Have you ever run out of steam stopped posting for awhile? Ever decided to go on a vacation sans computer but were worried about your blog? What do you do?

All of us from time to time need to stop posting. Whether its the need to “refill the well“, take care of a family emergency, or simply to get away from it all something is going to happen to make you stop posting eventually. How you handle that away time can mean the difference between losing readers and not losing readers.

The first consider how the readers get to your content. Do they read mostly via feed or are there people directly navigating to your site to check for updates? If the readers are using a feed reader, are they likely to be reading many other feeds or just a few? The readers that get to your content via direct navigation are likely to notice that you haven’t been blogging. The ones that use feed readers more will take several weeks to notice. It is important to consider when the reader realizes that you stopped writing because thats when she considers if it is worth continuing to read your posts.

If your audience primarily uses feed readers then play the strong silent type and not say anything. Provided you start writing before they notice you’ll lose nothing. However if you make an announcement you are likely to lose a few readers.

Is there a caveat to the strong silent method? Of course there is, if you are a power blogger you can’t do that. A power blogger is someone who has several thousand subscribers and posts a minimum of once a day. These types of bloggers get noticed when they go silent. The power bloggers should consider saying aloha to their readers and getting a guest writer. Of course they already know that… thats why they are power bloggers.

So for the mere mortal blogs? Play it cool and keep quit!

Filed under: Misc — Scott @ September 18, 2007 4:04 pm

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