How to De-Clutter Your Big Business Blog Closet

There’s certainly no lack of advice about blogging for a business or professional practice. Wisdom is offered in the terabytes on the topics of starting a blog, writing a blog, illustrating a blog, and promoting a blog. (In short, my Say it for You team is definitely not alone in our mission of helping business owners and professionals tell their story to potential clients and customers.)

But who’s advising blogging veterans, you know, establishments that have been producing content by the hundreds or even thousands of posts over, say the last two, three, or five years?

Couldn’t help asking precisely this question about blog clutter after I came across closet de-cluttering devotee Mari Kondo’s “Top 10 Organizing Tips” as reported in the Japan Times.

Kondo vows her stuff-purging method can transform lives. If nothing else, I believe her tactics, applied to accumulated content in business blogs, will infuse new energy into the process of creating new blog content.

Kondo: Approach your sorting and discarding strategically, and do it by category, not location. (Start with clothes and books, rather than with the attic or the spare bedroom.)

Searching by categories is a good thing for blog readers, who can learn more about exactly that aspect of your material that is most important to them. And categories enable you, I teach blog content writers, to update and add information to what you’ve already presented to readers. If things have changed in your industry or profession, reviewing what your position was four years ago is a great way to frame your take on what’s going on today.
Kondo: Pick up each item your own and ask yourself, “Does this bring me joy?” If the answer is no, out it goes.

In a sense, “clutter” in blogs, in the sense of quantity, is a positive. There’s only so much room in even the most spacious closet, but once I’ve put content on this Say It For You blog, it can remain on the Internet forever.  (This post is actually #1053 for me, yet all my 1,052 past blog posts haven’t disappeared. All, that content remains, available to readers in reverse chronological order, a very good thing when it comes to “winning search” online!)

So what’s the point of asking whether a two-year old piece of content brings you joy, or, put another way, how can de-cluttering help in blogging for business?

In corporate blogging training sessions, I often explain that it’s perfectly OK to repeat a theme you’ve already covered in former posts, adding a layer of new information or a new insight. You can’t do that, of course, without going back into your blog content “closet” to discover your own business “past”!