Some of you may have noticed I’ve been missing in action. The simple fact is for all of us there comes a time when blogging must take a back seat. We either don’t have the time or the energy or we find ourselves in the middle of a family crisis or some other circumstance that keeps us from blogging our normal routine.
But that doesn’t mean our blog will crash and burn. There are some very simple things you can do to keep your blog running on autopilot while you are away.
Spread out posts – If you usually post 6 days a week, slow that to 3 and take those other 3 posts and put them on the next week. I am a huge advocate of writing posts ahead of time instead of fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants blogging. Thinking ahead gives you tremendous flexibility. I would highly recommend you post once a week no matter what, just to keep your readers alert.
Enlist guest posters – Right now, I’m using a lot of guest posts to keep my blogs going. I don’t have the mental capacity to put out many quality posts right now. So, I am thrilled that I can feature other bloggers and let them write meaty content for me!
Put an auto-responder on your email – I have not done this yet, but I can see where it would be quite helpful to simply tell people your life is very busy right now and while you read every email that comes via your website, you simply cannot respond at this time.
Step up passive streams of income – Not every blog is a money maker, but I wanted to include this anyway. When your blog needs to go on autopilot, you will need to pare down your streams of income and go to a more passive form of making money. This may mean you step up your Google ads by adding more to your site, this may mean only doing posts where you recommend reading material from Amazon, or this may mean trying to solicit easy private ads (when I say “easy”, I mean ads that do not require anything from you other than a placement on your site).
Ask for a break from contributing sites – If you contribute to another site, ask them for a month or two off. They are human too and understand when life’s circumstances make blogging difficult.
Stop feeling guilty – I completely missed Twitter Tuesday last week. Yes, I missed the very twitter chat I host…every week. I apologized profusely and moved on. I can’t change my circumstances right now, and I can’t change the fact that I plum forgot Twitter Tuesday. I can fret over the way things are or I can just accept them. There will be those who don’t understand, but the majority will. Relax and let go of the guilt.
Has your blog ever been on autopilot? How did it go? What did you learn? What would you do differently?
