How to Manage Your Blog for the Long Term – Think like a Gardener

My previous post used an analogy of planting seeds as way to think about long-term blog planning. All fine and well, but how do you tend your seedlings after they’ve sprouted? The art of blog management is like tending a garden. Once a seed is planted–a blog post is written, a comment is left, a contact is made–you cannot ignore it or it will die. It must be properly nurtured. In order to reap your harvest, you must tend your garden.

Don’t let old posts wither on the vine

Keep older posts well-watered with traffic from new links in new posts. Driving traffic deeper into your blog is a good thing for several reasons:

1. It shows people that you’re consistent and that there’s continuity and general themes that run through your blog.
2. It will increase the overall number of comments, trackbacks, and pingbacks to the post, which will, in turn provide…
3. Beneficial side effects with regards to your blog’s search rankings and the PageRank for older posts’ single pages.

Update your older posts, as well, as new information becomes available. If you spend some time doing this with several older posts, you can even write a new post that links back to the older posts as an “update” announcement. This really maximizes the effort you spend maintaining your blog.

Fertilize with new comments and contacts

If you’ve planted a seed by leaving a comment or making contact with someone new, don’t forget to feed that seedling. Fertilize previous comments with additional ones to maintain your presence on others’ blogs (and of course your own) and keep a conversation alive. The longer the conversation stays alive, the more exposure you get for yourself, and the more you’re helping to add value to the original post at someone else’s blog, which is great for them. Many WordPress bloggers have installed plugins that allow you to subscribe to additional comments, so you can maintain your presence in the conversation, rather than being a hit-and-run commenter.

If you’ve made contact with someone new, send them a short, friendly email or IM saying hello and asking how they’re doing. This takes things beyond social network friends territory and into real, valuable interpersonal networking territory. Emailing a quick personal note to those who have commented on your blog for the first time helps fertilize and strengthen your relationship with that person beyond a casual, soon-forgotten comment.

Weed out dead links and spam

Just as in real gardening, weeding is a chore we’d often rather not do! But you don’t want dead links in your blog–especially in your blogroll or other link lists which feature prominently on your home page or on their own pages. If your blog has any decent PageRank and displays recent comments or trackbacks, then you need to stay on top of comment and trackback spam. Don’t let those links to bad neighborhoods on the web creep onto your home page. Even if you moderate comments, you still have to take time to moderate. You need to do this every day or legitimate commenters will despair of ever seeing their comments appear in a timely manner.

Save seeds for next season by backing up and keeping notes

Gardeners save seeds for next season, and in blogging, what we need to save is data. Every blog platform has a method for exporting data or creating backups of the data. Everything you ever wrote, your categories, the comments left by others… it would be terrible if you lose it all through some kind of accident. Learn how to do backups for your blogging platform and perform backups once a month at least.

Many gardeners keep a gardening journal, and bloggers need to keep one, too. Many successful bloggers use some fairly low-tech notebooks to keep track of ideas and prepare for future “seasons” of blogging. I always have a notebook at my side, and many other successful bloggers, do, as well, like Darren Rowse of ProBlogger and Rich Minx of, well, Rich Minx. From our notebooks come the seeds for new posts… and maybe even new gardens entirely, in the form of new blogs or a redesign of an existing blog.

Harvesting

If you plant seeds and tend your garden wisely, you will reap a harvest of traffic, links, subscribers, advertsing/affiliate earnings, new friendships, and new opportunities.