Blogging on Location

Are you at home? You know, one of the great things about running a blog is that you don’t have to be at home. I’m on location! I’m typing this now from a secret location, known only to my most loyal of disciples. Muhahaha…

Well, not actually, as I type this now, I’m visiting some relatives for the holidays, and just taking a few days off from my regular job to spend time with the family.

But I am still able to check in and keep up with Riches Corner. Not only that, but my online passive income strategies are still working for me.

There are a few ways to streamline your blog to stay active when you are away from home.

Design your Theme to Highlight Old Content

These methods can also help with your bounce rate, but have you ever thought about the benefits of pointing out some of your other content on your blog as a method to give your readers more content to read than just your most recent post?

Most blogs just publish their new blog posts to the top of their list of articles, pushing the rest of the content down into the ether. The most common problem with the default method is that your older posts get lost into the archive. Out of sight, out of mind.

Every blogger is conscious of this problem. It creates a constant pressure to create new content, otherwise your front page gets stale and people stop coming to your blog. In effect, this is one of the most fundamental reasons why many will recommend a very high post frequency.

However, once you have enough old content on your blog, you can highlight your older posts and continue to keep your front page fresh.

On Riches Corner, my theme is designed around highlighting all of my content, including my older posts.

On my front page, I have a news slider displays several of my newest articles. If your theme does not have a built in slider, you can look into a plugin such as featurific.

The second thing that helps with my theme, is that I set my home page to display random posts from my archive, that refreshes each day, and my traditional list of blog posts I’ve put onto the second page in my navigation bar.

As I have enough content in my archive, there is a large variety of posts that are displayed on my front page. This gives my readers something different to read on a daily basis.

The third thing you’ll notice that is build into my theme is the category list under the content. This gives a good table of content style list of my other articles. It makes it easy for visitors to go through my lists of posts and find helpful articles.

Starting off your blog with the right theme, can help out with your blogging endeavors in the future. I selected Hybrid News which is a free premium theme because it supports the features that I discuss above.

In addition to the features included in my theme, I also use plugins such as tweet old posts to tweet out my old content to my twitter followers.

Updating with New Posts when you are Away

Using these methods alone are good for highlighting my old content. But I also keep my blog active with new posts as well. I try not to go more than 3 days without posting.

In this case, If you are away for an extended period of time, you can write several posts in advance and pre-schedule them to post while you are away.

This is a great feature, particularly for wordpress blogs.

However, if you are like me, you may not like to schedule post, preferring to publish as you go. In that case, then you can set up your blog to publish remotely.

This is easy if you have access to a full web browser, since you can log right into your blog and write up a blog post as you would normally do at home.

However, if you only have access to email, you can also set up your blog with a secret email account just for publishing posts. Most blogging platforms have this feature in the admin section of your blog.

You can assign a secret email address for your blog. This email address can then be set up to automatically publish emails that are sent there as posts. Using this method, I’ve even been able to update with new blog posts just using an iphone.

Final thoughts (and a Passive Income Tip)

Blogging is one of the few business that you can run successfully on the go. Much of your success will depend on the planning that you put into your blog in the beginning.

By setting up your theme and plugins to highlight some of your other content, you not only lower your bounce rate, but you can give your readers more to read when life keeps you absent from the computer.

Now, since I am away from home, I did want to end this with a passive income tip.

One of the features on Riches Corner is an active job board. My job board is updated automatically with new postings directly from here as well as a large supply of backfill projects. The supply of backfill projects, the search functionality and the automatic updates to my twitter account are several reasons why I use the donanza job board.

These features keep the content on my job board updated frequently, so that the job opportunities never get stale. This again matches my goal of having a dynamic and useful theme.

A job board not only keeps your blog updated with new, useful content, but it also supplies a steady source of passive income for your blog as people post new listings and apply for jobs.

Once you’ve set up a job board, you have a completely passive source of income that also supplies great value for your blog.

You can read more about how to set up a Donanza Job Board in this article.

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About Richard  (243 Posts)

Richard is a full time professional, husband, father and blogger juggling all the responsibilities of life and running a blog. Richard enjoys writing about life and online money matters.