Owning a successful blog means that you must have a consistent flow of content updated to engage your audience on a regular basis. With vacation season upon us, many bloggers will go on vacation and leave the online world behind. When it comes to planning a vacation, as a blogger, one thing you have to do is prepare your blog so you can go offline for vacation. Today I am going to give you a few tips so that you can rest easy during your time away knowing that your content will still flow consistently.
Set up an Editorial Calendar
Start planning what type of content you will want to have live on your blog while you’re on vacation. Set up an editorial calendar using Trello or Asana so that you’re able to stay on mission. Create your topic ideas, keyword data, and notes for where you need to push that content out during your vacation.
Write Content in Advance
Now that you have your content planned using an editorial calendar you’ll be well prepared to write the content and social media prompts that coincide with your content. If you are swamped with other work then you could hire a copywriter to create the content in advance for you.
Schedule the Content
Once you’ve created or hired a copywriter to create your content from your editorial calendar, you can schedule your content within your blog dashboard. Prepare all of your social media and blog post images so that you can easily insert them into the content, update SEO and click schedule.
Schedule Social Media
Now that you have all of your content planned, written and scheduled to go out live, you can schedule your social media promotions for each blog post. Each of your blog posts will already be assigned a unique URL within your blog dashboard for easy copy and paste with social media scheduling.
Write and Schedule Eblasts
You’ll want to stay in touch with your email subscribers too. Write and schedule an email or two (depending on how often you typically send them and how long you will be on vacation) sharing any of the new content you have planned from above and/or any additional seasonal content that you want to recycle out.
Review your Schedule
Once you have completed each of the steps above to prepare your blog so you can go offline for vacation, you will want to review the schedule. There’s nothing worse than being on vacation and having someone text you that your blog’s gone wonky.
Hire an Assistant
A virtual assistant can be quite cost-effective for bloggers who truly want to go offline for vacation. You could get quotes for an assistant who specializes in monitoring your blog content and social media prompts or who can do this for you while you are away. This person could also engage your followers while you’re offline for vacation.
Each of these tips shared today will easily allow you to unplug and go offline during your vacation. It’s important that you remain dedicated to your mission to fully enjoy the vacation. Be sure to plan well in advance for all possible issues that may arise during your vacation. You may want to provide your login credentials to a trusted friend or family member who can access your social media and blogs should anything go wrong while you’re offline for vacation.
And worst case scenario, you just go offline for the week. Perhaps you don’t have time to get everything blog related in order before you go; in that case just send a quick email to subscribers and post on social media that you will be taking a blogging break for the week (or however long you will be away) and set up an autoresponder for your email with a similar message.
