We moved from our home of 5 years in Scotland last month as we are returning to Northern California after 7 years away, settling in the Carmel/Monterey area...(also a reason why this blog has been quiet for the last month). We were amazed by the amount of stuff that we had accumulated in that time, stuff we did not need.

The Lone Cypress, Monterey California

 As we sorted and packed our belongings for removal, we recycled many items to charity, threw out and sold a few items as well. While I wasn’t blogging over this period, I was working on the Website.

I was reflecting on moving house and the advice in a post from HubSpot in the Magnet last month, entitled 5 items to delete from your Website today and offer a few more ideas on that house-keeping theme.

We migrated our Website to the HubSpot CMS and began blogging in January 2009 and post a new blog article every week, adding over 70 pages to our site in that time.

Blog effectiveness is measured by the number of inbound links, comments and page views and is a reliable method of generating organic inbound traffic for your keywords.

The following excerpt from a Hubspot Blog Analytics report and shows the activity in the past week for our blog, sorted by the articles with the most inbound links.

With the above report or similar in hand and answering the following questions to direct your house-cleaning efforts, you should improve ROI on your blog and blogging activity.  

1. Are the messages that were relevant 18 months ago still relevant or has your target market, buyer-persona or product offering changed? If it has, you may have an opportunity to improve the performance of old posts with an update.
2. With high ranking blog posts, is it possible to improve their effectiveness with offers and links to relevant new content and updated conversion pages?
3. Are the "favorite keywords" that you started with, still central to your current marketing activities?
4. Are the calls to action of last October still relevant today?
5. Have the tags on the blog used to classify your posts multiplied to the extent that they need to be culled back to make it easier for visitors to access related ideas/posts?
6. Have your blog-posts kept up with the new pages added to your Website? Chances are there are many new pages added to your Website that you could link to and drive relevant traffic to conversion pages.
7. With low ranking blog posts that are not getting much traffic and have few or no inbound links, is it because the title is boring, too long or lacks keywords? If so, is the core idea worthy of recycling by rewriting, creating a more compelling keyword-rich title and updating images and keywords? 
8. Has every blog got at least one image that is relevant, adds value to your article that has a title and contains an alt tag?

Hubspot's blogging platform makes it really easy to create and post blogs that integrate with relevant content on your main Website. Inbuilt wizards check that your blog title, body and meta description contain favorite keywords, that the blog has an image with alt. text and that it has tags. Social media publishing buttons enable publishing to your followers and relevant social networking groups to generate inbound traffic. All you need to do is to invest the time to create interesting and relevant content.

Advanced Marketing Concepts is an inbound marketing and sales performance consultancy serving clients in the Bay Area of San Francisco. We are a certified HubSpot reseller and implementation partner.