How To Handle Blog Outages – 5 Ways

In a perfect world, bloggers would get to focus all their time on their blogs without having to worry about hack attacks and hosting service outages. Unfortunately, that only happens in the dream world. In reality, lots of things can go wrong for bloggers on a daily basis. If your blog is having issues (major or minor), the last thing you want to do is pretend they didn’t happen. Your loyal visitors would not appreciate such an approach. There is a right way and wrong way to tackle this. Here are 5 ways you can make sure you go with the right approach addressing your blog’s issues:

Provide updates: if your website is down for hours, don’t just sit around and pray to God. There are better ways to use your time. You should at least use your other outposts to provide an update on your site’s situation to your loyal readers. They will understand it if you are honest with them. Nobody likes to experience any downtime but these things happen. Don’t panic. Just act professionally and respect your visitors’ loyalty.
Don’t ignore complaints: in a perfect world, people would just understand that no website can stay up forever. Even large companies experience some downtime from time to time (that includes Amazon too). When someone complains about your website on Twitter or other sites, don’t get defensive. Address the situation at hand without attacking others or responding to their attacks.
Use other means to get your content out: so your blog may be down. You still have Facebook, your newsletter, Tumblr, and other channels to communicate with your visitors. Your world should not need to stop even if your site is down for a couple of days (not that it would be ideal).
Explain your story: once you are done with your site’s issues, take time to explain to your visitors what has happened. You may think they won’t care, but a lot of them do. At least, they’ll know that you are serious about your business and will do everything you can to avoid those issues from surfacing in the future.
Give away stuff: nothing can make your visitors forget about your blog outage than a nice gift. You can pull this off with a giveaway. Another way to do this is by offering your visitors, let’s say, a free week of your premium service.
No website is perfect. Every blogger will have to deal with major business headaches from time to time. The last thing you want to do as a blogger is try to hide your blog’s problems or ignore your loyal visitors. That’s just not a smart approach.