How to breathe new life into a dead blog

[A Clear Blogging Tip.]

Today's tip is in the form of a question: Does your blog look like the seed packet or the dead flower?

You know how it goes. You start a brand spanking new blog like bringing a beautiful plant home. At first, you tend for it, care for it, show it off to others.

But things keep happening. Work gets harder, the kids want more, there's new things to see on the web, it's late in the day and you don't want to bore your readers: you'll post tomorrow, first thing.

And tomorrow becomes the next day. And the next, and next and before you know it your comments have dried up and your blog has died of neglect. Your neglect.

Fortunately for blogs and other digital things, you can turn the situation around. You start posting again, you borrow a little nutrition from other bloggers by post comments on their blogs, maybe you give it a good jolt of fertilizer in the form of a few long posts with some real lasting value.

Here's a few other steps to breathing new life into a moribund blog:

• Apologize. When you decide to resusitate your blog, you should speak to your remaining readers directly. How much you share with them re your absence is up to you, but reintroduce yourself, the focus of your blog and what you'll be trying to do. On that note, I should apologize to my readers here - after the initial burst of posting when the book came out, my posts here dried up. I apologize - and hope to do much better bringing to you a steady stream of actionable information about how to make your blog blossom.
• Reach out. If you've let your blog die of neglect odds are good you've stopped posting comments to other people's blogs. Start doing so. And don't forget to spend a little time seeing what new blogs have broken through the topsoil of your part of the blogosphere.
• Water on a regular basis. Wheither you're going to post 4 times a day, a week or a month, share that with your readers. For example here at ClearBlogging.com, I'm aiming during the month of August to post an average of one post a day, if not more.
• Pay attention. Your blog to thrive depends not just on what you do, but on what your readers are doing, caring, and reading about. Reviving your blog means paying attention to not just your blog, but that corner of the blogosphere where your blog is planted.

I can't tell if your blog is past the point of no return and needs to be composted, but hope - if not flowers - spring eternal. Even in the blogosphere.

Comments

[Thomas Schmitz]

Of course one can always commit Blogging Sepuku!
http://www.marketingpiranha.com/blog/blogging-sepuku/marketing-piranha/0020/

[John Hewitt]

There are a lot of dead blogs out there. I am constantly trimming my RSS feed. I've run my site since 1993 and have ignored it many times. I always regret it later. My site does well, but I always wonder how much better it could have been if I had paid it a little more attention over the years.