Though short-form social media like Twitter and picture-based apps like Instagram seem to be taking over, many people still love the long-form content of blogs.
When you’re going out of town, maintaining your blog becomes a specific challenge, whether you write for friends and family or have a blog for your business. Figure out the style of out-of-town blogging that suits you best.
Use Blogging Apps
The most popular blogging platforms offer apps that make posting from a smartphone or tablet easy. For example, the WordPress app on both iOS and Android offers many tools that help you breeze through creating and posting blog content. You can format text and quickly post photos or videos with blogging apps.
For a blog that goes straight to your main website, try the Writer app. This word processing app for Android offers easy text formatting in a simple format. It can’t do much fancy stuff, but when all you want to do is format some text in a readable way, Writer is the tool you need.
Schedule Posts Ahead of Time
If you run a business blog, posting about your travels may not be relevant to your audience. When you’re going to be out of town, write enough posts to fill your typical blog schedule ahead of time. Then upload them to your blog, but schedule them to go live while you’re away. If you’re the kind of person who replies directly to comments as they come, leave a note at the end of each post stating that you’re out of town and that your response time might be longer than usual.
Set Aside Time Each Day to Write
When you travel for business, updating your blog about your business travels can be relevant and interesting. Along with your prescheduled content, write posts about the conferences, networking events, and industry fairs you attend. That means setting aside some time each day to create short, engaging posts.
If you’re a morning person, wake up half an hour earlier than you normally would to get your posts done. If you’re an evening person, set aside half an hour or forty-five minutes at the end of each day (or between dinner and late-night mixers) to create content that you can schedule to go live the next morning.
Get the Right Smartphone
In a perfect world, you’ll always have time to grab your tablet or laptop to type out a blog post. When you’re traveling, it’s rarely that easy, which means you’ll find yourself updating your blog from your phone. Apps are a big help when you have to update from your phone — and so is the phone itself. Blogging from T-Mobile’s HTC One M9 is easy because of its large display, and you can use the 20 MP camera to take and post great pictures of your travels over the fast, reliable 4G LTE network.
When you have a phone with a big screen and a good camera, you can avoid typing most of your content via your phone screen and post entries that feature photos instead. You’ll give your followers something visually interesting as a break from your normal text-heavy blog posts.
Take a Break
Sometimes you just need a break from blogging, and that’s okay! If you’re going on vacation, leave a post that says that you’re unplugging from the blog for the week. Let your followers know what day they can expect to find fresh content, and direct them to your other social media accounts, like Instagram, where you’ll be posting pictures and short updates centered around your travels.
Try facilitating a conversation in your absence by asking them about their favorite vacations or encouraging people to leave comments about the places they most want to go.
Each trip is different, so remember to be flexible when it comes to updating your blog. Scheduling posts ahead of time is always a good idea in case you end up without internet access or find yourself too tired to write. Have fun breaking out of your usual routine and posting from the road!
