Are you just starting out with your blogging? Are you an established blogger? Are you maybe wondering what simple, but essential, weekly maintenance you should be doing? Well here’s a checklist to get you going!

There are several simple, but essential, tasks that you should do to your blog each week. Although they are basic, they will help your blog traffic and your security. In no particular order, these tasks are as follows.

Check your comments Akismet is not foolproof, so go to your spam comments list and look through them. Are they all spam? Are any ‘good’ comments incorrectly identified as spam? If so, mark them as not spam and approve them. Then delete all of the spam so that next time you look you don’t have to review them again.

Respond to comments Following on from checking spam, reply to some of your comment leavers. Those that comment often will appreciate the time taken and those that are new can be welcomed to your blog. A blog, as opposed to a traditional website, is a two way interface whereby you write and then readers leave comments and you can then chat to them.

Check your versions It only takes seconds to go through your list of plugins and make sure that they are all on the most recent versions. Also, check your theme for updates. Some times new versions are release because of security issues that have been uncovered, so do not leave yourself exposed!

Look at your stats Look at that week’s traffic stats and feedburner stats and compare them to previous weeks. Does anything stand out? Are you getting more traffic or less traffic? Is there any particular post that is really driving traffic? All of these questions, which only take seconds, could reveal a technique that could drive you lots of traffic, for example if you notice a particular subject that drives lots of traffic.

Check for broken links Especially if you are running paid posts on your website, some of those links can suddenly become invalid and not work. This does not look good for visitors and looks unmaintained to the search engines. So fix them! There are useful plugins to help you to do this in seconds.

Write some drafts Any serious blogger should have some drafts prepared. In fact, some bloggers will sit down and write all of that week’s posts in one go and schedule them for the coming week. At the very least make sure that you have a store of posts ready so that if you are busy, don’t feel well or just can’t be bothered to write that you have something to put on your blog.

Apart from writing drafts, all of the steps can be completed in just a few minutes, but are a huge investment in your blog and are well worth doing.

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