Fog of Eternity | Website design and discussion

A couple of days ago a reader expressed surprise that I had been adding posts to Fog of Eternity while I was on vacation. Fog of Eternity is a professionally focused blog and holidays are supposed to be getting away from work stuff. But a blogging holiday isn’t really a practical option for most of us.

A couple of weeks ago I had a few days inactivity and highlighted the negative impact on my traffic. That was a four day gap between posts and it saw visitor numbers decrease dramatically. But the numbers quickly returned once I was posting on a near-daily basis again. How long is the attention span for a blog audience though? Particularly the audience for a blog that’s still reasonably new and developing its traffic levels.

Bloggers are self employed

Self employed people take less vacation time, work longer hours, and spend more time working at weekends. The reason? They’re reliant on themselves as a brand and a business, and inactivity directly threatens their livelihood. There’s nobody to cover their vacation, clients will go elsewhere, and holiday time directly impacts the bottom line.

Even when we’re blogging part time while holding down a job, we’re still “self employed” when it comes to our online profile. Constant activity is vital. Our visitors are our clients, our traffic levels our bottom line even if we’re not monetising our blog. Most of us don’t have a huge reputation that would make those “clients” wait a week for us to get back from holiday, so they’ll go elsewhere. It’s not like there’s a lack of alternative options.

Falling down tired

Downtime is vital though. Even if we enjoy blogging it’s still important that we get time off. Otherwise we burn out, the quality of our posts decreases, and we offer less value to our visitors. There’s no real point blogging if you’re simply too tired to put together a coherent thought. It’ll have just the same negative impact on visitors as if you weren’t blogging at all - without even the added bonus of getting refreshed from a holiday!

So it’s important to find a balance that will allow continued worthwhile activity on the blog while avoiding total burnout. Blogging, like any job, needs a reasonable work-life balance.

Managing that time

At the moment I’m only semi on holiday. I’m travelling, but still doing a reasonable amount of work. So it’s not a major chore for me to continue to write posts as part of my working day. But even taking a complete recharge holiday there’s a couple of simple things that can keep a blog ticking over.

Write articles in advance

One of my favourite aspects of my move to WordPress is that I can save articles to be automatically published later. So if going on holiday I can write a number of articles and set WordPress to publish one each day. Of course it takes a certain amount of extra work preparing articles in advance - but that’s no different than clearing the decks at work before a holiday.

Other blog platforms have variable capacity for saving for future posts. All of them allow you to save draft posts, but some require you to manually post a saved draft. Automatic is easiest, obviously, but there’s reasonable functionality on most platforms.

Arrange guest posting

If you’ve got an active and engaged readership, some of them are likely bloggers too. Guest posting is in general a worthwhile thing to do. So why not kill two birds with one stone - ask some trusted readers to submit guest posts, which not only gives them profile but also keeps your activity up without increasing your workload.

Again there’s various options for doing this - you could give them authoring rights for your blog if you really know and trust them. Or you can simply accept submissions that you then upload to your blog yourself.

It’s never going to be completely painless

I’m always keen to hear further suggestions for ensuring that holiday time doesn’t seriously harm your blog. Those are the two options I think are most effective. That being said, blogging on a professional basis is still kinda of a job. Regardless of how well you plan and what contingencies you have in place, it’s important to acknowledge that there’s always going to be some work involved, holiday or not.

Filed under: Blogging by Robin Cannon

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