Blogging While On Vacation
August 7, 2007 by Anne Wayman
Filed under Freelancing
Successful blogs, by and large, have multiple posts each and every day, or almost. Which is just fine until you need to go out of town for a business conference or simply want a vacation. Assuming your blog client allows it, the secret to real time off is to drip future posts. Here’s what I actually do:
- Open a word file and start listing ideas with no attention paid to spelling, grammar, just enough info so I’ll know what I intended. For blog writing the idea may just be a link I want to follow-up on.
- When I complete the post, I use Word’s format/font/strike through. This let’s me know I’ve written it, but I can still read the entry. Often I find I can write more than one entry on a single idea.
- Ask for guest posts from my audience to be sent to be via email. Post ‘em with a future date and let the contributor know when it will show up, with thanks.
- Schedule writing a future blog on my calendar daily until I get enough posts, then actually write the future posts.
I’m actually in the process of doing this now; I’ll be gone for about 8 days this month and so far I’ve got some 16 future posts already written.
Write well and often,
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These are great tips! I recently went on vacation and was able to post on my personal blogs for a few days. In the end, however, I had to just let the blog sit for a few days. Within two days my blog traffic dropped considerably.
Great tips, Anne. I lined up guest posters for one of my blogs while on vacation and used the future posting feature to post every two days on my other blog. It worked like a charm.
Have a nice time off, Anne. :)
This is the only way to fly. Just as writing every day is important to a blog (and writing), so is completely getting away from the daily grind of writing (and other things) so as to restore ourselves.
I take the “writing ahead” idea one step further; I write most of my posts for the week ahead of time working of a list similar to the Word list from Anne.
This allows my blogs to have consistent articles being posted and I can spend my time during the week checking out cool sites like this one and blogging on stuff that I find.
Thanks… and Scot, you’re way more organized than I am most of the time ;)
Great tips Anne. I wish I had read them before I recently went on vacation. I actually tried to post ahead of time but was unable to get a head. I also tried to set up guest posts but didn’t start requesting guest posts in time for me to get it all set up before I left town. Anyway, I am sure my experience will a least offer me a “what not to do with your blog’ post ;) .
Hey, I learned this when I didn’t do it well last year… tried to cram it all in a few days… it takes some lead time… we live and learn.
Good advice. I was lucky this year, my holidays were before I actually launched my blog.
I’ll make sure to be as prepared as you suggest next time I’m away.
Thanks,
Michael
Definitely some good tips! Keep up the good work!