Five Quick Fixes to Your Blog

If you’re a fellow blogger, this post is for you. Do you ever feel like blogging takes up so.much.time? Between location scouting and photo shoots, photo editing, writing content and finding the perfect links for products – it can add up to hours for just one post. At times, it can feel like keeping a blog is a serious, second job. And it certainly can be.

What I listed above is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to keeping a blog and driving eyeballs to it. There’s so much more to do than the traditional act of writing and posting photos to a personal website. You also need to invest time in activities will help your SEO and drive visitors to your site. I know, it sounds like more work. But most can be picked up and put down while multitasking.

Here are five things you can do to improve your blog the next time you have 30 minutes of free time:

1. Fix the broken links on your blog. When’s the last time you checked that all the links on your blog are still working? For me, it was last month – for the first time four years after I started my blog! Broken links hurt your site’s SEO (the ability to show up high in search rankings) and aren’t good for the user experience. There are plenty of free tools to that will generate a list of broken links using your URL. I used BrokenLinkCheck.com and saved my search to have it handy whenever I have a few minutes of downtime to update the posts.
2. Pin to Pinterest. I don’t know about you, but Pinterest is one of the last social media platforms that comes to mind when running my blog. Which is crazy – considering my blog is photo based! Since it’s less real-time based than other social networks, I try to get in the habit every few weeks of pinning at least one photo from each new post and choose good keywords to drive people back to my site.
3. Optimize your old posts for SEO. When you started blogging, did you pay any mind to SEO? I know I didn’t. Incorporating the Yoast SEO plugin on WordPress was a game changer! But now that means there are old posts that aren’t SEO friendly that could stand to be updated. Every so often I go back to some of my old content and update it following best recommendations like identifying keywords in the text and inserting alt text for the images.
4. Update sold out products on your popular posts. I know what my consistent top performing posts are, do you? Check them out if you haven’t using Google Analytics, and take notice if any links in the posts should be updated. For example, I get a lot of traffic to a Halloween costume idea post each October, but products aren’t available year after year. I try to keep it updated annually so I can continue to make a commission as it sees more traffic.
5. Organize your images on your computer. You’re probably wondering “How is this going to help my blog?” and ok, maybe it won’t immediately. But I find several benefits to being organized. Lots of the time I get in the mindset that new content = new photos. That’s not true at all. When you’re organizing your photos, do it in a way that’ll help spark creativity. This might include organizing into folders of used vs. unused images and organizing them by themes (all of my Rocksbox images are in one folder and organized by date). Each time I organize my images, I undoubtedly come up with a new idea for a post. (Want other quick post ideas? Visit this article I wrote on the topic.)

Sometimes taking a step back from churning out content and instead focusing on the details to improve your blog is the biggest payoff. And this post reminded me, it’s been a while since I got back to updating my dead links! I guess I know what I’m doing during my next Netflix binge.