Blogging can be fun, particularly if you are somebody like me who likes to constantly fiddle with stuff. The problem with this approach, is that over time you can break things or remove vital tweaks that you included in the past without realising it.

This could not only damage the performance of your site, but also lose you traffic and money. If you regularly make changes to your blog or its theme, then you really need to create a Weekly Blog Housekeeping List, to make sure that your blog is kept in tip-top shape.

For instance, twice in the last month I’ve spotted missing tweaks in my new Eureka theme that have both cost me a significant amount of money. If I didn’t do my weekly housekeeping checks I wouldn’t have spotted these and I would have continued to lose revenue.

The first tweak that I noticed was missing from my new Eureka WordPress theme was Adsense Section Targetting. The most recent missing tweak that I spotted was how my theme breaks up long posts. I tend to break my longer, more popular posts which account for a significant amount of my total traffic into smaller chunks, as not only are they easier to read in my view, but they also generate vital page and ad impressions.

If you look at this great post by Kline for instance, you will see at the bottom how the post has a very visible link to the second page of the post, and the third page. However, before I fixed the stylesheet yesterday, the links were very hidden and hard to spot and looked like this:

Pages:123

As you can imagine, this meant fewer people were reading the additional pages as they didn’t see the links. You may think so what, but I estimate that this feature alone had reduced my page traffic and earnings by around 5-10%.

I’ve now created a formal Blog Housekeeping Checklist that I’m going to try and run through at least once a fortnight, to make sure I don’t miss important items like this again. Here’s my current list. Let me know if there are any items that you think I should add.

Blog Housekeeping Checklist

1. Check for WordPress, Theme and Plugin Updates

Easy to do - just bookmark the relevant pages in a folder.


2. Review site speed and apply fixes, new tweaks

Check out the WordPress MasterClass series for some great ideas.


3. Check ad code implemented correctly

Vital - a small error could lead to you not getting paid!


4. Check ad targetting implemented correctly across site

Everything from adsense section targeting, to intellixt targeting, Kontera targetting etc should be reviewed.


5. Review performance of ad networks and consider alternatives

Are your affiliate schemes and their banners working? Which ad formats are working best? Which networks need replacing? Should you consider moving banners? All these questions need asking regularly


6. Follow-up old advertising leads

I use a gmail label ‘folllowup’ so that I can keep track of every party that has ever enquired about advertising. I try to send an email to each of them every month or so, to ensure they don’t forget about my site.


7. Review SERPs

After my PageRank got reduced, what I did was create a bookmark folder with my best google links. It now takes me 30 seconds to open all of these links in seperate tabs to see if my SERPs have gone up or down.


8. Edit Top 20 Posts

This is a biggie. Even though you will write hundreds, if not thousands of posts over time, there will be some big ones that will recieve traffic for a long time. I have about 20 posts like this and what I do is go and read those posts again on the live pages to check that the formatting is ok, and also to tidy them up if possible. Adding the latest info, or even making a few tweaks helps as Google will see the updates.


9. Check ‘competition’ to see if they are doing anything new

Always keep an eye on what your ‘competition’ is doing. Don’t just read their feed - visit the site and see if they are doing anything you should consider copying.


10. Review traffic to see if can spot any new trends or opportunities

Again a vital step. For instance, I noticed in my stats that this site was ranking highly for ‘FIFA2008‘. Not only did Dennis then decide to crank out losts of posts to benefit, he even setup a dedicated site and used the traffic this site was getting as a feeder to grow his traffic very quickly.