1. No Time: The contributors to the blog prioritized writing new content during the initial stages but as other tasks and duties catch up with them they find they can’t commit the time it takes to research, come up with ideas for posts, draft, check and publish them on a regular and consistent basis.
2. Out of Ideas: A plan was defined for the kind of topics which will be covered on the blog and after a while one finds themselves at a road block where coming up with fresh articles or posts within the defined topic scope was so difficult the writing stopped happening.
3. No Takers: The regular publishing was happening but it seemed like it was all pointless since there seemed to be no readers, no comments, no feedback. As a result motivation to continue died out and the blog froze in time.

At the end of the day, a blog where activity from your end has died out is not going to work. It needs consistent and work before the blog starts working for you. It needs fresh content, new ideas, regular updates, replies, changes in direction, promotion, distribution and more.  Once you’ve determined what’s slowing your blog down here are some quick tips on how to overcome those causes and revive it:

• If there’s no time, you have to find the time or the bandwidth to commit and make it work. Re-allocate it to someone within the company who can dedicate the time to post. Developing a successful blog takes time and patience. It’s never instant traffic magic and one needs to dedicate time over several months to keep at it and getting it to work. Alternatively, (and pardon my being so outright salesy) hire us to manage the blog for you!

• If you find yourself out of ideas, look around at other online publications within your area and look for inspiration (don’t ever copy, it just works against your objectives). Also try re-focusing your topics and content to cover a wider scope and still be engaging for your target audience. For example, a business that sells “designer light switches” for homes and offices doing a blog on “designer light switches” is bound to run out of topics soon and runs the risk of getting boring.  Re-focusing the blog to cover articles on “interior decor ideas for homes and offices” widens the scope, keeps the content interesting and reaches out to the same target audience which would be interested in the switches.

• If there are no takers and it appears no one has read your posts, you have to make it happen. Blogs don’t gather subscribers and regular readers overnight. It can take a long while. Till then, you need to promote every post, bookmark them on social sites, share them on social networks, tweet about them, link them and push it out to the first set of readers while hoping they in turn will share them with others. Push your content out to others and over time, they will come to your blog.

If your blog has been stagnated for some time now, have a closer look into what may have caused it, re-focus your blog outreach plan and revive it. If you stick to it, it will start working for you.

Prior to launching BuzzFactory in my previous work experiences I had the opportunity to work closely with a number of content sites which were designed to draw inbound search traffic around a specific B2B (in most cases) or B2C (in a few cases) industry vertical. The objective was to develop each of these sites into a valuable resource for each industry that had fresh content updates such as news, articles, blog posts and more in a single location and professionals would have a something akin to an industry publication they could quickly open and read through for good content in their space.

One set of these sites were driven by syndicated content which came through RSS feeds from various other related publications and an other set employed a very small team of writers who would contribute to the content daily in the form of one or two articles and blog posts a day. The general idea behind the site which displayed content from other publications was to have more updates and a lot more content in an automated and cost effective way. Since it was simply aggregating content from other sites, it didn’t need much time or money and would update it self several times a day building a large index of links on the site. On the other set of sites progress was much slower. Limited resources mean’t the site could only be updated when there was bandwidth for someone to spend time writing a post or a detailed article, using the right keywords, linking, publishing and finally promoting it personally through social networking and bookmarking sites. While the first set of sites had hundreds of new article links each week (though duplicated (syndicated through RSS) the second slowly and steadily grew at around one new original post or article each day.

Now as logical guessing would have it, the first set of sites should have done very well but failed quite miserably at search results in every single case. The second set of sites which depended on original content though slow to develop grew in terms of both referral traffic and gradually drew a rising percentage of search engine traffic through some very relevant keywords and phrases.

Lessons Learned

• Syndicated content on your business website is a good resource. It’s useful for those who come to your website. It’s not as effective in bringing them to your website from search engines.

• Syndicated duplicate content doesn’t do much for gaining more links in search results as that benefit really goes to the site that originally posted the content you are just re-distributing.

• Duplicate content which is not syndicated and posted directly on your site is a big no no. It’s not just damaging to your page rank and site reputation, it’s plagarism.

• Keep it original even if it means it can cost more in terms of time or money. It will pay back in the long run and give you long term returns in terms of bringing the right people to your site.

• Slow and steady wins the race. Even if you can’t update your site with new content everyday, do as much as you can and make sure it’s fresh, useful, relevant to your business or website and build your own content one step at a time. Even if you don’t see magical spikes in traffic, each original post will bring in a trickle of search traffic and you can build that trickle into a stream of search traffic gradually.