Traveling and blogging are often in conflict with one another and it can be stressful for you as a travel blogger to maintain your writing when you’re active on the road. It’s important, especially if you want to establish and expand your travel blog, to maintain a weekly posting schedule by writing posts in advance so they’ll be up on your site even if you’re not in front of a computer. You can make better use of your scheduled posts by taking advantage of some “Internet slow time” and stretching out your blogging calendar.
Travel bloggers don’t often get many opportunities to take breaks from their blogs and rather than abruptly stopping your regular schedule as soon as your travel schedule picks up, choose some smart breaks from travel blogging.
Use The Right Holidays
You don’t want to write posts when people are unlikely to be reading. Using Google Analytics you can find out from which countries your readers are coming from and when they themselves are probably taking a break. A large majority of foXnoMad readers are based in the US, which is why I tend not to write on major American holidays. I’ve also found that many other English websites have a significant drop in traffic on days like Thanksgiving and Christmas. Don’t stress yourself out trying to write on these days and wait until the holiday is over to post your best stuff.
When You Guest Post
A day or two after a guest post of yours appears on another blog use the opportunity to take a break on your own site. You’ve written a post that will hopefully bring some new readers to your site and you can use the opportunity for a break if you need it. Taking the break a day or two after you guest post lets your new subscribers see some fresh material so you don’t lose them in those critical first few days.
Look At Your Last Few Posts
Sometimes you end up spending so much time obsessing on the posts to come that you don’t take a look back to see what you’ve recently been writing. Having a series of longer posts sets up a good opportunity for a break or a simple post with some links recapping those longer articles. It’s much better to link back to good past posts rather than put up crappy new ones.
Margin Of Error
Look at your blogging schedule, whether it’s once a week or 5 times a day and give yourself at least a 5-10% margin of error. That is, out of 100 posts you’ll take 5 or 10 breaks here and there. It’s an acceptable amount and one that’s no going to stress you out or significantly hurt your readership.
- Plan those breaks into your schedule in advance.
Why Take Breaks?
Many travel bloggers don’t start out with set schedules but once you get on track with one you may feel enormous pressure to deliver. On foXnoMad, I write once every weekday and before I organized my blogging schedule about 2 years ago, I’d find myself often struggling to write for the next day. I’d end up putting posts up that I didn’t think were of the best quality and my frustration writing them would show in the post. (Remember if you don’t like your posts your readers probably won’t either.) I’d dread blogging when I was traveling when it should be the opposite way around.
Travel Blogging Isn’t All Writing
We all need breaks and taking them improves the quantity of your posts and can be a good time to focus on other aspects of your blog that don’t involve writing posts (jotting down ideas, setting goals, etc). There are also plenty of quick things to post on your travel blog when you’re traveling too much to write.
Taking breaks from your travel blog can be a good thing if you choose your breaks wisely. Your travel blog won’t fall apart and everyone won’t forget you. The worst thing to do if you’re going to take a break is to not enjoy it, recharge, and worry about blogging the next day.
[photos by: notanartist, floodllama, Francesco Rachello]
