6 Steps (And a Ton of Tips) to Clean Up Your Blog and Online Platform

I’m sure you’ve seen that show Hoarders, right?

An hour long journey into hell where people are living with literal garbage from years gone by. Burying themselves with stuff they’ve gathered and stored while adding, even more, trash each day.

In a way, bloggers and online entrepreneurs are no better.

We continuously collect and store all kinds of crap. We buy domains and pile them up in the corner. We add blog post on top of blog post without ever thinking about what’s still at the bottom of the stack.

We spread our platform as wide as possible by reaching out to every bright shiny social network there is, only to neglect it and ultimately let it rot from a lack of attention.

Yes, my blogger friend, you are an online hoarder.

But, it’s intervention time bitches! Wait, that’s another show, right?

Anyway, let’s dig into how we can start to dig ourselves out of this mess.

Step One – Assess the Mess

The first thing you need to do is figure out where all your stuff is. That means taking some time to draw out your online platform.

Consider it doing an inventory of your platform. Start with your blog in the center, then work your way out to each social platform.

Literally draw this on a piece of paper. You’ll be amazed at how many offshoots you have under your control or lack thereof.

For each branch from your blog, dig into each component there as well. For example, when you get to your Facebook environment, write down your personal page, your fan page, and your brand’s group.

Document everything so you can really start to understand how bad it has become and so you can have a blueprint going forward so you don’t find yourself in this mess again.

Step Two – Cull the Herd

As you go through the mapping exercise in Step 1 you might say to yourself, “Holy Schnikes, I completely forgot I had an account there.” This should be a red flag for you.

If you had no idea you were on a platform, maybe you should not be on it.

After you’ve drawn out your full platform you should be able to determine which components are worth saving and which need to be ruthlessly carried out to the dumpster.

This happened to me when I did my drawing. I remembered I had a “newsletter” at Paper.li. It was pointless.

I quickly went over to my account and deleted it. Done.

Step Three – Follow the Money

Now look at your map and start to mark all of the platforms where you are actually dropping cash.

You may be shocked at even small amounts of money being siphoned off by some of these sites you’ve signed up for in the past.

Now, you need to figure out if you still want theses services.

If you DO want the services, you need to determine if you really need all of the bells and whistles you are paying for?

Maybe you can drop your account level back to the free version. I did that with my Hootsuite account. I wasn’t using it at the level I was paying for so I dropped it down a level. I didn’t want to completely get rid of it.

If you no longer want the service, DELETE!

Don’t be like those hoarders hopelessly clinging to things they have just re-discovered. Let it go.

Step Four – Scrub

Start to dig into each of your social media accounts and get things in order.

This means going to each and every platform and validating your information.

• Profile Links
  •  Look at the links you have in your profile descriptions. Are they still valid? Is there a better link you should use? How is it performing?
• Profile Description
  • Review the description. Is it still accurate? Does it say what you want it to say about you and your business?
• Groups and Communities
  • Look at all of the groups and communities you belong to on each platform. Leave the groups you never engage with. Leave the groups where no one engages in general.
• Pages
  • Unlike pages that no longer interest you. Unfollow people or companies that you really don’t want to listen to.
• Account Settings
  • Check your account settings, privacy settings, and integration points between social media channels.
• About Page
  • Open up your own blog and check out your About page. Is it still telling the story you want to be known?

Step Five – Clean the Toilet

Your email…yes, it’s a toilet.

It’s the one thing no one ever wants to clean but dammit it needs it the most!

• Subscriptions
  • Unsubscribe to all of the junk you delete every day anyway. You won’t miss it. In fact, once you get rid of all of the garbage you’ve subscribed to, you’ll feel odd not having more to do when in your email. Strange, right?
• Filters
  • Set up filters or rules to automatically place emails you receive into neatly organized folders.
• Change Your Approach
  • Work with an Inbox Zero mentality.
  • Delete or archive anything that is just noise.
  • Delegate by putting a reminder on items you really do need to follow up on.
  • Respond to the emails you forgot to respond to.
  • Defer other items that you should get to but don’t have time right now. Maybe put them in a “to respond to” folder.

Step Six – General Maintenance

Now we get into all of the other stuff you can do to clean up your online business and all of the associated platforms.

This is the lightning round of all of the riff raff you can remove from your personal mess or strategies you can use to make it better going forward.

• Change your passwords
  • This should be done frequently…really, it should.
  • You don’t have to go crazy with your passwords either. Don’t make them overly difficult. Check out www.grc.com/haystack if you want to geek out on how simple it is to have an incredibly secure (and simple) password.
• Clean up your bookmarks and bookmark bar
  • Clean up how you have the links organized
  • Rename the bookmarks to something that makes sense
  • Remove links to dead sites or things that aren’t important now
  • Remove links to blogs that have gone stale
  • Reposition those bookmarks that are most important to you – put them at the top or put them on the bookmarks bar
• Clean Up Files
  • On your laptop, clean up local files and folders related to your website
  • For example, I have folders for Branding, Media, Content, etc. Each of these folders contain a ton of files and needs to be cleaned up a bit.
• Plugins
  • Make sure you’ve updated all the plugins for your website
• Blog Backups
  • Make sure you have a backup system for your WordPress blog
• Laptop Backups
  • Make sure you have a backup system for your personal files and folders on your laptop
• Plan Better
  • Get your planning in order – I use Evernote and CoSchedule
• To Do Lists
  • Scrub your current to-do list
  • Add new to-do lists relevant to personal life and your online life

Wrapping it Up

I know it hurts to go through this. I know you don’t want to get rid of anything.

But you have to.

It’s a necessary evil and you’ll feel better after you do it.

Take the time to dig into your digital house so your online platform has what it needs to flourish…your dedicated and focused attention going forward.