Reason #2 Not to Blog: "I can't post today, because…"
I’m teetering dangerously on the border of “practice what you preach” hypocrisy here, but you should let your readers know if you can’t post on a given day. That’s right: you should post even if you can’t post.
People understand that you have a life, and that lives involve responsibilities, and that some of those responsibilities will interfere with blogging. This doesn’t mean you can cheat all the time and be like “It’s laundry day today, so no new blog post.” If you’re that frivolous, then you aren’t really committed to posting regularly, and in response, your readers won’t commit to reading regularly. This is due to what is known as (or will be known as, in just a second) The Flakiness Reflection Rule, which states that your readers will give approximately as much of a crap about your blog as you appear to give. Put another way: if you want your readers to read your blog on their laundry day, you need to be willing to post during yours. Pretty simple.
In my case, I had a family tragedy yesterday, which is a little tricky, since it’s wicked personal and inherently touchy. But I could have posted something like: “I have to take a personal day off from the blog today. Sorry everyone – I’ll be back on schedule tomorrow.” (Post title: “Personal day”)
Boom – done. It’s that easy. If, say, we’re in Opposite World and I have thousands of readers who check their RSS feeds or my site itself and expect something new from me everyday, they don’t have their rhythm thrown off, and their trust in me stays rock-solid—again, as long as my “personal days” don’t start recurring too often…which you’ll find is hard to do when you are posting publicly about them, and you can see yourself how frequently it’s happening. (It’s much, much easier to slack off if you don’t bother checking in…in which case the Flakiness Reflection Rule will result in your readers finding it easier to not check in too.)
Unfortunately, my tragedy was also basically a day-long emergency, which is pretty much the one time you can be completely excused from blogging. Not coincidentally, such circumstances generally excuse you from almost all real-life responsibilities—and that’s a pretty good yardstick to use. If you’re serious about your blog, and you’ve established a frequency, then keep up with it by hook or by crook, except in the most extraordinary of cases. And if you aren’t going to be posting on a day that people will be expecting you to post, post and tell them that, and why.
WordPress allows you to post-date your entries, meaning you can write your posts in advance and set the time and date they will go “live”. So if you have a planned absence, where you literally won’t have time to even post a note (or you would rather not have to), then write it the night before and set it to appear in the morning. Easy peasy lemon-squeezy.
If you’re really clever and proactive, you could write up a handful of posts and keep them “in the can” as drafts, to be brought out on those days when life (or just a crappy mood or whatever) gets in the way of blogging on schedule. Just bust out one of those drafts on those days, or pre-schedule them the night before, lemon-squeezy style. (See the previous paragraph, in case you skipped that for some reason. And stop skipping my stuff, man!)
To make up for my own transgression (because I know in my heart I could have popped off a quick note yesterday despite circumstances), I will be posting at least once more today. Which, in case it’s not obvious, is a nice way to make it up to your readers if you do happen to have to take a day off.
Have questions? Lame excuses for me to shoot down? Post them in the comments! :-)