What is the Summer Slump?
The Summer Slump is a dip in attention and traffic. It affects many areas of life and business, not just blogging. Round about now our audience is thinking about vacations, slacking off, going to the beach, spending more time outside and less at their computers. The slump pretty much covers the whole of summer and only picks back up around September. Blogs are affected in many ways
- Less traffic
- Slower subscriber and link growth
- Fewer comments
- Lower earnings
It all comes down to our audience having other things to think about.
So what can we do about the Summer Slump?
You have to keep the following in mind
- Summer is slacking time – Accept that many your readers will be off to sunbathe, the lake or the coast and will not want to be stuck in front of a computer
- But some of us have to work – Also understand that they will not all be away, you still have to serve your readers with great stuff
- Don’t be absent – Which means you have to have a strategy in place to allow your own time in the sun!
The people who still read your blog daily even though it is summer will be your hard core loyal readers. You want to keep giving them what they subscribed for, don’t let them down.
One solution is to make use of the fact that it is your core group sticking around and talk directly to them. Ask for reader submissions, do carnivals, surveys, ask questions, host guest posts, and generally interact.
If your traffic really tanks then it is also an opportunity. While nobody is looking you can do all the housekeeping, redesigns, long term projects etc that you might put off at busier times. Anything, such as moving hosting, where there might be unavoidable disruption. You want this to happen with the least amount of audience. It’s never good to mess your audience around but if its inevitable its best to do it with a smaller audience of core loyalists rather than a big audience of first-timers.
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Think Long Term
If you have free time now you could be building your flagship content and posts in draft ready for when you don’t have the time.
It takes some time to rank for competitive phrases. Right now you need to be thinking about future seasonal posts such as Halloween, Christmas, Skiing, etc. While it might sound crazy in summer to be talking about Christmas you do need this lead time to get up there in the rankings.
Invest the time now to reap the rewards later
Bottom line: Don’t slack off, the work you put in now will pay off later when the bulk of your traffic does come back.
Over to you, what are your Summer Slump solutions?
What do you do with your blog in summer? Are you seeing a drop off in traffic? Let me know in the comments …