One of the downsides of being a stay at home sole blogger is that on days when you can’t blog (because you are on holidays, sick or.moving house – your blogging can grind to a standstill.
Having just had a few very light days of blogging and today logging onto the internet I’m feeling somewhat overwhelmed by the vast quantities of emails, comments to check for spam and questions, unread RSS feeds that just 36 hours without being online has meant. I’m still at least 24 hours away from resuming normal’ blogging activities as I don’t have my office set up and will be relying upon dial up internet from home for up to another week (I’m currently sitting on the floor in my empty old house blogging with the broadband that is still there).
Professional blogging brings with it quite a lot of administrative tasks that accumulate very quickly – more quickly than you realize until you take a day or two off. I guess when I blog most days I am able to pace myself and gradually pick off each task one by one – but miss a day and you’re behind the eight-ball.
This leaves me feeling a little worried about the 4 week trip that I’m taking in June. If I’m overwhelmed by the admin of 36 hours of being online – imagine what happens after 28 days! Not to mention the apprehension of wondering what happens to a blog when you don’t post on it for a month
So how am I preparing for my upcoming trip? Here is the strategy so far:
– Guest Blogging – I’m attempting to find a few bloggers to help out with some of my higher profile/most visited blogs. I’ll post about this in the next day or two but I’ve decided that on my bigger blogs that I’ll be paying for a couple of bloggers to keep things running. On the smaller blog I’ll be hoping for a few volunteers that’ll do it for the love of blogging and the links back to their blogs that they’ll get. Readers of ProBlogger will be pleased to know that I’ve signed up a rather large and diverse group of bloggers to keep this blog ticking over.
– Advance Posting – On a few blogs I’ll have some posts written in advance – ready to be added when the date and time ticks over – this will keep the illusion of an up to date blog for casual readers. It won’t work on some of the more time sensitive news blogs – but on others it will work fine.
– Blogging from the Road – I’m planning to do a few blogging sessions from the road from net cafes and relatives places. Whilst I don’t want blogging to dominate my holiday I’m resigned to the fact that there are some things that guest bloggers can’t and shouldn’t be asked to do. This will include tasks like dealing with spam comments which come to my inbox. I’ll also attempt to fill in the gaps a little on some posting duties where I can’t find a guest blogger – I’d like to at least keep each blog with posting once or twice per week.
– Letting Go – There is of course going to need to be a relaxing of my standards of blogging. 25 posts per day isn’t a reality, responding to every email quickly isn’t either. I guess some of my blogs I’ll simply have a note that the blogger is on holidays.
What would you do if you couldn’t be online for a month but you wanted to keep your blogs ticking over and earning an income? Interested in your thoughts.
Darren Rowse is the founder of ProBlogger.net, a blog about the many ways of adding an income stream to blogs.
Darren owns and writes a variety of blogs including Digital Photography Blog and Camera Phone
Zone. He is also a co-founder of the Breaking News Blog Collective.
