5 Crafty Ways to Maintain Blog Momentum While on Holiday

It’s summer and for the lucky ones of us that means holiday time. As it happens I am on holiday now… Could you tell?

We all know the feeling of posting religiously everyday and watching a blog grow, only to have a couple of days away without posting and coming back to see slumped traffic stats, earnings and ego. The last time this happened to me (I blame paintballing) I vowed to myself never to let it happen again.

5 Crafty Ways to Maintain Posting

1. Pre-writing posts in full and then using the Wordpress timestamp to set them to post automatically when you are away. This is a commonly known method but few bloggers seem to make use of it.

2. Having guest bloggers take over. This can be difficult if your blog is not yet popular enough for it to be worth the guest bloggers time, but you get what you give, so if you have helped a fellow blogger out in some way, asking them to guest blog on a small blog is an opportunity for them to return the favour. Their payment is in the link to their blog, as well as a renewed friendship with you.

3. Hiring a blogger to post. This is distinctively different to having a guest blogger. The reward for the writer is cold hard cash. While this method is more costly, it can be more reliable, because the cash incentive is likely to make that blogger have the post ready in good time.

4. Changing your posting routine early. This is a sneaky one and may not suit ambitious bloggers. As we know, you control how often your readership visits your blog. If you are aware you are going to have a few weeks when access to a computer will be on-and-off then it may be an idea to wind down the posting over a period of several weeks. This way, it will be perfectly normal when you go a few days without posting. This results in a drop in search engine traffic but it keeps hold of the loyal readers.

5. Conduct an ‘archive rummage’ (a newly coined term). This is where you write 2 or 3 posts consisting of links to the best posts in your archives. You then timestrap each post so each day your readers have links to your old posts to check out. Be sure to think carefully about which posts to link to. This method brings up exiting opportunities to bring posts together and make new connections. It has the added benefit of cleaning up the internal linking structure which is good for SEO and each trackback to your previous posts (even if they are from another post on the same blog) count as links to that post, giving it higher search engine ranking.

Technorati Tags: posting, blog, guest bloggers, Hiring a blogger

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