AdesBlog.com

Holiday, timestamp posts and guest bloggers

leave comment 

Going for a holiday soon? Then you should better get some arrangements going with some guest bloggers or you should pre-post (timestamp) some posts in advance.

If you are a full time blogger, you cannot afford to leave your blog idle for more than few days. Despite the fact that I have blogged some timestamp posts before going for my holiday, and asked HongKiat and Kumiko to guest-blog for me, as you can see from the graph my traffic still plunged quite badly.

Problem with timestamp posts
You can write posts in advance only so much, because it’s quite difficult to find topics that are time resistant. That makes your life even more difficult to write tens of posts that will be still readable after 1 or 2 weeks from the time that you wrote.

For me I couldn’t write many such posts, one of them was “4 Useful Tips to use Google effectively” and another “Effective advertising strategy using StumbleUpon” and few more. They helped to keep my blog alive, and other times I had to jump in to internet cafe and spend one or two hours to blog.

After all these, you can see from the graph that the traffic still dipped.

Recommendations
Here are some recommendations to bloggers who are planning a holiday soon. These are based on my own experience only.

1. Plan your holiday and everything else ahead
I was planning my holiday for the beginning of July, but when I visited travel agency at the end of June I found out that there was a ticket available on 27th June. So I thought why not? Earlier the better, but later I realized that there are so much work to be done, in a very short time. Time was too short for me to write (and find) time resistant posts. So if you plan to go for a holiday in the near future, start writing some posts and keep them as drafts. It will help you a lot, believe me!

2. Set arrangements with guest bloggers before you go for holiday
It’s important to find guest bloggers before you go for your holiday. Because when you are on your holiday, it will be difficult to start looking for them. I thought I could pull it off myself, but I was wrong. So I contacted HongKiat and Kumiko for help. Fortunately they were kind enough to write a post each. Thanks guys for that. I had also asked some other bloggers to guest blog for me, some of them were busy and some didn’t even reply. So as you can see, it’s really important to have arrangements before you go for holiday.

3. Check your email regularly during the holiday
I know some people want to go for holiday so that they can run away from internet and email for a while. However if you are a full-time blogger, you cannot afford to do that. Unless of course there is someone that can take care of your email.

During my holiday, I checked my email regularly. I could not check all of them, but I could reply to the important ones. Moreover I managed to close some deals with new clients. If it was not for these regular checks, I would have lost some very important deals.

Summary
I hope these tips will be helpful to you before you set for your journey. One more thing, don’t forget the charger of your digital camera! ;) I had forgotten mine at home, so I managed to shoot only few pics. Because the camera was not fully charged.

Let me know if you had any experiences with your travel and blogging. It would be interesting to know about them.

• What to expect when you are full-time blogger?
• Guide on blog posting frequency - part 3
• Popular Posts
• WP Plugin: BlogMetrics, stats snapshot on your dashboard
• Bye Advertlets.com