An inactive blog section, and what to do with it

There are many benefits to running a blog on your business website, but often, even if started off well, a blog section gets left behind and unused, or is rarely updated. A blog that’s not had a new post for months or years can give negative signals about your business.

A blog can be very worthwhile for the site owner over time, if posts are published regularly. Benefits include: boosting search engine optimisation; developing relationships with potential and existing customers; establishing your authority in your industry; connecting with people by showing the personal side of your business; providing value, and engendering trust; generating leads and email sign-ups; creating opportunities for people to share your content…

There are more great reasons to keep your blog active, as I talked about in Website Oversight number 8: Never changing content.

But, if frequent posting just isn’t an option for you, and your blog section has gone stale – and if old blog posts don’t generate traffic to your site – I’d suggest you close your blog section down. Possibly use any old post content to create social media posts, or turn the content into info products, Lead Magnets or similar.

Another option, if you can’t post regularly, is to hide the publish dates on posts if your content is evergreen. Make it into more of a resources/information section.

Either way, it’s a good idea to address the situation if you have an inactive blog on your business’s website.

Here are a few ideas for what you could be posting about (as a single post or series of posts):

• Share success stories of your customers.
• Answer frequently asked questions you receive.
• Provide advice and tips, useful to your target audiences.
• Demonstrate how to do something that helps your customers.
• Showcase your products.
• Profile each of your team members.
• Provide behind-the-scenes pictures and anecdotes.
• Review products or things your audience care about.
• Repurpose your social media content as posts.
• Share the history of your business.
• Invite your visitors to submit guest posts on your blog.
• List useful, relevant online resources.
• … And search online to easily find lots of other ideas…