HOW TO: Autopilot your blog and social media accounts whilst on holiday

There is going to come a time for every blogger when they are going to take a break from blogging. So what do you do with your blog and social media accounts whilst you are gone ? You need to put them on autopilot. If your blog relies on social media accounts as a strong traffic source then you cannot just not touch these as you will be loosing traffic and on Twitter people may begin to unfollow you if you have not tweeted for more than a week.

Thankfully there are many tools available online that you can use to set your WordPress blog and social media accounts to run by themselves.

Pre-blog 

With WordPress you do not have to publish your post straight away; instead you can set a time and date for your post to be published. This is great if you are taking a holiday and still want to publish posts to your readers. Before you go on holiday, write some posts for your blog and then you can use WordPress to publish them automatically at your desired time and date.

By doing this you do not have to let your readers know that you will not be blogging for a while. The main reason that i do this is to make sure that I do not lose any of my regular readers who may think i have decided to stop posting as often.

Get others to write content

If you have had people guest write for your blog before then why not ask them to do some writing for you again whilst you are on holiday. They will benefit from direct traffic from your website as well as backlinks. Furthermore if you do not normally do guest blogging then there are many freelance bloggers out there who will be willing to post content to your blog, however you will have to pay them.

Use Hootsuite

I use Hootsuite everyday to post to my Twitter account at night so that I can benefit from the traffic of people in other time zones and this works very successfully. However you could use Hootsuite to easily manage your Facebook and Twitter accounts when you are not there. Just set Hootsuite to tweet everyday from your social media accounts and no one will know that it is not you.

You may also want to let your readers know in your bio that you are on holiday just in case they may tweet to you and not get a response  or you may not follow them back and they may unfollow you.

WordPress & Twitter mobile

Okay, this may not be technically leaving your blog ad Twitter account on autopilot, but whilst you are on holiday you can easily use the Twitter and WordPress mobile applications to keep you online accounts in order. I like to just spare five minutes a day to check my blog is running smoothly and follow people on Twitter as well as telling them what I am up to so they do not think that my account is a robot and I do have a human side.