Five Things I Learned About Blogging While On Vacation

My vaca­tion was awe­some, but like most peo­ple I am glad to be back and get­ting back to my rou­tine. I had ten great days of barely and inter­net and I loved it. Spent a lot of time out­doors and on the beach enjoy­ing cre­ation. I barely even thought of the blog.

When I say barely I mean for the first cou­ple of days I didn’t think about it at all, but even­tu­ally lack of inter­net had me think­ing about what kind of state my blog would be in when I returned. Upon my return though I learned a lot about blog­ging. Here’s 5 things:

1. Blogs are very needy.

I don’t have thou­sands of peo­ple who jump out of bed every morn­ing and run over to their com­put­ers to check the lat­est on my site. So in my absence my blog reacted more like a scared lit­tle boy who needed it’s Mommy. It became very dejected. And sad. And lonely. I mean incred­i­bly lonely. The vis­its to my blog hit an all time low. I came back and had to cod­dle my blog to revive it from its state of despair due to my absence.

What to remem­ber: When going on vaca­tion if you are not going to be main­tain­ing your blog daily pre­pare for hav­ing to do some rebuild­ing when you return.

2. If you plan auto­mate your posts while you’re away think ahead

I resorted to automa­tion like a mother resorts to hir­ing a nanny when she’ll be away from her baby. I wanted to make sure my blog received some type of activ­ity while I was away. However, automat­ing post can be very risky when there is any type of tech­ni­cal error. If your efforts to auto­mate fail it can be dis­as­trous for your blog.

What to remem­ber: Test run what­ever automa­tion method you will use in advance to try to min­i­mize poten­tial prob­lems.

(I used a plu­gin called Post Shift and it worked well)

3. Prepare Posts In Advance (for when you return)

When I got home as glad as I was to be back after about a thou­sand hours on the road I was exhausted and get­ting back to blog­ging was hard. So I was glad that I had posts lined up for when I got home. This does take some advanced prepa­ra­tion. For me I had a great guest post lined up ( Thanks Ar!) and a cou­ple of other posts that I had in mind.

What to remem­ber: Vacations are great, but give your­self a chance to recu­per­ate by hav­ing a plan for your blog so that you can get the needed rest

4. Reconnect with your read­ers

Vacations are a nec­es­sary self­ish thing and while you are hardly think­ing of blog read­ers while you’re jet ski­ing, but you can’t for­get about them com­pletely. Reconnecting with them when you get back is vital. It is the human con­nec­tion in blog­ging that all of us blog­gers and read­ers want. We want to feel like we mat­ter and are not just stats. I have a great group of read­ers who have been extremely sup­port­ive and I truly appre­ci­ate them. So we have to show it.

What to remem­ber: Your read­ers are what make your blog they are not just stats on Google Analytics. Show them they mat­ter espe­cially after a long absence like a vaca­tion.

5. Your Blog will sur­vive

More impor­tantly so will you. While we may enjoy run­ning and main­tain­ing our blogs we have to be able to step away from it. Disconnecting from tech­nol­ogy and just enjoy­ing life is the best thing that you can do for your­self.

Thanks for read­ing,