Don’t Let Summer and Holidays Kill Your Content Flow
‘Tis the season, where us Canadians enjoy Global Warming, pools across the world open and blogs everywhere go downhill. You may be going away, but your readers won’t be. There’s a couple of ways you can keep fresh content served up everyday, or how often you’d like.
Fill up the Backlog
The term “backlogging” basically means you write a whole bunch of posts, and hold them for later use. With WordPress, you can tell it to post these articles on an exact date and time. Perfect for holidays!
This suits a personal blog well, and in the summer there will be a two week gap where I’m away, but the content stream will run continuously. A good idea is actually not even disclosing you’ll be away, and let things go on as per usual, except emails and comments back up.
If you’re away to a place with good Internet access or WiFi, you can always tweak things and stay on top of comments, but chances are, that’s not the reason you’re on holidays in the first place.
Guest Posting
Exchanging guest posts really can do wonders for your blog if done right. Usually you’re going to want to stay in the same niche, or ask someone you trust to write a quality post. Depending on how well they write for you, and vise versa, there can be mutual benefits and a future of more guest posting.
Guest posting on a single author blog, however, may put off some readers with the change in style or bias. Also, you don’t want to overkill with a ton of guest posts. One everyday for two weeks, and you’ll come back to readers who don’t even remember you!
Syndication Mode
In drastic times, where you have to go away on short notice and don’t have time to get any guest posts written or backlog posts done, you can always just aggregate some feeds on your homepage. It sounds a little out of the ordinary, but take a few blogs that you know will be updating quality content throughout and just widgetize it on your front page.
Another way to do this is to go way back in your archives and find some good stuff and auto post that throughout the time away, noting at the top you pulled it from the archives.
When used in combination, a bunch of great posts in your backlog, a couple guest posts and posts from the past, and you’ll be set. When going away for elongated periods of time, getting hold of an Internet café or WiFi hotspot shouldn’t trouble you too much. But remember, if you don’t want your readership to curl up and die, you need to keep the content alive where ever you are.
Leave a comment
L3ggy
June 28th, 2007 at 1:42 PM
Very nice post. On my blog, soon to actualy open (properly), i will have the backlog system.
The Personal Development Blog
June 28th, 2007 at 7:34 PM
I will also use the time stamp function this summer. My blog is new and I wont take any chances with my readers loyalty just yet.
cherries
July 1st, 2007 at 6:36 PM
You can also easily do this with cron and PHP
set a timestamp with time(); and have a script that checks if the current time is >= the timestamp then post all the information
Andy
July 3rd, 2007 at 8:47 AM
Nice post. I disagree though, readers can vanish too, although obviously not all of them :p I’ve been so busy recently I’m a bit behind on my blog reading!
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