It happens to everyone who maintains a blog… life happens and your blog goes on a temporary “hiatus.” Often, the blog owner will issue a “blogging absence excuse letter” which goes along the lines of:
- “I’ve been really busy… too busy to post to my blog”
- “I’ve been really sick… too sick to post to my blog”
- “I’ve been traveling… so I couldn’t post to my blog”
- OR.. the absolute WORST Blogging Absence Excuse Letter I’ve seen:
Dearest Blog Readers:
Sorry there have been no posts lately. I have been out of town all week learning (oddly enough) to blog. Look for new posts, material and blog responses soon!
I’ve change the content to protect the blogger’s identity, but this post is currently the last post to the blog and it is dated February 2008. By the way, there were only a couple of posts to the blog before this one!
BORING! BORING! BORING!!! These blogging absence excuse letters are boring and destructive!!!
According to Darren Rowse over at ProBlogger.net, writes in his post Excuse Posts- How to Let Your Blog Go #6
The problem is that when you post a few posts like in a row it has an impact upon your readers and any sort of momentum that you might have created on your blog.
He also writes:
While I occasionally include a little personal information in my posts this information is generally shared in a ‘by the way’ type form or as an illustration to an ‘on topic’ post. As a result if something happens in my life that prevents me from blogging then I generally don’t post a post about it (unless it’s a very major thing – something that hasn’t happened yet thankfully).
Darren goes on to give you several tips for how to blog when you can’t blog. It’s a great post, a must read for most bloggers!
Most of the time, if you aren’t able to blog you probably don’t need to offer a public apology. The exception to this rule is if your readers begin to email you to see why you’re not blogging.
I have a client who lives in Cedar Rapids, Iowa who hasn’t posted to her blog in a few weeks. I know darned well why she isn’t posting… her entire town is under water!
When she gets dry and has power again, she’ll be able to regale her readers on her experience of surviving the great flood of 2008. Meanwhile, her priorities are to get her life back to a semblance of what it was pre-flood.
However, maybe you don’t have a good reason for why you haven’t been posting to your blog. You haven’t survived a flood, a hurricane, a tornado or any other natural disaster. Then I encourage you to at least make up a good story before posting your blogging absence excuse letter. Rather than offering the lame excuses offered above (including taking a class on blogging), try the following:
- “Sorry I haven’t posted. I’ll be posting ALL the gory details of my Alien Abduction (complete with pictures) after the nice gentlemen at Area 51 return my cell phone.”
- “I forgot to bring in the Sunday paper last weekend. When I found it on Monday, I thought Monday was Sunday. I’ve been running behind ever since!”
- “My time machine is malfunctioning. My trip to 2030 did not return me to my exact time of departure as I had planned. By the way, sell all your stocks and buy jars of chunky peanut butter and brownie mix. Turns out, the currency of the future is rare food.”
If you have a great blogging absence excuse post that you’d like to share, PLEASE feel free to leave a comment with your best. (I’m sure you can do better than I did above!)
