While you may be planning to take a holiday from blogging, keep in mind that your prospective customers will still be online looking for information – maybe even more than usual if they have some holiday down time.
Here are five ways to keep your blog working for you and still have a holiday for yourself:
- Pre-schedule your holiday posts – Have an epic idea for this week’s blog post? Divide it into two or more shorter posts and pre-schedule the rest of the series to publish over the holidays.
- Share links to older posts – Even if you haven’t planned ahead to pre-schedule new content, you can still use your blog to get people’s attention and demonstrate your value. Use Buffer or Hootsuite to pre-schedule teasers with links to posts that have timeless value. As Julia Borgini of Spacebarpress commented on my post at Social Media Today, you can make it a weekly habit all year round to mine your blog content for timeless gems.
- Keep your readers busy – In each post, embed links to older posts about related topics. In your blog’s sidebar, provide a search box, list of categories, and links to recent posts. All of this makes it easier for people to continue browsing the content and information that’s already on your site.
- Use related posts plugins – Tools such as YARPP and LinkWithin accomplish this in another way by automatically displaying related posts at the bottom of the page, so your readers are guided to keep reading.
- Brag about your blog (a little) – When you’re catching up with people at holiday gatherings and they ask what you’ve been up to this year, mention, “We started a blog,” or, “We really ramped up our blogging.” Let them know there’s a wealth of valuable information on your site, for themselves or someone they know.
If you’ve been blogging consistently through the year, congratulations, you deserve a holiday! If you haven’t, rest up and get ready to make a new start in 2014.
I’ve been working hard on my blog and am wondering what the best time for posting new articles might be over the holidays. I think it is perhaps that time between boxing day and New Year’s.. ya know, that weird few days where things are in limbo, like you don’t know what side your bread is buttered LOL.
But as for scheduling posts with HootSuite: I always wonder what the Reach is like for this on Facebook. I’m pretty sure it has less organic Reach though I’m not sure if the same can be said for Twitter.
I recommend something called “Twitter Feed” for Twitter since that can be linked directly to your RSS feed. Then there is Future Tweets which allows you to preprogram Tweets years in advance (just make sure all Tweets are unique otherwise they will not get posted)
Hi Darren, thanks for your comments! I think it’s a good bet that some people will have more down time in that week between Boxing Day (or “the day after Christmas” for my US readers) and New Year’s. As many have been writing about lately, it’s getting much harder for businesses to be seen on Facebook without paying for ads – if not impossible. From what I’ve read you definitely get the best results posting directly to FB, and also if you include a picture rather than just a link (the picture appears larger if you load it separately, rather than just the thumbnail that appears with a link). I’m glad Twitter Feed is working well for you. Personally, I’ve been using Buffer and I’m very happy with it so far. I’m not a big fan of automating tweets right from the RSS feed because I like to add content besides the post title.