5 Tips for Managing Your Blog When You Go Away

Whether you need a long weekend to unwind or you're planning an extended vacation or business trip, sometimes life calls for a little blog vacation. This is when either you walk away from blog management completely for a while or when you alter / decrease the time you spend on your blog while you're away. But when you need time off, how can you keep your blog updated, keep visitors coming back, and keep income flowing in?

Here are five things you can do to make sure your blog keeps functioning as usual (or as close to usual as possible) while you're away:

  1. Pre-schedule new blog posts. -- If you want to minimize lost traffic while you're gone, you can keep your blog updated by writing new blog posts early. Schedule the publish date and time for each post and you'll have fresh content appearing until you come back. Since I generally post on Fridays here and Friday is a day off for me, I usually take the pre-schedule approach (including with this post).
  2. Schedule guest posts. -- Another option is to bring in a guest post (or a few) from different bloggers or others in your niche. You can either pre-schedule these like I mentioned above (meaning you don't have to personally write a bunch of new content before leaving), or you can set up login info for each guest poster and let them post their articles while you're away.
  3. Hire someone to fill in. -- If you can afford to hire another blogger in your niche or industry to fill in for you while you're taking time away from your blog, that can be a good option for extended breaks.
  4. Swap blogs. -- Can't afford to hire help while you're away? Consider an equal barter -- they'll fill in for you X posts per week while you're on vacation and you'll do the same for them on their blog when they're on vacation down the road. Hiring someone just to approve comments and delete spam while you're off can also help by letting conversations continue. If they sit in moderation everyone else is essentially placed on hold.
  5. Blog about your time off. -- While not ideal if you're on a restful vacation, some time away from regular work actually lends itself to interesting blog posts. For example if you're away doing something work-related -- a conference or writer's retreat perhaps -- blogging while you're away might be fun and interesting to both you and your readers.

Not all of these will apply to you on your next blog vacation, big or small. But perhaps one will give you a way to maintain your blog's traffic and keep your audience happy while you enjoy a little extra time to yourself (or with loved ones). Have other blog vacation tips to share? Leave a comment and tell us how you manage your blog when you go away.

Profile image for Jennifer Mattern

Jennifer Mattern is a professional blogger, freelance business writer, consultant, and indie author. She runs numerous websites & blogs including All Freelance Writing, Freelance Writing Pros, NakedPR, and Kiss My Biz.

Jenn has 25 years' experience as a professional writer and editor and over 20 years' experience in marketing and PR (working heavily in digital PR, online marketing, social media, SEO, new media, and thought leadership publication). She also has 19 years' professional blogging and web publishing experience (including web development) and around 18 years of experience as an indie author / publisher.

Jenn also writes fiction under multiple pen names and is an Active member of the Horror Writers Association.

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3 thoughts on “5 Tips for Managing Your Blog When You Go Away”

  1. Great points, Jenn.

    Strangely, I’d never thought of #4 before but I can imagine this being a really good idea, if you know another blogger than you can trust.

    It’s given me food for thought, as I’m expecting to be able to spend less time on my own blogs for the first few months of 2011, so I might look into the possibility of some type of exchange with another blogger, where I would repay the favour later on in the year.

    Great stuff!

    Reply
  2. I love your suggestion to pre-schedule posts. Before you know you’ll be away, you can spend a little time each day writing up posts that will get published while you’re on vacation. Asking users to guest post can also help, and doing so eases stress, since you’re not writing out all of the posts that will need to get published. Your readers also stay happy.

    Christina

    Reply
  3. I have my 3-Day, 60 Mile Walk for Breast Cancer coming up the weekend before Thanksgiving. I am going down to San Diego the weekend before so I’ll be there all week before the Walk.

    I do plan on working during the week (except on Friday, the 1st day of the walk-it’s so hard to manage a laptop for 20 miles a day :-)) so I’ll be doing some pre-scheduling.

    I’m with Dan, I never thought of #4 – good idea. I always learn something new here. Okay, I’ll remove my lips from your derriere now – some of us ARE working. 😀

    Reply

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