3 Ideas for Quick and Useful Blog Posts for the Summer

We work hard during the year, so come summer we naturally deserve some much needed rest and relaxation. However, how can we enjoy our vacation knowing that nothing is being published on our blogs and readers are slowly abandoning our sites?

Fear no more! Here are 3 ideas for creating quick and useful posts to update your blog while still enjoying your decompression time:

1. Invite Guest Bloggers

Guest blogging is the easiest way to score instant, high-quality and, most importantly, original content for your blog. Moreover, if you’re planning your vacation, you can schedule guest bloggers weeks ahead. It’s a great way to be assured that there will always be something live and that someone will tweet and share your content.

The easiest way to find guest contributors is through MyBlogGuest. If you don’t have time to participate in the forums, you can go straight to the Articles Gallery, choose a relevant article and offer to publish it for free on your blog. This is a new and  exceptionally unique concept of placing high-quality articles:

2. Share the Media Created by Others

Sharing something awesome that was created by others isn’t re-publishing old news. It all comes down to the focus. This old post from GrokDotCom is a good example of how changing a focus and sharing an awesome video can spark great interest and discussion – with very little effort on your part. It’s a perfect technique if you plan on taking some rest while still updating your blog.

The best advice here: don’t rehash what everyone else is already sharing. Instead, dig through to find something less-covered but no less awesome. Youtube has great lottery potential. Not everything cool goes viral there.

So, by digging a little deeper you could find some hidden gems: it’s all in how you search. Here’s my post on using Google advanced operators to search Youtube. By working with advanced searches and playing with filters, you’re more than likely to discover something phenomenal but lesser known.

3. Round up Stats and Trends

Another great way to share a quick but very useful post is to cover some relevant stats or trends. There’s a number of amazing and free tools that make short work out of collecting stats, and they always result in an awesome post.

Here are some tips:

• Use this stats search engine to collect some essential numerical data on the topics you blog about.
• Use Google Trends to spot and compare interesting trends.
• Use this WordPress plugin to quickly create round-ups of what you’ve been covering on your own blog (see this post on making the most of your old content).
• Use News Timeline to find quick coverage of all news related to a concept or an event. With this useful tool, you can quickly create a summary of all events (as well as news coverage) about a subject throughout the years by selecting the “year” mode. For example, here’s the summary of news coverage about Google:

Any more quick but useful underground blogging secrets? Please share them in the comments!