I have a year-end ritual at work, which is to clean out my office the week between Christmas and New Year’s. I don’t know when I began to do it, but I find it cathartic to get rid of old stuff that I don’t need anymore and have a clean desk and office space when return for a new year. The office is quiet, I can dress casually, and I literally order a dumpster from the building and fill it with the previous year’s worth of paper, catalogs, cards, and other odds-and-ends that have accumulated.

Your content for your business may be in a similar state and needs to be cleaned up, and this is a good time to do it. Review what information you have about your company. This may include what is published publicly on your web site, for example, as well as what you have stored on servers or on your marketing team’s computers. Get rid of old verbiage, old logos, old art and anything else that doesn’t represent how you want your company portrayed in the new year. Sure, if you’re into keeping a history of your business, you can file some of it away….perhaps on an external hard drive so it won’t mingle with what it current.

Check your web site and make sure that it portrays you and your business the way you want it to be portrayed, too. Is all the information up-to-date? Are the photos of people current or do they look like they were caught in a time warp? What about your service offering? Is it described using contemporary language, or might it include dated phrases from back in 2010 or 2011? How about your company’s LinkedIn profile and Facebook pages? You can look at those with a fresh new-year eye also.

This is simple work, and takes some time and effort, but really not that much. Start the new year fresh for both yourself, your business and your content. You might feel even better about the new year for doing it.