Setting up a content strategy for a dead blog is a bit similar to creating a new one. Only, there are a few slight changes to address why the blog died off in the first place. For the most part, though, you could follow along whether you’re building a new site or fixing an old one.
Perhaps the most important thing to keep in mind is that it will take effort in either case. A lot of blogs will fail simply because owners give up writing content. Sometimes it’s because the blog isn’t making as much money as someone hoped. Other times, it’s because creating a successful blog requires a lot of attention.
This is especially true if Google decides to torpedo a site with an algorithm change. I’ve seen a lot of legit sites of both myself and clients that get hit pretty hard when Google changes how it ranks content. It can be quite devastating to lose 90% of your traffic in a blink of an eye.
Regardless, it’s going to take maximum effort and drive if you want to bring a site back from the dead. Of course, this also depends greatly on why it was decimated. If you’re not producing unique, quality content, a content strategy won’t matter much.
So, if you’re trying to revive a site that is centered on misinformation or scams, move along. I’m focusing on those who want to create a legitimate website that is beneficial for its audience.
Why Does a Content Strategy Matter?
Now, there is nothing wrong with shooting from the hip, so to speak. There are a few blogs out there that are quite successful at drawing and keeping an audience without putting much thought into a content strategy. However, a plan for your content can make the process so much easier over the long term.
A strategy can help you with:
- Coming up with content ideas.
- Motivation to continue writing.
- Providing the most effective articles for your audience.
- Monetizing the content to make more money.
- Building a community of followers and subscribers.
- Boosting your reputation as an expert in your field.
- Developing a popular site people want to experience.
All of that sounds pretty nice, right? Just keep in mind that developing a strategy is only part of the puzzle. You still need to write something people want to read if you want it all to fall into place.
Publishing quality content is of utmost importance for both humans and Google. And in most instances, this means putting a great deal of research, thought, and care into the content you create.
When someone visits your site, their days of searching for that particular topic should be over. Essentially, this means that someone shouldn’t have to keep searching to find the information they’re seeking after visiting your site. Although you can’t please 100% of the people 100% of the time, the goal is to be the last stop in someone’s search.
Creating a Content Strategy for a Dead Blog
The purpose of any blog regardless of niche is to attract an audience. Unless you’re building a journal site you don’t want anyone to read, it’s all about the visitor. Even personal bloggers do so to put their thoughts out in the ether in the hopes of connecting with just one individual.
As such, all content strategies evolve around ways to engage and connect with visitors. It just comes down to creating ways to help you do that, especially when it comes to appearing in search engines.
Sure, social sharing may help you get a few more eyes on your content. But Google will provide the lion’s share of the traffic to your site. At least for those who want to continue attracting new visitors. A personal blog can bring in some great numbers without search results. But it will take you a lot longer to do so.
The bottom line is that you’re working to bring in readers with a blog. A strong content strategy can help you do that in a consistent manner. But as I pointed out earlier, you’ll still need to write the content. If you can’t string along a coherent sentence, no strategy will save your website.
That’s usually why a lot of blog owners will hire external help. Not everyone is as skilled when it comes to writing, especially while keeping SEO in mind.
1. Using Mind Mapping to Make a Plan
Mind mapping has been around for a very long time and is used in a variety of ways. Back in college, I used it to come up with logo and graphic ideas for brands. Today, I often use mind mapping to help plan out blog content and character backstory ideas.
In the case of rebuilding a dead blog, we would use mind mapping to plan the things we would like to accomplish and what is needed to get there.
Start with the blog and then branch out with ideas of what you’d like to accomplish. Then, branch out further with ideas that will impact the first point.
For example, let’s say I want to write two posts per week for the dead blog. Each branch after that goal would be things I can do to write those two posts including content ideas. The point is to get all of your ideas out there for the blog, even the ones you’ll probably wind up deleting.
It’s a practice to help structure your ideas in a visual manner while helping you establish goals and such to accomplish those points.
I’ve used mind maps to help organize everything from what categories to use in WordPress to strategizing YouTube uploads. And since a lot of apps like Mindomo are free, you can get started right away.
2. Setting Up a Spreadsheet
When building a content strategy, use a spreadsheet to keep track of ideas. Not only can you monitor what has been written and what you want to write, but you can also keep track of keywords, keyword volume research, research and reference articles, and more.
You can use whatever method you want to track this information. I just find it exceptionally useful, especially since I use Google Sheets. That way, I can access my content ideas from anywhere I have an Internet connection.
Of course, I also take it a step further as I monitor where ideas come from and in which category they belong. That’s because I want to see what ideas generate the most traffic after six months.
I use Data Validation in Google Sheets to create color-coded drop-down options to remind myself what has been assigned, what has been published, and what needs further research.
When all is said and done, using a spreadsheet to monitor my content ideas has been extremely helpful. I have a content spreadsheet for all of my brands as well as setting up blog-to-book ideas. One of my clients has a sheet similar to mine, only they include minimum word counts and META descriptions.
Essentially, you can keep track of any metric or idea you want in a spreadsheet with ease.
3. Redefine Your Goals
Obviously, the original goals for a blog that died off didn’t work as well as you hoped. So, you may need to redefine the purpose of your site. Is it to make money? Are you trying to promote some kind of awareness? Perhaps you’re trying to teach others something in which you’re an expert.
Goals can include a variety of elements that you’d like to accomplish over the next six months. It all depends on why you want to continue working on the site instead of starting a new one.
Take the dead blog I’m working on right now, for example. The original goal of generating ad revenue to use for donations to gaming charities is still one of its driving purposes. It wasn’t the idea of the blog that failed; it was more of a lack of published content, which I’ll go over in a moment.
Although having a goal for visitors isn’t necessarily a bad thing, you need to keep in mind that you can’t force people to read your blog. Focus on goals you can control.
For example, let’s say you want 100 visitors per day coming to your blog. You can’t force them to show up, so how are you going to tempt them to visit? A goal you can control is to focus on high-volume, researched, high-quality content.
This is why my goals center more on publishing three articles per week. I can control what I can create in the hopes to help someone.
4. Who Is Your Target Audience?
When building any kind of blog that is focused on search results, knowing your target audience is imperative. These are the people you want reading your content and who you’re trying to address.
For example, WriterSanctuary focuses on those who want to learn more about writing blogs, books, and freelancing. The target audience for CrossingColorado.com are those in their mid to late 40s and early 50s losing weight and being healthy.
Who do you want to visit your blog?
One method I use quite often is creating a visitor’s persona. This is kind of like a character sheet of your ideal visitor. It includes the individual’s wants, needs, likes, dislikes, and other characteristics of the perfect reader. Of course, there is no such thing as a perfect guest, but it helps when you tailor content to fit this fictional person’s needs.
You can also get a feel for your target audience using certain groups on social media or forum-styled websites like Reddit or Quora. Hashtags and groups are a treasure trove of visitor personas as well as content ideas. For example, part of your content strategy could center around answering questions people ask in these forums.
Knowing your target audience is key to building a new blog or rebuilding an old one.
5. Fine Tune Categories and Tags
When managing a WordPress blog, it’s easy to become inundated with categories and tags. This usually happens when you don’t have a clear plan of what you’re creating and a solid strategy for organizing the content. Not only does organization help you keep similar blog posts tidy on the site, but it can also help reinforce authority in the niche.
Authority is built by knowing the topic inside and out. By sticking with a few primary categories, Google and your user base will see you as an expert. That is as long as you truly know about which you are talking.
For instance, I have several primary categories on WriterSanctuary.com, and three where the bulk of the content are stored. These are the Blogging, Freelance Writing, and Self-publishing categories. I also have a few others that are relevant to writing, just not to the extent of the primary three.
In reality, you probably shouldn’t have more than a handful of categories to support the content. It mostly depends on the goals and purpose of your blog. Yet, these primary categories can help you structure content that is focused on your target audience.
As for tags, you shouldn’t have more than two or three in your articles. These are mostly to connect like-minded topics together, but not to the extent of categories. It’s quite possible to have articles sharing the same tag that are in completely different categories.
6. Decide On Types of Content
There are several types of content that are effective across the board for most blogs. However, a good content strategy bases what’s good according to your own stats. Sure, I can say that the number one article for me is a list of beginner writing apps. But you’re number one article might be a tutorial or a review.
To find out what works best, turn to your analytical tools and take a look at the traffic from the past year.
I use Google Analytics as well as Jetpack to keep an eye on the numbers. Regardless of how you track data, take a look at the top 10 most visited pages on your site. These are the types of posts that are more relevant for your site. It’s these types of articles on which you should double down.
For example, the top 10 clicked articles in Google for WriterSanctuary over the last three months consists of six reviews, three tutorials, and a listicle (list of writing apps to try). However, the vast majority of the top 50 articles consist of reviews for various products.
Keep in mind that one of the purposes of my site is to share reviews of writing, blogging, and freelancing apps to help others make informed decisions before using one. So, obviously, I’m going to have a lot of reviews.
Look back at your data and see what people are clicking on and reading. Then, give them more of that. It doesn’t hurt to experiment with different content types but don’t forget the ones that are the most effective at driving traffic.
7. How Will You Create That Content?
One reason why a lot of blogs fail is because owners give up writing content. Whether it’s from a lack of time or because the blog wasn’t growing fast enough, many people simply stop publishing. If you want to build a successful blog, you need to get over that mindset.
It can take four to six months before anything you write today will gain momentum in Google. Plan on playing the long game, as blogging doesn’t have an overnight success rate. Very, very few blogs will gain that much traffic on the first day, and those are usually sites created by someone who already has a massive following elsewhere.
Coming up with a content schedule is an important part of any strategy. I use Asana to plan when I write and publish, but you can use any app you’d like. Regardless, publishing articles on specific days and times is good for the audience who subscribes to your site and Google. The algorithm loves to know when new, high-quality content is available to crawl.
How much you publish depends on your target audience, goals, and allotted time. Some people can secure a bit of success with a single long post each week. Others will publish three to four times. It really comes down to what you can handle and what you want to provide.
Also, consider whether you’re going to provide all the content yourself or if you’ll have someone help you.
8. Updating Older Pieces of Content
Part of maintaining any blog is making sure the content is “fresh” and current. This means making sure it’s providing accurate and relevant information that isn’t outdated. Of course, this also depends on the type of content you’re creating.
Things like news articles often get a pass on this, but news sites usually generate several posts per day, which seems to keep Google happy.
Case in point, one of my clients produces a lot of WordPress tutorials every month. Unfortunately, a lot of the plugins from several years ago either go defunct or have new functionality. One of my jobs is to find those old tutorials and schedule them for revamps.
It’s always a good idea to update blog posts anyway, even if you’re not focusing on Google search. After all, you want to give visitors the most up-to-date information regarding the topic, right? The more informed your audience, the better you appear overall.
Sometimes, adding a bit more meat to the topic can also improve search rankings. I’ve personally witnessed how simply adding a little over 400 words to flesh out a topic improved search rankings by 20 points or more. It doesn’t take a lot if you’re providing quality content.
One of the best ways to find which articles to update comes from monitoring Search Console, which I’ll go over in a minute.
9. Why Consistency Is Vital to Success
A lack of consistency is also another big killer of blogs. Not just from the perspective of a search engine, but also because people lose faith or interest in your website. When you stick to a routine publishing schedule, your die-hard fans will continue to show up as they know when those posts are coming out.
Part of your content strategy needs to involve consistency in publishing frequency. It’s good for your subscribers and followers, it’s good for Google, and it’s good for you as it adds urgency to what you’re creating.
When working from home or blogging, it’s tempting to put projects on the back burner. This is especially true if you’re not really making a lot of money for the work. The beginning days of owning a blog or rebuilding one may make you feel like you’re spinning your wheels. And you need some kind of accountability to help with motivation.
Sticking with a consistent publishing routine will help with that accountability. Plus, it’ll fuel pride in your work and make you feel accomplished.
You’ll have to figure out the best schedule for your blog and your time. Some of us can crank out a new article every day while others may only be able to squeeze out a Friday update. But keep in mind that the more content you have, the greater are your chances of pulling in new readers.
10. Keep a Close Eye On Search Console
Search Console is Google’s platform for showing how your site is functioning on the search engine. It’ll show how many times your content is shown (impressions), how often people visit your pages (clicks), and even how it ranks in the results (position). It’s perhaps one of your greatest tools as a blogger, especially if you’re trying to rebuild a dead blog.
By using Search Console, you can see what terms people are using to find your content. Then, you can compare that information to what is currently showing in the results. Afterward, you can take a look at other sites to see if there is anything you can do better. In this regard, Search Console is great for helping identify what posts need updating.
Search Console helps identify weak points in your content strategy and where you might want to put a bit of extra work. Of course, it will only show you the pages that are indexed by Google. That’s one of the reasons why you want a consistent publishing schedule.
By seeing how people interact with your content in Google, you can develop a great strategy to either update the content or write something new according to what people are searching and clicking.
11. Keep a Close Eye on Analytics
As I’ve mentioned a few times, analytical data is invaluable. Keep your eye on the site traffic and what people are reading. Then, double down on those types of articles or perhaps even write a follow-up. Never underestimate the value of traffic data.
Anyway, there are a lot of ways you can keep an eye on traffic. Google Analytics is one of the easiest and most popular choices. However, it’s also prone to record bots and AI-crawling. This means it can skew the results and show spikes caused by bots instead of people.
Although Analytics is prone to recording non-human traffic, it also shows how much each page makes in terms of AdSense revenue if you connect an AdSense account. That means I can see how much each page generates and decide to write similar articles to try to capitalize the same effect.
I also use Jetpack’s traffic tool, but the desktop version has all of its goodies locked behind a paywall now. You have to use the mobile app if you want to see what posts are getting the most traffic.
There are all kinds of tracking plugins for WordPress as well. So, you have a lot of options – you just need to find the one that works best for your blog.
How Long Should You Stick with a Content Strategy?
For the most part, your blog should be in a constant state of growth. That is unless Google pulls the rug out from under you and decimates your traffic, which happens more often than you might think. In any case, I suggest giving your blog a 12-month stretch with your new content strategy. This gives you plenty of time to see if what you’re doing is working.
In other words, with the exception of Google making massive changes to the algorithm that hurts your traffic, keep working on your strategy as long as you have year-over-year growth.
Of course, you can tweak your content strategy as time goes on to better suit your site’s needs. Perhaps you’ll find additional time to publish an extra post per week. Or, maybe you invest in a keyword tool that vastly helps you write content. You might even be able to hire additional writing help.
The point is that a content strategy is not set in stone. You want to give it enough time to see if there is a long-term effect, but you don’t have to stick with something that is blatantly not working.
No matter what route you take, you want to give the strategy longer than six months. As I said, it can take four to six months before posts gain traction in Google. You won’t know what’s working until you give it a bit of time while keeping an eye on the stats.
Fine-tune the Strategy as You Progress, But…
Remember that building a successful blog is all about playing the long game. Sure, you might hear about someone building an instantly successful website using AI or some off-the-wall tactic that seems a bit shady. But the sites that have longevity were built by those with a long-term viewpoint.
When you’re building or rebuilding a blog on your own while juggling life, chores, a job, and school, there’s only so much you can do. And some of these “experts” assume that most people have nothing but time on their hands. That’s not always the case, especially for those who are blogging for the first time.
I can’t stress enough how you need to give your content strategy a bit of time before making changes. The odds that something you do right now will instantly cause the site to go viral are slim to none. Don’t worry about trying to fine-tune anything until the data convinces you otherwise.
All sites are unique, and what works for one might not work that well for another. That’s why I’m constantly pushing people to keep an eye on their own metrics to base major decisions. Don’t just do something because someone on YouTube or TikTok told you to do it. Have a reason behind every decision.
Even when it comes to rebuilding a dead blog, no one can guarantee something will work. Well, outside of creating more high-quality content. That’s kind of a universal foundation of a great website. But take other tips and tricks with a grain of salt. They may or may not work for you.
A Strategy for Content Is Crucial to Rebuild a Dead Blog
A solid content strategy will make building a blog so much easier than without. And a strategy is absolutely pivotal for rebuilding a dead blog. It all comes down to figuring out why the blog died in the first place.
In my case, it was purely from a lack of content, both new and updating the old. After three weeks, I’ve already published three times as much as I did in the entire year of 2024, and I’m starting to see a bit of the numbers move in my favor.
Building a new blog, or rebuilding an old one, is going to take time. This means you’ll need to be patient with yourself as well as the website.
If I had to give one piece of advice for building a content strategy, it would be to put in the effort to see all of your plans through. Without action, no amount of proper planning will matter.
Make sure you’re putting in adequate time throughout the week to hit your goals. As long as your blog has continuous growth year-over-year, then you’re doing something right. Tweak what needs tweaking, but don’t overcompensate. You could inadvertently hurt your chances of success.
- An Evening with Gary Kidney on After Hours - April 7, 2025
- Fixing a Dead Blog: March 2025 – A Bit More Growth - April 5, 2025
- Master the Art of Writing: 19 Expert Tips to Help New Authors - March 31, 2025