It happens to the best of us, we let our blogs just die away or become the opposite of what we really wanted. Usually it’s cause we burn ourselves out, writing too often or putting too much time into it. Sometimes we simply start blogs for all the wrong reasons, or maybe we just get bored of the niche. What ever the case maybe there is a way to get your blog up and running again.

I recently let two of my blogs die, this one and my personalish blog TheArdit. When I went to relaunch them both I found that they both had very different needs. I couldn’t do the same thing to both of them which brings be to the first step of a blog resuscitation.

What Happened?

Before you even think about a design, content or the actual relaunch you need to analyze what happened to the blog in the first place. Look at it and think about what went wrong and figure out what you dislike about it. Doing this is gonna guide your decisions throughout the entire process.

Trash The Content, No Wait Keep It

Deciding if you should keep the content you have or if you should just junk it maybe a tough decision for some but it’s an important one. It will actually pave the way for the rest of your “blog resuscitation.”

Get Rid Of It All

Getting rid of all your content maybe extreme, but sometimes it’s just what’s necessary. At my blog I needed to get rid of all the content. Not necessarily because it was horrible stuff, it just wasn’t at the quality I wanted. When I created the blog I wanted only the best content I could find, but this is only one of the many reasons to clean up, some others are:

• The content is way off-topic.
• It’s very poorly written.
• They are nothing but a bunch of bull shit.

Just remember you don’t get rid of the content cause your ashamed of it or you want to ‘sweep it under the carpet’ and deny writing it. Acknowledge your writing mistakes and learn from them.

Keep It All

You could say I let this place sorta die when I got tired of it. Well now that I decided to come back I knew I wouldn’t delete any of my posts for a couple of reasons. The reason this place ‘died’ was cause I got burnt out, but the content I have here is actually pretty good. Some posts got over 30 comments, they all stayed on topic  and I believe people can actually learn from them.

Maybe I’ll Keep Some

This is actually the third option which consists of keeping only a few articles. This would work if you have a few ‘diamonds’ surrounded by ‘pebbles’ or in other words awesome articles in the middle of a shitty pile. What I suggest doing it one of two things, get rid of the crappy ones and leave the good ones as they are. Or delete the bad posts and then actually rewrite the good ones to freshen them up.

Get A New Suit

No, don’t go to the local wedding store just yet, I’m talking about getting a new look for an old blog. At my personalish blog I changed my theme and logo out for a fresh theme and clean logo. I really needed that new look to fit my new ideas for it, plus it get’s rid of that feeling of blog death. But I know what your thinking, why didn’t I change the theme here? This place is sorta an exception, I started with this theme and logo and thought it would be best for my “identity” to keep it. What I could have done though was have some one design a new updated version of this theme.

Finish Everything

Get everything up and running before you re-launch, finish that about page, get the advertising page up and your contact page should be ready to go. Make sure you do the little things too, clean up your old categories, plug-ins, and old themes off your server. If you have no other work to do other than write and promote, there’s less of a chance your gonna get overwhelmed. Plus with all the basics up visitors are gonna feel like it’s a finished blog not one that’s still under construction.

Kick Off

Well depending on the type of blogger you are, you want to decide how your gonna start the blog back up. Will you promote it lightly and add content slowly or are you gonna start off with a bang?

Like a Turtle

You might be a new blogger that gets caught up in the early success of a blog and is crushed when that initial buzz wears off. Maybe you just get bored quickly, well you may want to start off slow. This way that gradual growth in traffic and readership keeps you going, and makes sure you never really get bored of it.

Like a Rocket Ship

Well if your a more experienced blogger who doesn’t get to caught up into things you should definitely kick off with a bang. Post something awesome and promote harder than ever before. Tell everyone that your back and your going no where any time soon.

Make sure you avoid making the same mistakes you did the first time around. Cause no one wants to do Blog CPR a second time around.

Have you let a blog die? How’d you go about bringing it back?

Image by Leppre