Writing Archives - This Week in Blogging

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.

How to Write a Thoughtful Restaurant Review

April 30, 2026

If there is one thing I hate as a writer in the food space, it is poorly written posts that “review” bars and restaurants.

You have probably seen the type a thousand times over on social media by now. “We went to [restaurant]. We had [list of menu items]. It was sooooooo good. 1000000000000/10. Your new favorite hangout.” And then that influencer, likely omitting that they were also hosted by the restaurant, never, ever goes back again until the next time they're given a free appetizer.

Yeah, they sure “loved” it, alright. So much so that I hope everyone can (or at least, I hope) see right through it as nonsense.

If that sounds like you, I've got some good news. It is actually really easy to write a thoughtful restaurant review, and I'm going to share all of the secrets with you today!

Should Bloggers Use AI? When (and When Not) as Written by AI

December 20, 2022

In a recent post, we discussed when bloggers should use AI and, perhaps more importantly, when they should not.

This was a fun piece for us to write about because the use of AI in blogging is a grey area at best. Some love it, some hate it, and some are in the middle.

But in writing this particular article, we thought we'd have a little fun with it and flip the script a bit. To put it simply, we thought why not make AI write the article. We did this briefly in the original post, with a 100 word segment used as an example, but in this one we wanted to go a bit more robust.

So we ran off to ChatGPT and put in a simple prompt: “Write a 1,500-word article about why bloggers should AND shouldn't use AI”. The following is the final product of the prompt.

Please note: This was the only direction we gave ChatGPT. The below article has not been edited in any way. We will provide our commentary at the end and note when our own thoughts resume. The featured image is a stock photo of our own selection.

Should Bloggers Use AI? When (and When Not) to Use AI Tools

December 20, 2022December 19, 2022

Artificial Intelligence seems to be taking the content creation world by storm these days, with new tools coming on the market every month for creating text, images, graphics, and more.

While some of these tools do appear to be fascinating and, dare we say, possibly quite useful for bloggers at large, we have to take a step back and think about an ethics question that is on everyone's minds: “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.”

Wait, no, that is Jurassic Park. But we'll run with it because the same ethics concern applies. Just because it is there, should we use it?

Let's dive into that one today looking at three broad AI uses that may be of interest to bloggers.

Note: We used AI for some elements of this article purely to illustrate points. These will be clearly noted. Otherwise the content featured herein is 100% original.

Pros and Cons of Audio Typing – Increase Your Motivation to Write

July 21, 2022May 23, 2022

For the longest time, I resisted podcasting as a medium for my blogs. Part of this was because I was simply far too busy running five sites and part of this was also because I just didn't care about that marketing outlet in the slightest.

Chris finally got the better of me and convinced me to order a podcasting microphone for my desktop setup.

The intention for this was to have a short podcast for This Week in Blogging which is going to (hopefully) be coming out soon. But I wanted to see how a podcasting microphone to help me with my writing productivity at large as there are other ways to utilize a microphone for blogging.

One way I thought of to help manage my productivity was to use audio typing software to help write notes for my articles when I am too tired, lazy, or distracted to put that digital pen to paper via traditional writing.

Well, I found that there are many benefits to using speech-to-text software but also some limitations to keep in mind. So I thought I would talk about those today.

3 Ways to Increase Pages Per Visit on Your Blog

July 21, 2022August 15, 2021

In an earlier article on This Week in Blogging, we had a discussion about the differences between CPM and RPM when it comes to advertising revenue on our sites.

The main takeaway from that was CPM is the cost to advertisers for one single ad on your site (per 1,000 impressions) whereas RPM is the total revenue a site earns across all ads (per 1,000 sessions- typically). RPM takes in a number of factors including article length (number of ads displayed), audience demographics (for cookie-based advertising), pages-per-visit, and more when it comes to determining what you actually earn on your site.

We concluded that article with ways to increase your RPM, and one was to work on optimizing your site to increase your pages-per-visit. As that is easier said than done, we thought it'd be timely to put together an article all about the topic!

3 Writing Techniques to Increase Your Blogging Productivity

May 17, 2021May 17, 2021

Recently, I was at an event with a few friends who were looking into getting into blogging more and I was asked what seemed to be a fairly simple question – how do you blog as much as you do?

My normal go-to answer is that since blogging is my full-time job, I have a lot more time to dedicate to writing. But, to me, that is a copout. Even amongst full-time bloggers I still somehow am able to write far more than most and routinely crank out anywhere between 5-10+ articles a week (split up across several blogs).

I took a moment to think about it before answering in this instance, and I realized that I actually engage in a number of writing techniques that help me crank out articles with a fair bit of speed. In this one, I thought I'd share a few of my favorites.

So if you're looking for some writing techniques to help you publish more blog posts or perhaps simply need a new way to keep yourself motivated, these may help.

Is There an Ideal Blog Post Frequency? It Depends

May 5, 2021

There are few topics in the blogging world that people are more opinionated on, and less sure of, than blog post frequency. Of course, the quick answer is the obvious one – the more content the better. However, that sentence really should read the more quality content the better. In the early days of blogging, “the daily blog” was a thing, and with little to no competition … Read more

What to Know About Copying and Plagiarism for Bloggers

October 6, 2021May 3, 2021

Wherever there is originality and creativity, there's bound to be copying.

We're going to double-click on that idea today, and look at how it's affected the trajectory of social media, but also offer some tips for finding and going after folks who think your blog might be a nice place to do a little copying (and subsequent pasting).

Copying in the blogging space is all too common, and at This Week in Blogging, we'd love to take a moment to arm you with the information you may need to do something about it.