Should you tell your readers that you are away for a bit?
Reason I ask is that I went away for the weekend, and my traffic dropped a bit, and it didn’t recover this week.
Of course, there may be a plausible explanation (my last two posts have been shit, I have full feeds, people didn’t want to dignify them with a comment), but could it be that by saying to people “I’m going to be away” people weren’t expecting content over the weekend, and even though I did post twice, the fact remains that people were discouraged to read.
Personally, I will keep telling people “I will be away for a bit, or doing this for a bit”, largely because I believe it keeps readers in the loop – and people are more understanding if they know you are away. If I feel the need to reply to comments, I generally try and do it the day after, so the fact is nobody will expect a response
Personally, I also believe that e-mail responses should take time, and people shouldn’t worry about not getting a response within half an hour, but that’s another story for another time. There was a good article on the BBC about it though.
But what would you do? Would you tell your readers you’re drinking yourself into a stupor in Guam or somewhere? Maybe you have. Did you experience a drop off in traffic?
Ironically, my feed subscribers have gone up. 125 subscribers baby!
Comments: 10 Comments
Rhys Wynne, the author of this blog, is a 20 something web designer from Colwyn Bay. 
im intrigued… how do you find out all these reader stats? i know mine is pretty much 0 but i didnt know such a thing existed lol
as for telling people… the idea was i came away and the blog was part of it so can’t really pass judgement.
Have to be honest if someone doesnt update for a day or 2 when there a daily i tend to check it more which is random and really stupid but hey… run an experiment
I don’t think going away for a day or two, and not blogging in the meantime, affects visitors too much.
But, from my experience, going away for a week definitely seems to reduce visitor numbers afterwards. Hell, people are so fickle.
I think its okay to tell your readers if you are going away, especially since you have a personal based log not a I’m a computer/robot type blog :c). You are human, you go on breaks sometimes. I think if you keep them in the loop its better. Wait to see if it picks back up. Interested to know if it does.
I don’t usually tell my readers unless I am going away for a week or more usually because I only blog once or twice a week (at the most) so it usually doesn’t matter too much. I have no idea about my stats as I only check once in awhile and that is usually to laugh about the search terms that land people on my blog.
I agree about e-mail responses too, I prefer someone taking longer to get back to me if they have put more thought into the email rather than a hurried short reply.
I don’t see the point in telling people if I’m not going to be available to blog from X point in time to Y, because even when I am around I don’t blog every day anyway. That said, if I were going away for something like a week I’d probably let a few people know so my readers don’t think I’m dead.
If I told people the real reason I wasn’t blogging (or rather wasn’t in the mood for blogging) I’d get stupid “aw” comments that irritate me.
You know what I’m talking about.
Well, obviously nobody visited because they subconciously knew I was also away from last Friday until today (Weds) so without my input in the comments, the posts are barely worth reading
it’s true Sibz… it’s good to have you back!
now you can tell us really what happened at the weekend… was rhys chasing the men again!?
Good question. I try to schedule posts ahead if I know ahead of time I will be gone so noone will even notice, but that isn’t always possible.
If you go a few days without blogging, your RSS subscribers go down for various Feedburner reasons. Once you post again, your subscribers should jump back to normal.
How do you tell how many feed readers you have?! Can you only do that with feedburner? 125? That’s a lot of dedicated people! Hehe
Perhaps all your readers went away for the weekend? It’s always a possibility….