My Blog Doesn't Need to be Babysat

by Donna Huber

It has been on very busy week. I wasn't even sure if I would even write a post for today. One, I didn't have a topic, and two, I wasn't sure I would have the time since I didn't get to it over the weekend. Let me tell you about my busy week and what I learned.

It is the end of the spring semester at the university that I work at which means it is time for my department's annual symposium. It is a large regional conference that usually last one day. Yet, this year we celebrated the 25th year of the symposium and expanded it to 2 days and a reception. As publicity manager I had a number of duties this year and wound up working nearly 12 hours on Tuesday, the first day of the symposium that ended with a reception.

As you may know, a couple of weeks ago I took on a new job: editorial manager of an academic journal. Of course, I had a deadline Wednesday. As you can probably tell Tuesday was extremely busy. When I wasn't needed for the symposium, I was attempting to ready manuscripts for production. There was little time for a bathroom break let alone an opportunity to manage my blog.

Typically I use a few minutes in the morning to send my posts to Google+ and linking up to any memes that the post is appropriate for. There was no time during the day and by the time I got home I was too exhausted to do anything more than get ready for bed. (I typically post about that days post on Facebook in the evenings).

Yet, my blog saw little negative impact. Actually page views were up compared to Monday. So what did I learn? I don't have to babysit my blog - it doesn't need to be watched constantly.

I have done a few things that makes my blog function independently.

1. Schedule posts. This is biggest lifesaver for a blogger. Getting all, or at least most of, the posts for the week scheduled over the weekend means my weekdays are a bit more free. The biggest problem I have with this is accidentally setting a post for 7:30 PM instead of AM. 
2. New posts are automatically tweeted. Occasionally there is a hiccup and a tweet doesn't go out, but in 4 years it has been a rare occurrence.
3. Connected to a few Tribes through Triberr, I might not have had time to share my own post, but my fellow tribe members share my posts. (I usually have a full day of posts scheduled in my Triberr stream so I was still sharing tribe posts on Tuesday and Wednesday).
4. Regular contributors. The post on Tuesday was a review by one of my staff reviewers - Claire. I had already told her the post was scheduled so she knew and was able to promote it to her own network.

The only negative impact I observed for Tuesday, was the post was set to be part of the 1st Chapter, 1st Paragraph meme. However, I didn't have time to link the post and, therefore, missed out on comments. A solution to this was to have asked Claire to link the post herself, but as it is a task I typically do I didn't think about needing to delegate it.

Now I wouldn't recommend never showing a little attention to your blog during the week. While I didn't get to do the morning routine on Wednesday, I did boost views with posting it on Facebook yesterday evening. But it is nice that everything won't fall apart if life gets little too busy once in awhile (and I think as bloggers we think things will).

Bottom line: Don't worry so much about leaving your blog unattended for a day or two.