Find Time to Maintain Your Blog on Cyber Monday - 5 Tips to Get You Started!

The Time Finder with Paula Eder

The way you use your time is the way you live your life.

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Find Time to Maintain Your Blog on Cyber Monday – 5 Tips to Get You Started!

Posted on November 9, 2009, under Time and Technology.

Finding time to keep up with writing blog posts, as many bloggers know, can be a challenge. In an upcoming Cyber Monday post, I’ll be taking a look at some good sources of content (especially for when you’re stuck for blogging ideas).

Today, however, what I’d like to discuss is even more basic – finding time to keep your blog running smoothly. The Time Finder is a WordPress blog, but the basic concepts apply to any blogging platform.

A blog has a lot of “moving parts”, and if they aren’t all working well, they can spell difficulties for you and your readers. Yet blog maintenance is a task that, like car maintenance, can often be something that we postpone or let fall by the wayside. Sometimes, the consequences of doing that are annoying and sometimes they can be downright dire.

I highly recommend that you set aside time, at least weekly, to devote to blog maintenance. If you work with a Virtual Assistant (VA), this is a task that you can clearly delegate to him or her. If you are technologically inclined, you might find that you enjoy performing some of these tasks yourself. They give you an opportunity to explore your blog in a whole different way!

Whoever ends up taking care of these tasks, here are a few basic maintenance items that I urge you to consider:

Back-up, Back-up, Back-up! This is something you need to do weekly … and if you do NO other maintenance task, do this one! We needed to restore our blog once – and the back-up absolutely saved us! You can set this plugin up so that it performs the back-up at intervals that you specify. (We also have it set to automatically e-mail us the back-up file.)

Check for Spam: We do this daily, so that it doesn’t pile up. WordPress blogs offer a spam-catcher (Akismet) as well as different dashboard plugins that display spam comments and allow you to process them. The one we use (Ozh’ Admin Drop Down Menu) gives a very easy method for viewing and deleting spam.

Keep Your Plugins Updated! WordPress plugins are constantly being tweaked and improved by their developers. The dashboard that we use flags plugins that have been updated, and the process of integrating these updates into your blog is a matter of a few clicks. It’s very easy – and important – to keep on top of this. In addition, set aside time to periodically check on new plugins that can enhance your blog. There are hundreds to choose from – and WordPress has them set up in a searchable plugin directory!

Check your links … it’s so important to not frustrate your readers with broken links! This is another process that is automated by WordPress plugins. We run our Broken Link Checker weekly.

In addition to checking your links, be sure to check your “Blogroll” – that’s the list of links you maintain in your sidebar. Blogs come and go – and you don’t want to be sending your readers to a site that’s inactive! This is a check that we do at least monthly at The Time Finder.

I suggest that you develop a maintenance schedule with daily, weekly, and monthly categories of tasks. And remember – if you do nothing else, back-up, back-up, back-up!! And please drop me a line … I’d love to hear how you carve out time in your busy schedule for blog maintenance!

Want to learn how to set effective boundaries to honor yourself, your time, and your relationships? You can ask for the time and space you need, and get it, too! Claim your FREE MP3 of “Honoring Your Time With Boundaries” – a recent teleclass – and discover tools to move you toward a stronger self and stronger relationships! To take your next step, click HERE and grab your MP3! When you sign up you will also receive (if you don’t already) our weekly Finding Time Tips, our monthly Award-Winning Finding Time E-zine, and our Finding Time Personal Boundary Template! All FREE – our gifts to you!

Let’s explore time together …