Curating Your Content

I am a big Pat Flynn fan and I really love his work.  In the Smart Passive Income podcast episode 200, he and Todd Tresidder discuss how Todd deleted a third of his website content and actually tripled his site traffic.

I am in the process of consolidating two of my Dynamics CRM-related blogs ( rockmycrm.com and infinite-x.net) into my main company blog, xRM Coaches.

Infinite-x is my main and oldest blog which has been around for over ten years. Unfortunately, it’s also go ten years worth of content on it. After listening to that podcast, I reviewed the articles on my site and decided to do a little housecleaning myself. This will not only improve my blog, but also make the consolidation process easier.

The Cleanup Process

I started reviewing my content and ended up making the following decisions:

1. Anything that was related to the first two versions of Microsoft Dynamics CRM (v3 and v4) was archived. We are currently at version 8 (Dynamics CRM 2016) so even though there are people still using those earlier versions, they are probably just in a maintenance mode and not making any change that my articles might have helped with.

2. All old announcements had to go. There were webinar announcements, product releases, user group meetings, etc.  All of which are totally irrelevant today (or tomorrow).

3. Unused categories. I used to only have the single blog so everything was written there. That has changed over the years and much of that content has been moved to other sites.

The Results

Here are the results of that cleanup:

I started off with 1,079 articles and ended up with 267 live articles remaining – that is a 75% reduction. That may seem rather extreme, but as I outlined above, there were just a lot of articles that contained no value whatsoever, or where just irrelevant to today’s audience.

New Tools

Since many of my posts were announcements, I wanted to find a way to automatically remove them from the site after the event had past.  Just a small amount of digging turned up the Post Expirator plugin.

This plugin allows me to automatically remove a post from the site by changing its status.

Here is an example for a post regarding an upcoming Microsoft conference. I have set the post to be deleted the day after it ends:

I use this same technique to move posts back to a Draft or Private state – both of which remove them from viewing.

This will save me tons of time in the future because this process will be automatic and the site will self-curate (with a little thought up front).

Next Steps

Before I move the infinite-x content into xRM Coaches, I will archive, then delete, any article not in a published state.

In addition to the standard cleanup, I will also be going back and updating some of my articles to make them current with today’s technology.  Most are not far off, but I need to make notes of specific product versions, remove the version from the title, make my explanation a little clearer, etc.

Overall, it was a very worthwhile exercise and I really appreciate Pat and Todd’s discussions to help me get started.