How To Blog While Away

Since I am still trying to figure out the best way to pack for my upcoming trip, I thought I would take some time to prepare for keeping the site updated while I am away.
The last time I traveled I had every intention to blog in the evenings after I returned to the hotel. Unfortunately I had not accounted for the nice little bar near the hotel that graciously continued pouring me Guinness after Guinness into the early morning hours.
This time around I am trying to plan ahead and prepare myself to blog while I am away. As I sit here and ponder my plan of attack, there are a few strategies that come to mind for blogging while away.
Future Posts
Most blogging platforms allow you to customize the timestamp that posts will be published to your site. This allows you to dedicate blocks of time to authoring posts while maintaining the ability to space out the publication of each post.
To be honest, I’ve only used this feature a few times and I know that I should try to take advantage of this more often. However, I typically draft and publish a post one at a time and rarely plan far enough ahead to have a handful of posts waiting to be published.
One of the key advantages to using the ability to schedule posts for future publication is that it should increase your productivity. In my case, I will be able to draft a handful of posts and schedule them to publish while I am traveling. This will allow the blog to stay fresh without requiring me to drag myself home from the festivities each night to author a post.
Guest Authors
Another tool that can be used to keep your blog fresh while you are away is to line up a couple of guest authors to fill in during your absence.
The nice thing about guest authors is that it allows the guest author to promote their name a little bit while adding a new perspective for your readers. It really is a win-win situation for both the blog owner and the guest author.
I’ve been giving serious consideration to positioning myself to try and become a guest author for a few other blogs when there is a need for another voice. It would certainly provide a new audience for my content and hopefully bring new traffic to my site. On a few of the blogs that I read regularly, I’ve seen guest posts that bring quite a bit of publicity to the guest author.
Likewise, as a blog owner, I’ve been thinking about asking a few other bloggers if they would be interested in submitting guest posts to either of my blogs. If any of you would be interested in submitting a guest post for Derek Semmler dot com or my personal finance blog, please let me know as I would be happy to arrange something with you!
My Plan
Unless anyone jumps forward to become a guest author, I will be trying to utilize the ability to schedule future posts for both of my blogs. Hopefully I will have time to make a few posts from my conference but I want to be covered just in case.
When you are going to be away from your blog, what strategy have you found to be the most successful?