Blogs don’t die, they go to sleep

No posts in 14 days, I should feel bad about it, but there are reasons: First, I went on vacation and directly after that, my body explained to me that the vacation wasn’t long enough, so it used a weapon I cannot resist, it went on strike. Hence, I’ve got the flu.

That will happen when you work too hard for too long, and only take 4 days vacation and, yes, it could not come at the worst of times because I had loads of stuff to do.  But you know what?  We always have too much to do, don’t we? It’s only a matter of time before we crash. So, I got a full week in bed, with high fever, sore throat, headaches etc…

Yet, I’m not complaining, because getting ill is really like a forced vacation and it does have its perks:

• You get time to think about life
• It really makes you rest without feeling guilty about it
• You only eat and drink what is good for you in that period
• When you smoke (I did 8 years ago), it’s a week without cigarettes, imagine that.

Not every illness is benevolent, of course, but a typical good old flu, or a serious cold can give you the opportunity to listen to your body. It is very important that through the work you do, you do not neglect your body. Yet, most of us do it time and time again and that is why Mother Nature invented a brilliant way to force you to a halt and think about what you are doing and what for.
And one of the things I have decided in my period of reflection is that I will not feel guilty anymore about not having written enough posts.  I do plenty of work outside the sites I have and there comes a point where you cannot work harder then you already do. And feeling guilty about dropping a penny here and there makes the pressure only worse.  It’s like stop smoking.  In a moment of weakness, you light up a cigarette and that gives a chain reaction of guilt and stress, eating away your resolve and energy.  It usually ends with chain smoking again because you think you are too weak to resist it anyway.

It’s the same problem many blogging entrepreneurs face by feeling guilty about not writing enough weekly posts, so they slowly fall behind until they simply let their blog die out.  But let me whisper something in your ear:

Blogs don’t die, they go to sleep

And they wake up again as soon as you pick up the pieces. Let me give you an example: I have an art site that is around for 11 years now.  In 2005, I started to write my own rss feeds with a simple RSS writer I found on the Add-on pages of Firefox(my favorite browser).  What I basically did was that I wrote a short description of a new artwork, with a thumbnail and a link where you could find it on the site (www.raboo.info). As soon as I used that method and submitted my rss feed to all the appropriate rss-directories I could find, traffic doubled in a matter of days.
Unfortunately, the type of artwork I create is not the sort that gives you a finished piece every week and I do not always have inspiration, so it happens that for months on end, nothing new happens on the site.  And indeed, traffic drops like a stone.  For about 2 years I didn’t do a thing about the site anymore, until I added some new stuff a couple of weeks ago, and bang, it went off again!  And that is not even a blog, it is a regular site, with a primitive handwritten rss feed. And the good news is that this goes for blogs as well.

So, before you think everything is hopeless, your blog can have as many new starts as you are prepared to give it. Therefore, feeling guilty about dropping that penny once it a while is a waste of energy.  Just start writing again. Some of your readers might have dropped out, I agree, but there are tons of others, even if you have a very small niche.

I wish you success!