As you may have noticed Real Blogging Tips has been a little quiet as of late. Tennius’s awesome Guest Post “4 Different Ways To Destroy Your Blog” was the last thing here and sadly I have not managed to follow the tips he laid out! No doubt I have lost some readers….
I have been on a Vacation, back in the UK, visiting friends and family before I move to Cairo in August. Sadly my plan to keep the blog going whilst travelling around has been much harder than I anticipated.
Basically I now have a good plan in my head of how to approach keeping the blog alive next time I go away and am likely to have limited internet access. My Mum often used to say to me “Do as I Say, Not as I do”. As I messed up on the blog planning front but am about to give you advice…. I guess I am kind of using that phrase here too 
.
First off, I think a blog only needs around two high quality posts a week. Anymore and your readers may get behind on the reading. Be honest, how many of you read every post from blogs that post daily?
So if you are going away for 3 weeks you need to pre-schedule 6 posts and you can go away safe in the knowledge that your blog will keep working whilst you lounge around on the beach.
If you take the time to mail your list or privately mail some blogging friends then you can easily make half of those posts guest posts, reducing your need to come up with quality content all in one go.
Next up…. I think it would be a great idea to add a little foot note to each of your holiday posts letting readers know you are away and that you will be answering all comments on your return. If you put it in italics and bold then hopefully even skim readers will pick up on it. Something like this may work:
I will be on vacation visiting my friends and family until around August 10th and will be answering all comments on my return. If I get a chance before, I will pop online and answer them sooner. Thanks a million,
Forest.
When You return it will be a 5 minute job to go through the posts and remove the foot note.
Another important thing is to make sure that you contact your advertisers and make sure they are aware that you will be away so that you can set up any due renewals or anything whilst you are away…. Obviously it’s also a good idea to set up an auto response on your blogging email too.
It’s as simple as that. I don’t think you have to do much more but if you think I have missed anything I would love to hear your thoughts.
Also just before I head off and just incase you don’t know…. Here is how you schedule a post in Wordpress.
- Log into Wordpress.
- Click on Posts > Add Post.
- Write your post as normal.
- On the top right in the Publish box click Edit, next to Publish immediately. This will let you set a date and time for the post
- Hit the Schedule button.
Take care,
Forest.
