Sending Your Blog on Vacation

Blogs work best when they’re updated frequently. If people drop by a few times and see no new content, they’re likely to quit dropping by. If subscribers see nothing new for weeks on end, they’re likely to unsubscribe.

If your blog has good result in the search engines, you’re still likely to have visitors to your older posts through search, but it’s generally good blogging practice to keep those posts coming regularly.

What if you’re going on vacation, though? I taught my last class of the spring semester today. Since that’s something I do on the side, that doesn’t by any means imply that I get a vacation. But some people get vacations.

How can you keep your blog going while you’re gone?

• Stockpile. I have some clients for whom I write a whole bunch of posts at once, and they can post them at their leisure. This is an economical approach to getting professional posts, but you can also do it yourself, writing things when you have time and posting them hastily when your mind is on other things. Just leave them as drafts in your blogging platform, or as text documents. Remember, though, if you cut and paste from MSWord or another word processing program, you’ll need to check your posts in all the browsers your visitors use, to make sure they look right. Cut and paste into Notepad first to clean them up instead, if you prefer.
• Find a guest blogger. Ask someone in your field to fill in for you while you’re gone. Or, if you’d rather, someone in an adjacent field. For example, your furniture store blog could have a guest blogger from an interior design service. Your lawn care blog could have a guest from a nursery or garden center. It can be a good opportunity for promotion for the guest blogger, and it can be good for you, too. Offer to return the favor some day for maximum benefits to both parties.
• Share your vacation. if your blog isn’t too serious, you could post holiday snaps with captions. “Here I am in Waikiki,” you could write, “looking for great new bargains for the store!” or whatever the case might be. Check with your accountant to see whether this makes your trip tax-deductible. Either way, it gets your blog done almost as fast as reading your email.

If you’re not going on vacation, but just having trouble getting blog updating into your schedule, you can hire someone like me to take care of it for you, or check out my post on how to make time for blogging.