Why I’m Deleting Blog Posts In 2023

January 03, 2023

Let me tell you about one of my big projects for the new year…

I’ve been blogging for a… long time. Let’s face it… I’m old. I have blogger wrinkles. And this blog you know as Blog Marketing Academy has existed for a long time.

It has existed under other brand names. It has existed through various product launches, offers, memberships and a list of things that don’t even exist any longer.

Not to mention that the way I create content has changed and evolved quite a bit. My blog posts used to be much more frequent yet shorter. More… personal. It was, in some ways, more like a public journal for my readers at the time.

But, things shifted. The internet shifted. SEO shifted.

Today, those kinds of posts are rather useless. In fact, those kinds of posts are much better suited for a community email list than a public blog. In my niche (and many others), we now need blog posts with much more meat on the bone. Longer form. Multiple media (video, images, text, etc.). We need to think about a lot more things.

The days of worrying about posting frequency are over. It is a rather stupid thing to fret over.

Quality is far more important than quantity.

Don’t get me wrong…. both matter. But, in the end, it is far more effective to blog less often but make what you put out there really count than it is to post for the sake of the calendar.

So, my blog over the years got really big and bloated. A lot of old, outdated content. Posts that don’t really fit the way I do things now.

Not to mention that things change in this line of work.

I’ve got posts in the archives talking about tools I no longer use and wouldn’t even recommend anymore. I’ve linked out to things that don’t exist any longer.

All of this presents a dirty SEO footprint to the big G (aka Google).

So, I’m on a mission. It is one of my big projects for this year.

It is something I actually started awhile ago, but things paused and it got put on the backburner. For this year, I’m kicking it off again.

It is a site-wide content audit.

There are 3 prongs to what I’m doing:

  • In many cases, I’m simply deleting old content that no longer applies.

  • For good posts that are still useful, I will be modifying those posts, improving them, making them better and then re-publishing.

  • I will also be identifying content “gaps” that haven’t been properly covered and creating new content to fill those gaps.

As I go through every post, I will also be fully optimizing it for marketing purposes. This includes:

  • Linking to landing pages where relevant.

  • Inserting calls to action using new reusable blocks (see previous EDGE issue on the most effective opt-in strategy)

Basically, every single post will be gone over thoroughly to make sure it plays a role in the overall content strategy and has a reason to exist.

Each post will be optimized as a long-term asset.

Each post will be much more intentional from an SEO perspective.

In the end, the blog will have less content than it does now. But, the stuff that is there will be far more effective on all fronts.

As I move forward, you will see a lot more updates of flagship posts. New ones being published.

I don’t expect instant miracles in terms of traffic to the site. I know it could take months for me to see results here. But, I will say that I do expect traffic to increase because of this content audit. It is all a matter of degree.

I also know that this will make the blog more efficient. It will get bigger results with the traffic it already has. Better conversions. So, if the traffic also increases, even better.

It also helps put a lot of predictability into the content calendar. After all, it is always easier to streamline content that already exists than it is to come up with something brand new from scratch.

Where does YOUR blog stand in this regard?

Do you have outdated content on your blog?

Do you have a large archive of old posts that you haven’t looked at in a really long time?

Perhaps it is time for you, too, to make a content audit a priority for 2023.

Blog marketing isn’t supposed to be a hamster wheel. It is supposed to be strategic.

That means that instead of always pumping out new stuff under a pressure cooker, it pays to look at your overall body of content as a cohesive whole and go back and maintain that stuff.

Tech Talk

The tech side of the WordPress and blogging space has, frankly, been a little quiet because of the holidays. Whatcha gonna do.So, what I'm going to do here is simply highlight some of the latest reviews that I've posted into the new Reviews section of the Blog Marketing Academy.

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