De-cluttering a Business Blog Post

When my latest issue of the Tucker Talks Real Estate newsletter arrived in the mail, it was a wakeup call. “At the end of the workday,” the lead article read, “you’re ready to leave behind the endless barrage of emails, conference calls, and meetings.”  There are steps I could follow, the author reminded me, to make my home a more tranquil place, starting with reducing clutter.

It occurs to me that business blogs could use some de-cluttering as well, and I wanted to share my ideas on that with my business owner and professional practitioner readers, as well as with other freelance content writers.

The concept is that, once you’ve built up a nice collection of posts in your business blog (congrats to you – most bloggers abandon ship after a few months), it’s time to make a commitment to keeping the blog organized, clean, and easy on the eyes.

• “Get rid of things you don’t need or use,” is Tucker’s advice, “and find a place for everything else.” One form of “cleaning house” for us blog content writers is to re-categorize.  Hopefully, using the blogging platform software, every blog writer has “filed” each post in a “category drawer”.  But, just as happens at home, where somehow spare toothbrushes get put in the sock drawer, posts were “misfiled”. It’s a great idea to systematically re-read each of your past posts to see what main theme or “leitmotif” each one actually emphasizes. That, in turn, allows you to reduce the number of categories, which not only makes the blog more useful to readers, abut more “tranquil” for you as you create and file new material.
• Minimizing “clutter” in blog content itself doesn’t necessary mean chopping the number of words (although Meryl K Evans advises bloggers to “shoot for 500 words or less, because “Readers want to get to the heart of the matter and get out.”) It’s more about making the posts readable and easier to look at, with shorter paragraphs, photos, bullet points and bolding.
• Does that Tucker advice to “get rid of those things you don’t need or use” apply to your blog posts?  Yes and no. No, you don’t want to send old posts to the trash heap, because they are part of the “equity” you’ve built up in using your keyword phrases. But, yes, you need to revisit your strategy – are you promoting the blog on the “right” social media platforms (the ones where your target customers “hang out”)? Are you establishing a clear navigation path from the blog post to the right landing page on your website?  Has your target readership changed?

No way around it – from the cabinets under our kitchen sink to our business blog content writing (including both past and future posts) – it’s time we spent time de-cluttering!