The end of the year can be a personal and holiday maelstrom. Hanukkah. Christmas. Kwanzaa. Kids are off from school. Family and friends are in town, or you’re traveling to them. Work projects need to wrap up before January. Or maybe you just want a week or two of down time to reflect and prepare for the start of a new year.
No matter the reason, lots of us want to simplify during the year-end whirlwind. One way to cut back? Don’t worry about your blog. Here are four ways to take a blogging break without losing your readers.
Wise words from American World War II propagandists. (Image in the public domain.)
Announce it
The easiest way to put your blog in a holding pattern for a few days? Just stop posting.
Don’t just disappear, though: let your readers know you’ll be taking a break and let them know when you expect to return. A short post announcing your time off and offering good wishes for the new year lets you and your readers click the virtual “pause” button on your blog while getting everyone excited for your triumphant return.
Eight nights of links
If you’d rather not go completely dark, sharing great links is a low-impact way to continue giving your readers useful content. Choose links that are seasonally appropriate or relevant to whatever holidays you celebrate, highlight the best posts you’ve read this year, or tailor the links to your blog’s topic. Share one to three links per post, and include a sentence or two explaining why people should click.
As with a roundup post, you can focus the links however makes sense for your site. And if you schedule the posts in advance, you can still take a personal blog break while the posts publish without you.
Blasts from the past
Along with scheduling posts in advance, you might also consider disabling commenting so you don’t have to monitor your blog at all. If you decide to disable comments, it’s nice to give your readers a heads-up and let them know that it’s a temporary change.
A simple way to continue sharing great content over a break is to share your own content — after all, not every reader has seen every post you’ve published, so the posts are new to them! We often do this on weekends here on The Daily Post; you’ll see them as posts titled “Perennial Favorites.”
Highlight your most popular posts, or use this as an opportunity to give posts that you were proud of but went unnoticed — we all have them! — a second chance to impress. You can either share links to the original posts, or paste the content into the new post. I’d recommend the latter, unless there was a great comment section in the original you don’t want folks to miss.
Invite guests over
One of my favorite ways to take a virtual vacation is to get friends to do the heavy lifting for me. Enter the guest post, where another person publishes a post on your blog.
Inviting guest posters in lets you publish new takes on familiar topics, adds exciting new voices, and introduces your readers to the other bloggers you love. It takes a bit more planning than posting links or republishing your own posts, but can have big payoffs, like increased engagement and traffic. Interested? Check out our primer on guest posters.
Are you taking a holiday break from blogging? Any plans?
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Header photo by David Shankbone (CC BY 3.0).
