10 Ways To Work on Your Blog Without Writing New Blog Posts!

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Whether you’re a full-time blogger or you run your blog alongside a full-time job or your studies, the chances are you are not feeling motivated to write new blog posts in our current situation, especially if you are a travel blogger because of course, travel is the last thing on our mind right now and no-one is searching for it! (Sigh!)

However, there are a lot of things you can do on your blog right now which do not involve writing new blog posts!

Some are small, easy and mundane tasks, perfect to do if you’re head is not fully in the game, but they will benefit your blog in the future, and although I agree that we shouldn’t be pressurising ourselves too much right now, I do like to make my future self proud, and this is what this list is doing because in a few months time do you want to look back and realise you’ve done nothing on your blog just as everyone is starting to research things again!?

So if you’re looking to improve the SEO of your blog, tidy things up or give yourself something to do, here are

Easy Ways to Blog Right Now!

Broken Link Checker

The first task you can do which is super easy and takes hardly any brain capacity is to check for broken links on your site. Google doesn’t like broken links so this will not only help the health of your blog, it will give your readers a better experience too.

Broken links come in the form of websites you’ve linked to that are no longer going, internal and external blog links which have since changed, and I often find some broken links in my post comments too!

Every few months I use this Free Broken Link Checker as it’s really easy to use and I recommend you use it too!

Start / Relook at Pinterest

If you’re feeling like you need to be creative, get on Pinterest, or get back on Pinterest!

Make some nice new pins (which makes time fly, trust me), using Canva.com.

And then start uploading them to Pinterest to share via Facebook threads or Tailwind.

If you are a total Pinterest Newbie, read this post of mine: A Step by Step, Beginners Guide to Using Pinterest as a Blogger which will help you work out how to upload the pins and how to start sharing them on Facebook thread posts!

Update Old Posts

Updating old posts is sooo important because it keeps them relevant for the reader, and if you’re like me, you are constantly learning new things about SEO, plus, many things that you shouldn’t have been doing in the past, so you need to update your posts with your new knowledge.

Now not every post needs to be updated. I suggest updating your top 20 most read posts based on the last 6 months first and if you have time then you can do your top 40, 50 etc depending on how many posts you have on your site.

Things you can do to update old posts which will benefit your SEO and get you more views are:

• Add more keywords
• Make sure all photos have alt-tags
• Break the post down using headings – H2, H3, H4 and use keywords in these
• Improve the meta description with more and better keywords
• Improve the title description with more and better keywords

If you’re not sure on what I mean by ‘keywords’ or how to find them, I love this post by Digital Nomad Wannabe on how to find awesome keywords and rank on Google!  Her site is also packed full of amazing resources and information, especially on SEO so be sure to binge read it!

Delete Old Posts

I know it’s really hard to delete posts off your blog, especially the early ones as they old memories even though they are rubbish, but honestly, to improve the health of your site they need to go!

Check your Google Analytics based on the last year and delete the blog posts which have had barely any views! Not only will it benefit the SEO of your blog but readers will only find high-quality, useful posts on your site which will look better on you!

Break Big, Old Posts into Smaller, Specific, New Posts

Whilst you’re looking at your old posts, especially the posts that get less / no views, see if you can revive them and republish them, or if it’s a huge post see if you can take out a small section of it and turn that into a new, very specific post.

For example, if you are talking about a day trip you took somewhere and you have given a lot of information on how you got there, could you copy that info into a new blog post and turn it into a ‘how to get from X to X’. I know that may seem boring but its what a lot of people search for and it won’t require you to concentrate much as you already have the basic info, you’re just repurposing it!

Re-look at Your Affiliates 

At the same time as going through your top 20 posts to update them, now is a good time to look into which affiliates are working for you and making you money, and which ones are not!

As Jodie says in her Master Affiliate Marketing Course, we need to trial and error our affiliate links to test which ones work.

For example, a few months ago I added lots of new links to my posts for travel insurance with World Nomads, sim card affiliates and train booking affiliates. I have made only 2 sales from the sim cards but I have made way more travel insurance sales and sales on the train ticket platform!

SO, I am going to go through my posts and take out the sim card links because I know after a few months of testing that the readers of these posts are not in a position to buy them right now and I don’t want to confuse them with too many links.

I just want the links on there that I know they want!

If you are totally new to affiliates, this is a good time to look into them. I had zero affiliates on my blog until June 2018 and now I make a good few hundred $$ each month from them!

I have taken Alajode’s affiliate course called Master Affiliate Marketing (this is an affiliate link FYI!) and I really recommend it to you if you know nothing about affiliates, or you have started but you’re not yet making any money!

(Of course, in the current climate, travel-related affiliates are not making any / much money because no one is booking things but there’s no reason why you can’t learn now and apply later!)

Internally Link Posts Together

Whilst you’re in your top read posts updating them, be sure to see if there is an opportunity to link to another blog post of yours and steer the reader to it so they click on it.

What we really want to do is to keep the reader on our blog as much as possible, reading many blog posts at one time, because the more views you have the more money you make once you can put ads on your blog via Mediavine, and that reader may be more likely to buy a product through your affiliate links, follow you on social media and come back to your blog in the future if they stick around now!

Revaluate Your Why

If you are really struggling with motivation on your blog right now because your traffic and income is LOW/non-existent! Now is the time to think about your WHY.

WHY are you blogging? WHY do you have this blog? WHY should you do the things on this list? What do you get out of it that you enjoy? What do you wish you got out of it that you don’t currently?

Going back to my ‘why’ is so important for me, especially when I find myself comparing myself to other people and bloggers, and I think it’s a good time to go back to it now!

Set Goals for the Future

I admit that now is not the perfect time for goal setting because we HAVE NO IDEA what is going on! But it is still a good time to think about where you want to take your blog in the future, do you want to go full time, or part-time? How much money do you want to be making?

I don’t think timeframes are needed at this time because it’s so hard to know when things will get back to normal but journaling and goal setting is still important so have a go.

Tidy!

Just like you’re tiding your house, room, wardrobe, etc, tidy up your blog.

Check your about me page, when did you last update it?

Check through your blog in incognito to see what it looks like to a reader.

See if your menu needs updating or changing.

Delete the plugins you no longer use. (But keep a note of which ones you delete so if you cause issues to you blog you can retrace your steps, I’m talking from experience!)

Move things around a bit!

I hope this helps you, let me know if it has!