How to keep your blog active while you are away on holiday

Bloggers take unnecessary breaks from blogging when travelling. I was on a trip last week and with a bit of planning I was still able to keep the blog alive and active.

Going away on holiday can result in lost momentum for your blog. The blog would be inactive, the latest article would have been published some time ago and there would be no recent comments. This will not give a good impression to new visitors or to the potential advertisers, and it might scare them from subscribing or contacting you.

It is a good idea to take a break from blogging to travel and get new inspiration but it does not mean that you need to let your blog die because of inactivity. Following are the steps I have taken to keep my blog active while I was away.

Write your blog articles in advance

You know how long you will be away. You know if you will have an internet connection and time to get some writing done while you are away. Analyse these factors and plan in advance. Write the needed amount of articles, style them and keep them ready to be published.

Schedule your blog posts to be published automatically

Schedule the articles you have written to be published automatically according to your regular blogging schedule. WordPress TimeStamp feature makes it easy to publish your blog articles automatically.

Set your blog comments free

Comments are the lifeline of your blog. I prefer to manually approve comments, but as I did not want the discussion to die out I set Akismet WordPress plugin to do all the work.

In WordPress settings in “Discussion” I usually have “Comment author must have a previously approved comment” checked. By removing this you let Akismet automatically approve comments.

There is a risk that one or two spam comments will go through the filter but I find Akismet generally does a great job.

Automate your blog promotion

• Having a large RSS / email readership is a great promotional tool. Your loyal readers will not only read your article, they will comment on it, they will Tweet it, they will Stumble it and more. Make sure to setup your FeedBurner to include different social media bookmark links in the feed to let your subscribers easily share your content.

• Help your blog visitors do the promotion for you by including a Tweet This plugin to your blog articles. “Tweet this” now supports Digg, StumbleUpon and other social media sites as well.

• I also schedule TweetLater to automatically send out a couple of tweets announcing my new blog articles. It results in clicks to your blog from your followers, and it also helps the promotion as people do retweet interesting tweets.

These simple steps can assure you that your blog is not asleep why you are away on holiday. Your visitors will read fresh content, comments will be moderated automatically and you will be able to relax and recharge your batteries.

Image by Wili Hybrid