How to Blog the “Green” Way

These days, everyone is talking about the environment. Taking care of our environment is important, and so is taking care of your blogging environment. Let me ask you this: are you practicing sustainable blogging?

Many bloggers are becoming overwhelmed because they aren’t conserving their blogging resources or practicing sustainable blogging. But wait…just what are your blogging resources?

Well, your blogging resources are your content, your time, and your money, and this post is going to show you how to use all of them more wisely! So listen up and learn how to make your blog more green.

Reduce: Get Rid of Your Blog Clutter and Hindering Mindset

The first step to an easily maintained, well manicured blog is reduction. Reduce the amount of clutter and weight on your blog. This includes things like:

Unnecessary sidebar widgets.
Plugins that do absolutely nothing or that you could code right into your theme.
Deleted posts, pages, and comments.
Deactivated themes and plugins.
Unnecessary bits of code (code comments)
Excessive advertisements.

Removing the clutter from your blog will make it look more professional and will make it run faster and smarter. Cats Who Code has an awesome post on speeding up your blog that will help you reduce the amount of drag on your site and build a more sustainable and user-friendly blogging environment.

Reduce the Clutter in Your Mindset

Reducing the clutter doesn’t just mean cleaning up your blog…it means cleaning up your mind. Learning how to turn the things you have to think about everyday into habits will help you blog faster and smarter.

For example: start quick-outlining your blog posts whenever an idea strikes you. In this way, you’ll build up a habit of jotting down a few main points, and you won’t struggle when the time comes to expand on the idea.

Reuse: Optimizing the Way You Blog

Once you’ve reduced the clutter on your blog, you’ll have to learn how to reuse your resources. Taking advantage of the hard work you’ve already done to grow new aspects of your blog is as easy as copying page/post templates when adding content, or linking back to old posts to recap ideas.

For my newest blog, I use post templates to quickly format my posts. This allows me to quickly format posts uniformly, and build authority by having a nicely organized blog. However, post layouts aren’t the only things you can reuse. Try these other usage tips:

If you have a custom design, re-use it for a new blog and change the color scheme. This way you still have a unique design, but it’s branded and fully-functional.
If you have a guest post that’s been rejected, post it to your blog, submit it to another blog, or an article base instead.
Once you find a plugin that works to your advantage, re-use it for your projects so you don’t have to learn a new system.
Instead of buying shared hosting for each new blog, get a dedicated host the first time and use add-on domains.

Learning to reuse your blogging resources will make running your blog a smooth process.

Recycle: Using Your Current Content for Marketing and Profit

The content on your blog doesn’t have to stay on your blog. Recycling old content into new venues is an easy way of building backlinks and marketing your blog. One of my favorite ways of recycle content is to simplify general information posts into synopsis or a step-by-step process and put them on Ezine Articles and Articles Base.

Of course, there are plenty of other ways to recycle your old content. Try out these blog recycling suggestions:

Compile all your posts from one category into an ebook or report. Add an introduction and some resources and you can sell it or give it away to email subscribers!
Take an old blog post and put a new perspective on it, then post it on your blog or in an email campaign.
Tweet older informational posts on your blog under new headlines to drive traffic to flagship and pillar articles.
Combine interesting comments from readers into a “press” page and show off what people are saying about your blog.
Post excerpts of popular posts on relevant forums and lead traffic to your website.

There are tons of ways to use the content on your blog and avoid burning out all of your new ideas. Just take a look at your archives and think, “how can I make these work even harder for my blog and me?”