Okay, I'll admit the only way to take a true blog vacation is to simply stop publishing for a period of time and focus on something other than your organizational or personal blog.
Another blog vacation option people suggest frequently - at least to me - is rerunning blog content that's previously appeared. For whatever reason, republishing an evergreen blog post seems like junking up your own part of the web with duplicate content. It's bad enough when someone else grabs your content and re-publishes it without doing it to yourself in order to take a break.
What to Blog About - 8 Ways to Take a Blog Vacation
As part of my own ongoing exploration of how to devise a blog vacation to work on other projects, here are eight ideas for various ways to arrange a blog vacation:
1. Cut back one blog post weekly for a specific period of time.
This is kind of the “Fridays off during the summer” strategy applied to blogging.
2. Create a compilation post with evergreen content on a specific theme.
Depending on how well your content is categorized and how deep it is, this can take longer than expected.
3. Update an evergreen blog post with new information.
This variation on rerunning blog content can create two pieces of fresh content with lesser effort if you run a new post calling attention to the update.
4. Write extremely short posts or publish only photos during your vacation.
By reducing your standard blog post length to perhaps 10% of its normal number of words you can create more content in less time. This works well if your strategy is to stockpile content ahead of time.
5. Feature only guest blog posts during your vacation.
As with other strategies, this can one can take a deceptively long time to solicit, edit, and publish the guest blog posts.
6. Put a starting topic in place and let your readers build on and refresh it.
I participated in an experiment such as this on someone else’s blog. They left an “on vacation” post and pre-invited regular readers and fans to build on the topic or take it in new directions through comments.
7. Adapt evergreen content from multiple posts on your blog into a single post.
This strategy has been working for creating content to support a weekly newsletter I write. It’s pretty efficient to compile content on a specific theme as a starter and then rewrite it to make new and updated points.
8. Adapt content from varied posts into questions readers effectively use.
This strategy adds new value to evergreen content. Taking sentences and paragraphs and turning them into questions and diagnostics provides new usability to content.
Your thoughts on taking a blog vacation and figuring out what to blog about to save time?
What other ideas have you tried or do you have for creating the space for a blogging vacation? – Mike Brown
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