Wednesday, August 5, 2015

10 Things to Do When Your Blog Dies


 I recently had a blog bite the dust. It happens. Maybe you have decided that your blog wasn't the best idea, or maybe your situation changed, or maybe, like me, you forgot about that Go Daddy account-- remembering the annual payment as my blog partner was texting asking why he couldn't log in.

Ooops. 

As much as bloggers like to encourage everyone to "hang in there!" sometimes you just have to know when to give up and have a margarita. People blog for a lot of different reasons and there are just as many reasons to stop doing it. So you've decided you would rather do something else on Saturday night other than document your knowledge of 17th century pie tins.

Now what?

As I looked around the internet there wasn't a lot of information about what to do when you decide to shut it down. As I went through the process, here's advice I came up with for deleting your blog: 

1. Sit down and make sure you are really finished. That it ran its course and that you are okay with it. Here's the post I wrote about the process:

 Blog Obituary: RIP Professor & Housewife

2. If you can still access your blog in your browser go ahead and export it to a flash drive or even just the hard drive of your computer. You are done at the moment but you don't want to wake up a month from now and remember that one remarkable post. Back it up.

3. Write a final blog post explaining what happened. It's good for closure too. Depending on how long       you kept your blog up and how hard you had worked on it, it may feel a little bit like a breakup.

4. Scout around for old email addresses and the remains of unfinished blogs you started when the process was in the works. I found an old Wordpress blog that just had a message directing readers to the host I finally settled on. Did you also connect a Tumblr account to your blog? Look for any loose ends to tie up. Delete those accounts.

5. Decide what you want to do with Twitter. Would the time consuming blog you had work as a Twitter account? Would you be even more snarky or informative in 140 characters?

6. Decide what you want to do about Instagram. Again, maybe you are brilliant at photos. Maybe you would be the next big Instagram thing. 

7. Think about Pinterest. If your blog was image rich or you had a zillion pinners following you it might be possible to rework some of your boards by eliminating certain pins. Otherwise delete boards that were very specific to your blog. They'll go to a dead link and that's not fun for others. 

8. Post your farewell post and/or explanation on your Facebook page. I posted the obit for mine on Pen & Hive. If it was your only blog write it on your FB page and share it to your personal page if you had readers who were friends.

9. Reply kindly or not at all to comments. Resist the temptation to ask all the people who send you condolences where they have been until now. If you kept some other form of social media just invite them to follow you there.

10. Decide that your blog was just a warm up act for what you really want to do. Start planning your next venture!


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