Optimizations Archives - This Week in Blogging

How to Refresh Old Blog Posts With Intro Summary Boxes

July 7, 2026

As part of my push to revive a dead blog, I stumbled upon recommendations to add summary boxes at the start of articles.

In a way, these summaries check a lot of, pardon the pun, boxes when it comes to refreshing old blog content- they can have a few hundred words and be a “substantial” update, they are immensely quotable by AI Overviews and LLMs, you can sneak some affiliate links in for users who may bounce, and, perhaps most importantly, adding them into an article also gives you a chance to re-read old content and do more updates further down the page, too.

So in this one, I thought I'd share more about my approach for using summary boxes to refresh old blog posts!

5 Ways to Update Old Blog Content for More Traffic in 2026

May 28, 2026May 28, 2026

Over the last few years, my nearly 18-year-old travel blog has been through hard times. After hitting a peak of about 100,000 pageviews per month in 2019, between COVID and algorithm updates, we saw our traffic dwindle to as low as 4,712 pageviews per month in May 2025- a traffic figure we hadn't seen in nearly 15 years.

To call that depressing would be an understatement.

But in late 2025, I realized that I had nothing left to lose (literally), and decided to treat my travel blog as a test subject for playing around with new update ideas and, over time, we started seeing some encouraging signs!

By November, we had traffic up to over 10,000 pageviews per month for the first time in a year-and-a-half, and by May 2026, just one year later, we were on track to hit 22,000 pageviews per month- a figure we hadn't seen in over two years and just shy of our goal of 25,000 to apply for Raptive.

So in this one, we wanted to share a few of the things we've tested that appear to be working for us right now, and then bring it all together for an analysis of why it may be all of these working together just as much as any individual change.

7 Conspiracy Theories for the March Core Algorithm Update

April 1, 2024March 31, 2024

A man who looks like Chris wearing a tinfoil hat

Another month, another Google Core Algorithm update was rolled out, and the March 2024 update sure was a doozy.

We're not going to sugar coat it- this one was bad. In fact, it was probably the worst update we've seen for bloggers in our 15+ years of working in the industry.

Still, as the algorithm update is on-going, no one has a clear understanding of what is going on. But that doesn't mean the theories aren't flying. So in this one, we thought we'd share some popular conspiracy theories we've seen about the March 2024 core algorithm update, and breakdown why we think most are just that- conspiracies.

10 January Blogging Tasks to Start the New Year Off Right

January 8, 2024

The new year always feels like a fresh start in many aspects of life, and work on our blogs is no different.

As January is also fairly slow for many niches, the month is a great time to do some backend tasks to start the new year off right.

Whether you're analyzing last year's performance, updating dates or your media kit, or launching something new, now is the time!

3 Reasons Why You Should Log Your Blog Subscriptions

October 23, 2023October 23, 2023

When my business credit card expired, I had a moment of panic simply because I didn't know what recurring subscriptions I had set up for my blog that were hitting that card. My concern was that if I forgot one I would miss a payment and, perhaps, lose access to a much-needed service, domain registration, or something else entirely.

After taking a few moments, and a few deeper breaths, I started the process of putting together a list of all of the places where that credit card was being used. What resulted was a list of all of my blog subscriptions, and having this one on hand gave me more peace of mind.

So in this one, I thought I'd share more about what kind of subscriptions you may want to track, relevant information you may want to log, and why all of this is important at all!

When Blogging Tests Fail – Is It a Bad Idea or Wrong Time?

August 20, 2023August 17, 2023

It is hard to believe that I have been blogging for over 15 years now, and since starting in 2008, it feels like I've made just about every blogging test imaginable to determine what does and does not work on my sites (be it for traffic, affiliate sales, social media reach, and more).

One common trend I've seen repeatedly is that I make a test, find that the results “didn't work,” write the idea off, and move on to something else. Then, months or years later, I returned to the idea one more time only to find that it worked better than I ever dreamed.

As it turns out, the idea itself wasn't bad, but instead that it I was not analyzing the results correctly or, in most cases, simply doing the test too early in my blogging journey!

So in this one, I thought I'd share a bit more about some lessons I've learned and why you may want to repeat past experiments as your site grows and evolves.

How to Define Your Blogging Strategy – Keeping Your Goals in Mind

August 6, 2023August 29, 2022

For the last few months, I felt like I've been spinning my wheels on growing my blogs. My sites are doing well, but I'm not seeing as much growth as I would like (especially for my new niche sites).

It wasn't until I saw a comment in our Facebook group from our friend Mariellen (of the amazing travel blog Breathedreamgo) about the differences between strategy and tactic that it made me really stop to think about what I was doing with my brands. In fact, I thought of this one so much that it helped inspire me to change how I approach producing content moving forward.

So in this one, I thought I'd share a bit more about defining a blogging strategy and how my new angle helps keep me in line with my site goals.

5 Ways to Shield Yourself From Spam Emails in Blogging

January 31, 2022

Raise your hand if you received a spam email today.

Okay, fine, that was a bit of a loaded question. Perhaps the better way to phrase it would be raise your hand if you didn't receive 100 spam emails today.

One of the unfortunate downsides to operating online is that our email accounts are tied to just about everything we do. This makes privacy a bit tricky because many unscrupulous marketers will try every trick in the book to ensure their message reaches your inbox.

So in this one, we thought we'd share a few tips that you can integrate into your business to help minimize the spam emails you see, and, for those emails you can't quite ever get away from, a few ways to recognize they're spam immediately!

10 Blogging Activities to Perform in Q1 to Start the Year Off Right

January 9, 2023January 10, 2022

Whenever a new year begins, we take the first month or so to take stock of the state of our blogs.

Part of this is because ad rates are so low at the start of Q1 that we're not driven to create content like mad. But the other part is that the new year is simply a good excuse to start new blogging habits to get the year off on the right foot.

But some activities that can be done in Q1 are not necessarily habits that need to be adopted throughout the coming year but are rather one-off tasks that could be accomplished during the downtime as well. So in this one, we thought it'd be fun to share a few back-end blogging tasks you may want to consider doing at the start of the year that you may have slacked on in the past!