6 Tips for Keeping Your Website (or Blog) Fresh

If anybody wants to understand what being “strapped for time” is all about ask a domain investor. A lot of us not only tend to a ridiculous collection of domains in our portfolio but manage multiple sites. Some might have a domain blog  to keep up. The secret is to work smarter, not harder.

Schedule Content to Release

Sometimes it is difficult to find the inspiration to write. Sometimes you may be springing full of ideas and can’t wait to publish five articles at once. Make great use of scheduling content in intervals that span over a period of time. Most CMS systems (Wordpress, Joomla, etc) now have this feature. It is better to have the appearance that your website updates on a regular basis than to release tons of content at once while your site gathers cobwebs over the next two months.

Encourage Discussion

Comments themselves can be great content to read. There is an actual art form on how to close an article or blog post that can encourage more comments. The article itself can be tailored to inspire conflicting opinions that result in debates via comments (which is a completely different subject but worth looking into). Either way, this is updated content.

Allow Users to Submit Content

You might not want to do this with your personal blog but this article is a good read: How to use WordPress to build a website with user-generated content…Furthermore, I believe for niche sites (beside a personal blog) you should give users an opportunity to contribute in some way. This can be in the form of comments, directory submission, article submission, profile editing, content editing, video submission, etc. The more you allow them to contribute to the actual growth of the website the better chance they turn into a return visitor (and eventually a dedicated user).

“Auto Pilot” Your Content

I am a huge fan of automation. If you have an opportunity to turn (even in part) some of your content into auto generating updates, do it. An example is GoodFuckinMorning.com which chooses content from a database and updates itself at midnight on a daily basis. Another example is from TiaWood.com that shows random thumbnails from the Domainer Directory with every page view.

Assign Yourself Topics

I write better if I know the topic of what I am writing about. For instance, TiaWood.com is divided into sections with two main areas that get constant attention: “Articles” and “Learn“. Those two areas are further divided into categories: “News“, “Industry Reviews“, “In the Spotlight“, etc. I have an actual schedule that I tend to every morning that looks something like this:

17th – Blog.TiaWood.com

18th – TiaWood.com : Industry Reviews

etc.

I may not know the exact title of what I want to write about (need to have some sort of spontaneous subject matter. ) but I do know my topics. It helps keep me focused and ensures that different areas on my website get an update.

Write Down All Ideas

Write down all ideas even if you cannot write on them right away. (I wrote down the idea for this article last week.) If you need to update your site but have no idea what to write (guess what?!) this is very helpful. The “muse” can be quickly sparked by going back to a compilation of things you wanted to write about.

There are many different methods for keeping your site (or blog) fresh with the overall key being quality and execution which you should never sacrifice and the sanity which you must always keep.