Time Off Can Hurt You

Recently I went on a short trip.  Only four days.  I think I ignored the blog for about six days because of it.  I was trying to get some specific editing done before we left and I didn't have a whole lot of access to Wi-Fi while I was gone.  In fact, just typing that sentence I realize I got an email, which I read just before the plane brought us home, that I still need to respond to because I didn't want to try and type my response on my phone.

At First All Seemed Fine.

When I first got back I figured I had better write a blog post and get back into the groove of updating everyone regularly.  When I clicked over to check how many readers we had lost, I was surprised to find out that things had chugged along pretty nicely even without any new content being posted for days.  My numbers had dropped maybe 10% -20% from the week before.  Not bad considering there was nothing new to see.  This left me optimistically thinking that once I started writing again, the numbers would go back up to normal and then continue to grow as they had been before I left.

Boy Was I Wrong.

It's almost like people just needed to see something new in order to decide that they weren't interested in the blog anymore.  Our first new post since we got back seemed to get about 50% of the traffic of the ones posted up until then, but the daily traffic overall has gone down about 80% in the week I've been back to it.  I think this is the fourth or fifth blog I've written in a week (if you include the CGM Blog hosting Monique Dupree's video from her live shoot with Tara Cardinal.  Pop over to our Cult Magazine Blogs to see it.)  That's a pretty normal amount of content for me right now, but we're still down on views.

Maybe It's A Social Disease.

Perhaps part of the change is how things now work on platforms I use to promote this blog.  I am posting less to YouTube and Facebook has changed how links show in the newsfeed.  Also, I admit, that I have snoozed about 20% of my friends list for 30 days.  Today some of those ended and suddenly those friends are liking or commenting on my stuff again.  I think when you snooze someone, Facebook hides your feed from them as well.

It's no secret my YouTube activity has been way down.  I did use the blog to refer to things on the channel and vice-verse.  While I have turned off the searchability of many of the videos on YouTube, I have left most of them active on my channel and they can still be seen in the free theatre on my website http://www.hocfocprod.com . But not posting new videos means no new links back to my blog in the descriptions.

As much as the dates of these changes coincide with the trip, I can't help but think that "being away from things" was the major factor.

What I Should Have Done.

Just like I can schedule videos to post on YouTube days or weeks in advance, I should have done that here.  I can write blogs ahead of time and set them up to post at a later date.  The trouble is, I like to keep them topical and as you can see, I do tend to write a bit "stream of conscious" here.  That would be lost on pre-written blogs.  I would also then have to figure out how to announce them.

I guess these are all things I can try the next time I have to travel, or maybe I'll set some up to publish on auto pilot when I have a few days of shooting ahead of me.  That way I can write about what I know I'll be shooting and set it  up to post on the day I'm shooting because I'll be too busy to write about it then.  I can also read it after the shoot and see how closely my fantasy of how things would go on the production  match with how they actually DID go.

Here is a video I shot and set up to publish on Christmas, I believe.