By Javacia Harris Bowser, See Jane Write Magazine Founding Editor
With the winter holidays upon us, chances are you going to need to take some time off from blogging. Maybe you’re traveling to visit family and friends for Christmas. Maybe your in-laws are coming to visit and you know you won’t have time to write while they’re in town. Or maybe you’re facing end-of-the-year burnout and you just need a break.
Just because you go on vacation doesn’t mean your blog has to as well. Updating your blog regularly is important for building and maintaining a loyal readership.
Here are three tips to keeping your blog fresh while you’re away.
Blog like crazy before your break. Grab your laptop and your notebook of post ideas and head to your favorite coffee shop. Spend the day writing and scheduling blog posts for your time off. Keep the posts short and sweet, but meaningful. Be careful not to sacrifice quality for quantity.
While you’re preparing for house guests, invite guest writers to your blog. Recruit a few friends to do guest posts for your site. Offer to do the same for them for their next vacation. Be sure your guest bloggers are writing about topics related to your niche and in a voice that is distinct but not so divergent from yours that they’ll scare off your readers.
Take your blog (and your readers) on vacation with you. If you love to take pictures when you travel, simply turn those snapshots into blog posts. Don’t feel you have to spend hours of your vacation writing wordy posts. Just upload pics from your photo and create mini-photo essays for your blog.
When you return from your hiatus, regardless of the reason for your break, be sure to come back strong with a thoughtful, high quality post that your readers will love and that will remind you why you started blogging in the first place.
This is really helpful! I already follow these tips myself, but I wanted to leave one piece of advice about blogging while traveling: Post info about travel AFTER you return home. I’ve heard of writers and non-writers alike sharing their travel plans on blogs and social media and then being targeted by criminals who rob their homes. (I know this is difficult–especially when traveling to a writers conference when you want everyone to know you’re there!) I love the idea of just sharing photos from a trip – that is less time-consuming and can easily be scheduled to post publicly in the days following a return home from a trip.