Many of you who are subscribed to my blog have noticed that I’ve taken a month-long vacation from all things blogging and social media related.
Not only has this given me a break so I can come back to this blog fresh rather than worrying about blogger burn-out, but it’s also been part of an experiment.
An experiment to find out just how my subscribers and social media followers react to a strong blog that pumps out great content every single day, then disappears for a month.
The Effects On My Blog
Yes, when you stop writing content for you blog for a month’s time, you’re going to lose traffic. My traffic numbers didn’t totally go away, but they did dwindle down quite a bit.
The key to keeping your numbers high when you take a blog vacation?
Work on your backlinks. Be everywhere.
The more places that are linked to you blog, the more links of yours show up in Google, the more traffic you’ll get even when you’re not writing.
But don’t expect to build that traffic overnight. It takes months, and even years to build enough backlinks to significantly keep traffic flowing when you’re away.
My subscriber count while not showing an astonishing increase, did actually show an increase rather than a decrease in subscribers. Which begs the question of whether all of the advice that’s been taught about how subscribers will leave if you don’t keep a consistant writing is really flawed.
From my experiment, I’ve concluded that subscriber numbers aren’t effected by a disappearance of one month. But the results could change if a blogger was gone for a longer period of time.
The Effects On Social Media
The effects my disappearance has had on my social media profiles is actually quite impressive.
I’ve increased twitter followers by at least 200 since my month-long disappearance.
The best way to do this?
Use websites that compliment your use of Twitter. Like Twitter Follower and others. They aren’t just here to look pretty. They actually can work in ways you haven’t though about before.
Have you taken a break from blogging before? How long? And what effects did you experience?
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My name is Steven Sanders and I'm a Professional Blogger, Izea Insider, Web Designer, Social Media Enthusiast, Dad, Husband, and Friend.
I am not sure or not if you have a friendfeed account but I am sure you heard the news or going to hear it soon. Everybody got an increase in subscribers over the pass few days. friendfeed subscribers now count in your feedburner subscribers count.
Yes, I know about the friendfeed count. But I’m not including that in my experiment results.
My subscription habits don’t include leaving blogs when they don’t update. I use Google Reader rather than, say, sign up for email. I don’t have any idea how many blogs I subscribe or how often many of them update. When a blogger comes back after a long lull, I’m happy to see them. I only unsubscribe when the content is bad.
Ditto to Tina. Some I wish would blog more, but if the content is good, infrequency is not a reason to get away from that good content!
Really – that is curious. I’ve never thought of such experiment, and Your results give an opportunity to learn something new. Sure its a great post.