When the holidays roll around, we people worry about packing on the pounds. But your blog has a tendency to lose the ability to throw its weight around.
More distractions, parties, and yeah, good food means we’re more prone to neglect our blog writing during the holidays – and that means your blog looks mighty lean come the new year.
So how do you avoid slimming your blog down during the holidays when you have other stuff to do? Here are three ways to keep your blog nice and solid.
(As for managing your own weight, you’ll have to find a different blog. I, for one, intend to eat so much pumpkin pie that my freckles nearly turn to cinnamon and nutmeg.)
Store Up for Winter
During the fall, lots of animals store up food for the lean months ahead. That way, when winter rolls around, they don’t have to spend precious energy foraging in the snow to find food. The other reason they store up food is that they know they can’t find any food out there even if they tried, but I don’t have an analogy for that particular aspect of animal behavior, so let’s focus on saving energy.
You don’t have a lot of energy to spare when the holidays are here. Your relatives are in town, your mother’s stressing you out, you have food to cook and presents to buy and very possibly some sort of holiday-timed disaster to cope with. Your washing machine knows there’s no time like the day between major holiday parties to break down, too. It’s wise. It’s onto your plans.
What with the washing machine’s evil machinations and everything else to take care of, you’re not going to want to blog much.
So do as the squirrels do and store up for the winter. Look at your calendar and figure out the days that you’re going to be busy with holiday-type-things. Then go write a post for each of those days. Right now. Make yourself a big ol’ stockpile, and you’ll never lack fresh fodder.
And should you happen to think of a great holiday post to write about the washing machine fiasco? Then you’ll have a head start on next year.
Maintain a Solid Diet
As you start building that stockpile of posts, the temptation to bang out light, fluffy pieces just to fill in the blanks happens. That’s a good idea when you’re exhausted and you just need to slam up a post really quickly before morning comes. You can get away with it once, but if you feed your blog light little fluff pieces all the time, it’s going to become airy as a helium-filled meringue.
Delicious as that sounds, it’s not what you want people to associate with your blog.
Make sure that your posts are solid fare. If you have to, go through and compare the posts you’ve just written to the posts that have been most popular since you started writing. Are they up to that standard? Are they even close?
If not, re-write them. Feeding your readers this sort of meager stuff means they’re going to seek out their meals elsewhere – and eventually they won’t even bother to show up to your blog to whet their appetite. By the time the holidays end, you could’ve lost them all.
Get Some Exercise
This one’s the same whether you’re trying to keep the pounds off your butt or if you’re trying to keep the readers ON your subscriber list.
Without exercise, your hips are going to widen with all the holiday indulgences. Without exercise, your blog is going to waste away to nothing. Its muscles atrophy and its strength dwindles. It will be so weak that a newborn baby chick could knock it down and call it its bitch.
So what’s exercise, to a blog? Your exercise involves going for a run. Your blog, remarkably enough, needs much the same.
We’re talking about running around to other blogs and leaving a comment. Plan yourself a regular course to run a certain number of times a week. Blogs you enjoy that you know also create strong content – because having an exercise buddy makes it much more likely that you’ll keep working hard, too.
That course you’ll run also means you’ll be drawing readers from strong blogs to your own, at a time when other blogs lacking attention get weaker and weaker.
And way less impressive.
Your turn: What plans do you have for your blog during the upcoming holidays? How will you keep your blog in its weight class?
