Man, it’s amazing what three days in a crack house can do to your productivity!

One day you’re doing fine and then you wake up a few days later and realize that you haven’t posted on your blog for almost a week. Maybe it’s been longer than that. Out of the many millions of blogs, most of them go silent or nearly so after a time. Lots of bloggers start out blogging every day or at least with some sort of regular frequency. Then something happens.

Life, family, work, recreation, all sorts of other priorities crowd out the blogging. Quite often, it’s just the blogger running out of ideas to write about or just plain getting bored. And, we hate boredom, right?

Many, many posts have been written on how to find topics to write about, so I’m not going to revisit that now. However, there are fewer posts written about how to deal with an absence once you come back from it. What should you say?

Here are a few ideas for how to deal with missing a few days (or more) on your blog:

Play it off with a joke. Use your sense of humor and say something funny. You could use a catchy title that might just get readers interested enough to come back and check out what you’ve been up to. Then you can get back to blogging. The benefit to this is that it allows you to show a little bit more of your personality and makes you more interesting to your readers.

Apologize to your readers. This is something I see too much, but it’s still an option. Let’s get something straight, though. Most of us are doing this essentially for free and we have no obligation to provide articles for our readers. It’s only something nice we do. Some of the purists out there will get their panties into a bunch over the sacred bond between bloggers and readers, but, honestly, guys, get over yourselves! If you made a promise to post an article or something and you didn’t do it, then it’s OK to apologize in a reasonable way. Don’t go overboard with this technique, though, because it can make you look like a tool.

Get personal Explain what’s going on in your life. For the most part, the personal details are interesting to people. Look at all the traffic celebrity bloggers get. Everybody seems to want to know whether Paris and Britney went commando last night. Similarly, loads of people want to know what Shoemoney or ProBlogger had for breakfast. Was it Super Blogger Flakes? Sure, you and I aren’t A-Listers or celebrities, but people are still curious about us. A little bit of personal info can make a blog much more appealing to readers. Be careful, though, because it may quickly get to be too much information if you haven’t been doing it from the beginning.

Use it as a reason to change. Maybe it’s time to shake up your blogging a bit. Have you been posting less often or not at all because you’re bored with your main topic? Change it then! There’s no law that says you have to keep blogging about all the same stuff every day. Most topics get worn out over time. Like blogging about blogging… Anyway… You can always hire another blogger to write your boring old blog about making money blogging or make use of guest bloggers and then start a new blog about whatever you want. You have choices. Just remember that you’re in charge. You can take your blog in a whole new direction if that’s where your interest is going. You may lose readers, but you also stand a good chance of picking up new ones.

Use it as a lesson. You can also use the experience of missing some blogging time to teach your readers how not to miss days. You can talk about how to brainstorm for ideas or how to prepare several articles at once and future post them. There are a number of ways you can turn it into a positive tool for helping others to avoid the same problems. This is a pretty good way to turn things around and keep readers interested.

Pretend it never happened. What? Did I miss a few days? I never even noticed. There are plenty of bloggers who just seldom post anything. If you’re a once a week or once a month blogger, then that’s the way to go. Readers may check back periodically to see what’s up with you, but you probably won’t experience a lot of growth in traffic. If you’re not interested in growing your readership, then just don’t worry about it. Post whenever you want.

A combination of the above. Finally, you can combine some of the approaches I’ve mentioned above to suit your personal style. If you want to get personal, change your blogging style, and teach a lesson, then go for it. It’s all good.