11 incredible Blog Spring Cleaning Ideas for 2018

It’s Spring – the Bloggy World is picking up speed again after a long and cold winters Sleep!

This is the best time to start cleaning, refreshing and updating our Blogs for High Summer Season!

In this Blog post I am showing you 11 INCREDIBLE BLOG SPRING CLEANING IDEAS, so you are ready and in control for Summer!

We are all busy bloggers constantly creating new content, growing our business and social following and innovating new stuff for the future success or our Blog!

Because of that we sometimes forget that at the bottom of this all lies the foundation of it all our Blog!

If you are just starting our you can check out my Guide on how to start a Blog in 2018 the Right way here!

We are going to refresh, reboot and revive our blog using this Blog Spring Cleaning guide

Let’s do this!

Ps. Don’t forget your FREE PDF Guide on How to Self Host your Blog:

SELF HOSTING FREEBIE

Here are my 11 incredible Ideas to Blog Spring Cleaning in 2018:

1. Blog Spring Cleaning: Review, Combine or Revive old Posts

Once we clicked publish to my a Blog, often we already wander off to what we want to create next!

Especially once you have had your blog for a few years or month we rarely find the time to go back to older blog Posts and see whether they need updating or review!

So my first tip is to go back the rabbit hole and go through all of your past Blog posts:

First of all Review the language and text of your Blog post. Is this still your Blog voice you are using right now or does it need an update?

Second, Read through your text, are there any mistakes you missed the first time reading?

I use Grammarly for basic checking or you could even pay someone to proofread your Blog Posts if you do not have enough time to do it yourself: Editorr is a great proofreading business I much enjoy!

Especially If you such a – I am sorry – “idiot like me” 🙂 when it comes to grammar!

Blog Spring Cleaning means getting your Grammar in order!

Have you written several articles on a similar topic? You may want to combine them into a new post such as an “Ultimate Guide to” something! You can use old content to create longer blog posts with little effort.

PS. Goole loves long Blog Posts 🙂

2. Blog Spring Cleaning: Delete or make irrelevant Posts Private

When I first started out with What’s Katie Up To it was this general Lifestyle Blog. I was just randomly talking about my Life, my Dog, Beauty and lots of Food!

Remember that?

So when I really started getting into Blogging about Blogging these posts kind of disappeared in the big black hole of my Blog past. But there are still in here somewhere.

If you are like me and there is a bunch of irrelevant stuff spamming your Blog do the following:

Go back the rabbit hole and find old irrelevant posts you are going to set them to private

Maybe it even makes sense to delete the post from your Blog altogether. I would suggest you copy paste the post into a word an save it somewhere. Maybe you want to start another Blog about that topic at some point. But it is cluttering up your Blog and using storage space which is slowing down our website.

Blog Spring Cleaning also means letting go of the past 🙂

3.Blog Spring Cleaning: Create an accounting for your Blog Expenses

Now, this is a big one! Do you have your Accounting Hat on and your Expenses under control? Blog Spring Cleaning means being realistic about Cost!

My suggestion for you is creating a super easy Excel File!

Create atone tab for each month!

Each Tab creates two columns with Income and Expenses.

You could create an overview tab at the end where you summarize all your income and expenses throughout the month so you have full control and awareness of our budgets!!!!

4.Blog Spring Cleaning: Adjusts Tags, Meta Tags, Snippets

Tags, Meta Tags and the Snippets (the little extract you see below your Blog Post Title on Google) are important factors for our SEO (Search Engine Optimization).

We love organic traffic and the older our Blog gets the more blog posts we got which we can share with the world the more opportunity we have to rock at SEO!

Maybe you have old blog posts published which you wrote 2 years ago. Just when you created your first Blog.

Maybe you did not know about Tags, SEO or the Snipped and did not provide your post with respective information!

Well, we are Blog Spring Cleaning today!

Let’s go deep down into the rabbit hole and update our Tags and Snippets for an older Blog post!

This is great because it shows search engines that you are actively engaged and update your Blog!

Also, this can give back old post some long gone traffic juice which we love! Head over to those old forgotten posts and give them some love! 🙂

5. Blog Spring Cleaning: Create updated Pins for old Blog posts

One of the best tips I have for new as well as old posts is, creating sever maybe 2-4 individual pins for one single Blog post!

Chose different titles which are nevertheless relevant to the blog post and create a Pinterest pin for each of the titles.

Titles could concern the content of the blog post!

Maybe you have separated your post through subheadings anyway, and you could use those subheadings as inspiration for your pins as well.

I would go through all of your old blog posts and update their underlying pins.

Then I would use Tailwind to schedule the new Pins so they get distributed to Pinterest over a period of time over the next weeks!

The traffic boost you are going to get from promoting your blog posts is going to freak you out 🙂

Read more about Pinterest: THE ULTIMATE PINTEREST GUIDE 2018 HERE

6. Blog Spring Cleaning: Including Fresh Updated Affiliate Links

Many of us are using affiliate links within our blog posts to get that extra blog income floating.

It is though super important that your affiliate links are still working!

Are they working on your Blog – do you know for sure?

Maybe the terms of services for your affiliate partner has changed, the links are broken or the links have changed in the meantime.

Now people might still visit your posts and click on those links but we need to make sure they are still running!

We for sure don’t want to forgo on that extra income each month 🙂 agree?

7. Blog Spring Cleaning: Interlink between Blog posts

Linking to other related posts within your blog posts is sooo important.

First of all, it increases the engagement on your blog and creates super fans because they realize you have amazing content!

Second of all, having a high engagement shows google once again you are an important website and it supports your SEO.

With all these crazy changes social media change that is constantly keeping us occupied we for sure want to keep our focus on good old organic traffic :).

Maybe you have created an amazing new guide which you can link to.

Or you have added a post about a similar topic to your blog lately. Interlink your posts and give your audience a chance to check out your amazing content!

Here are some of the most popular Blog Posts on my Website which might interest you too:

8. Blog Spring Cleaning: Harmonize your Blog and Social Media Branding

One of my favorite topics in blogging is creating a brand!

However, creating an effective branding goes way beyond your blog, it should be consistently applied to your entire online appearance!

I love having dedicated social media accounts for my blog so I do not mix the personal weir images I post (for example on Instagram) with how serious I take my business!

Create your dedicated Facebook Page, Instagram Account and Twitter Feed for your Blog.

Social Media can even help you grow your Blog, check out this post if you want to learn more about HOW TO USE INSTAGRAM TO GROW YOUR BLOG

Apply the same branding to your Social Accounts as you do on your Blog!

This means for you, use the same color, images, and fonts as on your Blog! We want to reinforce that “AHA” Effect in people so they recognize you and your brand no matter which media they are using!

9. Blog Spring Cleaning: Remove or Smush large Image files from your Blog

Another big SEO factor is how fast your website is loading when new people visit your site.

Now loading time of your website highly correlates with how big your blog is.

Meaning how big are images, videos, and data stored on it.

For your 2018 Blog Spring Cleaning, I would love you to download a free Plugin to compress all of your images stored on your Blog.

For most of us, images take up the most space on our blogs so it’s super important that we manage our images well 🙂

I use WP Smush to smush/compress all of my previously uploaded images.

Once it’s installed you can set this up so every new image you add to your blog is automatically compressed!

How cool is that! Let’s get our SEO ready for Spring!

Oh and ps. compression just means that your image file gets reduced (compressed) without losing the quality of the image! It’s awesome!

Access the Plugin Here: WP SMUSH

10. Blog Spring Cleaning: Moderate your pending and spammy Disqus Comments

We all love getting a ton of Blog comments right!

But what I sometimes forget myself is that a lot of the comments I receive actually get taken out as spam!

You can moderate (approving and marking as spam) your comments in the settings of your comment plugin.

I use Disqus as a commenting system.

For my Blog Spring Cleaning 2018, I am going through all of my pending approvals as well as spam comments figuring out what is for real and what is not!

Learn more about Disqus HERE.

11. Blog Spring Cleaning: Deactivate or Delete unused Plugins

Now, this is a big one as well!

Similar to images also Plugins take up space on our blog which slows us down! Bah!

Now, who of you have had these frenzies when we would just download a bunch of plugins because they sound important.

After a while, we would realize that we actually won’t need them!

Or that they don’t work well with other Plugins and messed up our site so we deactivated them.

I tend to have a bunch of deactivated plugins just hanging around the blog 🙂

Go ahead and Blog Spring Clean your Plugins!

DELETE instead of deactivating your Plugins. We don’t need them all and they are literally spamming our Blog!

Let me know what your favorite Blog Spring Cleaning tasks are for 2018 in the comments and what you think was the most important Tip in the list above!

I love you all A LOT!

Thanks for being here with me on the blog and on this journey together to awesome bloggers and business badasses!

Xx Katie

Ps. Did you already grab your Free Self-Hosting Guide? Having a Self-Hosted Blog is one of the key factors to successful Blogging. Download it for free below 😉 SELF HOSTING FREEBIE