Blog Down? Don’t Forget These 7 Steps

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Every blog experiences an outage or two in its life time. If you have been blogging for a few years and have never had to deal with crashes, slow downs, and hack attacks, you may want to try buying a lottery ticket. The rest of us will have to deal with these headaches from time to time. When these things happen, your first instinct could be to just fix what’s wrong with your blog. That is a good idea as long as you don’t forget about your loyal visitors. Leaving them in the dark and not updating them on your blog’s situation is never a good idea. If you take the time to explain to your visitors what you are experiencing, you have a better chance of retaining your loyal audience.

If you have been experiencing blog outages recently, you want to take the following steps to keep your audience in the loop:

• keep your readers in the loop: just because your website is down 10 PM at night does not mean people do not check your website. If you are doing a major redesign or are having serious hack attack issues, you want to make sure you let your audience know about them. Your audience could get discouraged with you and your business if your site stays down for long. Things can be even worse if you don’t take the time to update your readers on what’s happening on your site.
• use your communication channels: sometimes, your blog could go down for just a few minutes. That is not a huge issue. Anything beyond that should concern you. While you may not be able to bring your site online in certain situations, you should let your visitors know what’s going on using your Twitter and Facebook accounts. A newsletter update would not be too bad either.
• find other ways to provide value: can’t access your blog? Use your YouTube account to stay in touch with your visitors. Try a radio session on Blog Talk Radio. At the very list, you can have a special podcast or two until your website comes back up.
• share what issues you have experienced: some site issues can take a while to fix. Let’s say you are having huge issues with your web hosts and want to move your site to another server. That can take some time. It never hurts to share what you have experienced with your audience. It would be easier for people to connect with you and your brand if you are being honest about your site’s issues.
• ask for advice: have trouble solving your blog’s issues? You can always ask your Twitter and Facebook friends. Writing a blog post explaining your problems and asking for suggestions would not be a bad idea either.
• get back to your audience: if people write emails to you or send you direct messages on Twitter, chances are they expect a response. Don’t just ignore your audience. Even if you can’t bring your website back online, you should still get back to those who write for you.
• make it up to your visitors: bloggers do not necessarily have to do this. But if you do, it goes a long way towards making your community even stronger. Throwing a simple giveaway or giving away a free report are some ideas you can consider here.

No bloggers likes to deal with site issues. They happen to everyone. How your respond to these types of crisis can be a maker or breaker for your blogging business.