Blog flipping involves acquiring existing blogs, boosting their traffic and revenue, and selling them for a higher price. Achieving success in blog flipping heavily relies on a strong foundation of maintaining content quality, making it one of the most critical aspects to consider.
Think like this: You acquired a niche site / a blog from a previous owner. The quality of the content is quite good and you want to at least keep up with that or better yet, take it to the next level. In order to do that, you need to master content quality maintenance.
Content quality maintenance ensures that the information provided remains accurate, relevant, and valuable to the target audience, thereby driving more traffic and optimizing potential revenue.
What is Content Maintenance?
First thing first, let’s define content maintenance! It’s a process of routinely checking, updating, and improving the existing content in order to ensure that it meets current industry standards and is engaging enough to draw interest from the target audience.
It includes ensuring accuracy, relevance, freshness, readability, language use, grammar, formatting, and keyword optimization.
You can either do content maintenance yourself or outsource it to a content writing agency, and you can either do all the maintenance at one time, or break it down to several smaller tasks.
The key here is to make sure that all content, from blog posts to product descriptions, is up-to-date and presents a consistent brand voice.
It’s so true, especially when the site has already had a static traffic and revenue for a long time, that content maintenance can make all the difference. Keeping up with content quality, in this case, will not only draw more traffic but also boost the revenue of the blog.
Content Maintenance Strategies
Now that you understand what content maintenance is, let’s look at some strategies to help you master it:
Content Audit and Evaluation
One of the initial steps in content quality maintenance involves conducting a content audit and evaluation.
This process entails assessing the current state of the content on your blog, identifying gaps, and determining the necessary improvements.
You can use tools like Screaming Frog or ContentKing to crawl your website and gather insights on areas that require attention, such as missing meta tags or broken links.
Content audit agencies or services, for example, can be really helpful, especially if the site you acquired has a huge repository of content.
Updating Outdated Content
Content on websites can quickly become outdated, making it essential to keep your blog’s information up-to-date and valuable to readers.
Periodically review your blog posts to identify articles that may require updates. This approach could include adding new insights, statistics, or examples to keep the content fresh, relevant, and engaging.
How about evergreen content, you may ask! Well, more often than not, evergreen content still needs to be updated in order to stay relevant, unless you write about topics that never change, like the Pythagorean theorem.
When you update existing articles, make sure to revise the meta titles and descriptions accordingly as well. This will ensure that your blog posts remain search engine friendly.
Enhancing Readability and Engagement
Readability is an essential aspect of content quality maintenance. Focus on improving the structure, format, and language of your content to make it easily digestible and accessible to readers.
Use headings, subheadings, bulleted lists, images, and visual content to break up chunks of text and keep users engaged.
Tools like Hemingway App and Grammarly can help you enhance readability and polish your writing. However, the downside of using tools like that is that it uses AI technology to make corrections, and sometimes, the new corrections make your writing sound so bland and robotic.
I used to rely a lot on Grammarly to check my grammar and spelling mistakes. However, after a while, I realized that the style of writing had become too artificial-sounding.
These days, I manually go through my articles or blog posts and make sure to use natural language for better engagement with readers. Remember, you’re writing a blog, not a text book or the dictionary!
Enhancing Keyword Optimization
Another important aspect of content quality maintenance is ensuring that your blog posts are properly optimized for search engines.
If your newly acquired site has a good traffic, it means it already has some level of keyword optimization.
In that case, you should go through the existing content and make sure to use the same keywords as before. To do this, you can use tools like Ahrefs or SEMrush to see which keywords are being used for ranking higher in SERPs.
If your blog doesn’t have any SEO-friendly content yet, I suggest doing some keyword research before you start writing. Identify keywords that are relevant to your niche and have low competition so you can easily rank for them in SERPs.
For me? Hands down for Keysearch.co. It’s one of the best, if not the best, keyword research tool out there. It’s extremely user-friendly and affordable and I’ve been using it for years now.
The Starter Plan of $17 per month (or $169 if you pay for one year) will give you 200 credits to do your keyword research per DAY. And trust me, unless you have to write a huge amount of content every single day, which you will not, you won’t run out of credits!
Quality Control in New Content
Now that we’ve just covered the process of updating existing content, let’s talk about quality control in new content. Although some aspects will remain the same, there are definitely several key points to note:
Utilizing User Feedback
User feedback can offer valuable insights into content quality and areas of improvement. Monitor engagement analytics, comments, and social media interactions to understand what your audience values and what topics resonate with them.
This helps you create content that resonates with your target audience, thus improving the user experience.
Incorporating Data-Driven Decisions
Data-driven decisions can be easily understand that you make a decision to create, upgrade, or merge your content based on what Google Analytics, Google Search Console, or any other similar SEO tools show you.
For example, if your website traffic is decreasing due to lower rankings for some keywords, then analyzing the SERPs and researching what your competitors are doing with their content can help you optimize yours accordingly.
Or, if you start to see a drop in web page visits, you may need to modify the content to make it more engaging and attractive for users.
Data and data-driven decisions play a crucial role in improving the quality of your content and can help you identify areas where you need to make changes.
Conducting A/B Testing
A/B testing is an effective way to measure the impact of content-related changes on user behavior. It involves creating two versions of a web page or blog post with slight variations, allowing you to analyze which one has performed better and why.
For example, if you want to measure the performance of two headings for a blog post, you can create two versions of the same page with different headlines and then compare user engagement metrics like clicks or conversions.
This process is important because it allows you to make informed decisions on which content changes produce the best results and optimize your content accordingly.
Setting Clear Writing Guidelines
Lastly, make sure to set clear writing guidelines that cover topics such as tone of voice, formatting preferences, grammar rules, and language consistency.
These guidelines is extremely important if you have a team of writers or if you opt for outsourcing.
By having clear writing guidelines, you can ensure that all your content is consistent in terms of quality and style. This helps to maintain the credibility of your blog or website as a whole.
My Final Thoughts
I’ve reached the point where I now understand content quality maintenance and what it takes to maintain a successful blog.
Content maintenance is not as simple as just updating existing content. It encompasses all aspects of content optimization, from keyword research to user feedback analysis, in order to ensure that your blog stays on top of the SERPs, thus bring more leads, traffic, and conversions.
It’s also important to note that content maintenance involves a systematic approach to keep track of the changes you make with your content so that you can measure the impact over time.
Creating a content maintenance checklist is one way to easily keep track of these changes. It should include tasks such as checking for outdated information, testing the impact of changes, analyzing user feedback, conducting A/B tests, and so on.
I hope this article can give you an overview of content maintenance and help you create a plan for improving the quality of your newly acquired blog and make it even more successful!