone who is reviving their blog, you should focus on hard-hitting article types that you are sure of. Writing about something new that you are unsure of, or something that hasn’t been tested with your audience, might not bring the results you need. Once your milestones and long-term goals are set, you can start thinking about creating new content for your site.
Tip: It’s important to set attainable blogging goals so you can stick to your blogging goals!
3. Schedule Your Activities
Jump-starting a blog might take more time than regular blogging activities do. As such, your activities should be clearly scheduled so you can cater to every task. You will have to not only create new content, but keep tabs on the already existing articles and audience, as well as work on your SEO, social media activities, and newsletter.
It can often be too much work for one person, but only if you don’t schedule it properly and let chance do everything instead. The first couple of weeks of your blogging revival will be the most stressful, but once you have ramped up to your usual posting schedule, it will become more and more manageable.
4. Revive or Set Up Social Media Profiles
If you didn’t have social media profiles for your blog before, now is the perfect time to implement them. Think of it as watching a sequel to your favorite movie – all the features you have seen before are back, but with an upgrade!
You can do the same with your blog and connect your content to Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and other social media platforms. This will help you promote content easily, attract new readers, and gather up the audience you may have lost when you went on a hiatus.
5. Send Newsletters
If you did your job right, you will have a list of emails from your fans who subscribed before you went on a break. These emails can easily be used to revive your blog by using the simple technique of sending a promotional email with new content attached to it and a promise of more coming soon.
If you don’t have subscription base, it might be difficult to start sending emails straight away. Instead, you can opt for creating one right now by sharing old content on social media pages, announcing that you are coming back from a hiatus, and working to grow your email list. This will bring old people back to your blog and invite new people in. It’s never too late to start growing your newsletter.
6. Sharing Old Content
When you share old content, you need to be careful about what you are doing. Are you reposting old articles that have somehow become relevant again, or are you posting top articles in order to give them more exposure?
If you are posting articles over and over without any logic, your readers will notice that something is going on behind the scenes. They might not leave at once, but once they fully realize that you are going in circles only for the sake of ad revenue and SEO optimization, they will soon leave.
Make sure you select old content carefully and annotate that the content you are posting is old. Don’t play with the trust and feeling your fans have for your website – they can go away as quickly as they came in the first place.
7. Rewrite and Republish
Another option for publishing old content would be to rewrite it and publish it as new content. This can work to your benefit in a number of ways – it can help your audience resurrect along with your blog and attract a new audience that wants more content just like it. Best of all, you will be able to create seemingly new content by using the old piece as a starting point.
If you want to make your job even easier, you can check out some of the best websites ratings and find a writer to help you out with rewrites and editing. Never neglect the usability of old content. Just because the trends are moving forward doesn’t mean that old news automatically becomes irrelevant.
8. Hire Help
Getting back on track with your regular blogging activities will often be an exhausting task, so much so that you will start questioning your decisions. You can easily make your job enjoyable again by expanding your army of one and hiring some help – even having a graphic designer on board will take a huge load of work off your back and let you focus on creating quality content instead.
Put all the tasks you need to accomplish on a weekly basis on paper and start putting them into categories. The tasks that require most time are the ones that should be done by your partner, virtual assistant, or freelancer. Never do the heavy lifting yourself if you want to become a huge blog after coming back from a break.
9. Create Curated Content
One of the many mistakes you can make as someone coming back from a break is being too rash about your content. Your fans will be perfectly happy if you post a single article every few days if it means you will come back full-time later on.
Your content should be curated and kept to the same level of quality that you had before – after all, it was that content which built your blog in the first place. Every article that doesn’t make sense to you should be left on the cutting room floor and every video or multimedia piece of content that doesn’t seem “right” for your blog should also be excluded.
Do your best to post the best possible content on your blog. It will show people that you still care about quality and that you are back for good.
10. Network and Collaborate
Last but not least, one of the best ways to make a comeback is to collaborate with a partnering blog. If you know someone who creates the same type of content you do or someone who is an expert in the field, contact that person. Chances are they heard about you in the past and are willing to give you some help coming back from a break.
Your network is the number one resource when it comes to reviving a dead blog, especially if you went on a break without announcing it beforehand. Contact the people you know are creators and bloggers themselves and see what kind of content you can create together. You can even share the credit and post that content on all the websites that participated in creating it, allowing your blog to gain an even bigger reach than before.
Future Steps Before You Take A Blog Break
The next time you decide to shut down and stop creating content for a season, make an announcement to your readers. Even though you don’t owe anything to your readers, they will still appreciate the honesty and work you put in for them.
If you are smart about reviving your blog, you can not only come back to where you were before but also reach new heights as someone who came back smarter and more energized than ever before. Don’t waste your opportunity. Plan your blogging comeback carefully before doing anything.
Author Bio: Luisa Brenton
Educational writer and regular contributor to the top writing websites page, Luisa Brenton graduated from Chicago’s Public Research University and is now working to become a professor. She sees her mission as helping people find their own way to balanced lifestyles and teaching them to cope with everyday assignments with success.
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Very good points! I personally am a fan of scheduling and hard work. Blogging is not easy and inspiration and ideas can be lost for a long time. After that a good idea can be to just sit on the computer for at least 2 hours. Usually your mind starts to create ideas as you just “force” it a little bit. And if you just sat there for 2 hours with blank head, thats ok too! Take a break and try a gain. Good luck to blogging!
This article is fantastic and i got some good information by reading this.
thanks a lot.
Thank you for the nice advice. Sometimes it’s hard..
What a great post. I came back to my blog early last summer, after an extended break of almost a year. I wish I had had this article then! Life took some turns recently again, but I”m determined to keep this blog alive. It’s my baby, and I’ve had it since 2011. I’m keeping it going, mostly by co-hosting a weekly link-up. Thanks for the great info.
What a great post! It’s definitely going to help me revive my old blog. Thanks!