Sometimes when you’re first starting out in in business, you're excited, fired up even, and put out a slew of blog posts, only to get sidelined by other important business development fundamentals. Your writing gets put aside.
Other times, perhaps you've been in business a while but have hit a block growing your business. You decide you need focus on a major project, like refining your messaging on your website. Your content creation has to take a back seat for the time being.
Or sometimes, like a colleague who recently lost her best friend to an unexpected heart attack, life intervenes. Three months into her grief she hasn't been able to write a word.
Whatever the case, there are times, especially when you're building your business, when your content creation and sharing isn't completely consistent.
First, I want to point out that this is completely normal part of business development. It takes time to get into a rhythm with content sharing, identifying effective processes and adapting your work to how you work best.
Having said that, when you find yourself in a situation like this, sometimes it’s difficult to tell when you need to address an absence with your audience.
And when you don’t.
To Say or Not to Say?
Do you need to acknowledge you've been gone for a while? And if so, how do you do it in a way that feels good, both to you and your audience?
Well, there are no hard and fast rules here (Darn it, I know!). Most of it boils down to two things: the type of relationship you have with your audience and what feels best to you.
It's Like a Party
It's helpful to think about this like you're hosting a party.
Your house is full of twinkle lights, stacks of cakes, and cozy seating arrangements. People have gathered and are milling around, talking, enjoying things. At a certain point in the evening, you need to step outside.
When you come back, do you simply slip back in and pick up where you left off or is something more required?
Who's at the party?
The first thing you need to do to decide is determine who's at the party and what's your relationship with them.
If you're simply hosting a get together, let's say, a fundraiser for a colleague of your brother in law, it's likely you won't know many people there. You being away wouldn't need any explanation at all. On the other hand, if you're hosting a party that's filled with your best friends, dearest colleagues and closest family, your absence might be noticed, and your guests might appreciate an explanation.
It's the same thing with your marketing, if you're newer in business and haven't been very consistent before in your content sharing or email communications, your audience isn't likely close enough to you to need an explanation for an absence. You just slip back into the party, so to speak, and send out your new content.
As you build consistency and your relationship with your audience grows, that might change. And, if you already have a close relationship with your audience - you've been communicating with them frequently for a while now and they've been engaging with you/your content, they're more likely to notice you stepping away. They might appreciate you saying something.
How long have you been gone?
Another thing to consider is how long you've been away.
If you slip out the backdoor at the party to catch a glimpse of moonlight or listen to the sounds of the evening float by to recharge, you can just as easily come back in likely without many people noticing you've been gone. If on the other hand, let's say you fall ill or leave the party for a family emergency and you're gone for a long period of time, people will notice.
In the same way, if your last communication was only a few weeks ago, you likely don't have to say anything. People get so many emails from so many different sources, the fact you didn't send out anything the past two weeks might not even hit their radar. Saying something would just call attention to something that's not needed.
On the other hand, if you were very consistent blogging or sending out content, and you haven't for three months, that's a longer absence that your audience is much more likely notice and be receptive to hearing what's been happening.
Acknowledging It: What to Say?
If you've decided that saying something about your absence feels right, here are a few guidelines.
A One-liner
Something as simple as one line might do the trick. When my mom was in the hospital last summer, I got thrown off regular communications for a couple weeks. When I sent out my first blog post after that, I decided to simply say I'd been attending to some personal family stuff, and I left it at that.
Going More In Depth
For some, more information may be a better approach.
If you regularly share personal updates about your life and what you've been up to with your audience, letting them know more about what's been going for your might feel more appropriate.
Also, if what you've been dealing with is in some way directly is connected with your work, your audience might really benefit from hearing from you about it. For example, if you help women dealing with stress who want to find a more peaceful way to live their lives, hearing about a stressful situation you dealt with and how you handled it could engender more trust and a deeper relationship.
Keep Your Balance
No matter what you decide to say, make sure you are not processing your absence in your communications.
If you still have grief about what happened or some residual shame or guilt lurking about the time you've been away, make sure you process that elsewhere and not overload the information you share with your clients with it. That energy isn't helpful and can be off-putting. If you want, sharing it with a trusted friend or colleague before you send it can help.
Also, keep in mind this is best for those who’ve had something specific or concrete come up in their business or life that’s kept them away. If you’ve been holding yourself back from being visible in your marketing or if you’ve been having trouble taming distraction and focusing on your marketing that is not necessarily something you want to share with your audience in the moment.
Follow Your Heart
After you've taken the above into consideration, follow your heart.
If you don't feel like acknowledging or making a big deal out of your absence, you absolutely do not have to. (Remember, no rules.) And if it feels important to you for some reason to say something, please do.
If you've been away from sharing your content or communicating with your audience for a while, don't worry. They do want to hear from you. Deciding whether or not to acknowledge your absence and how is a matter of stepping back and looking at your relationship with your audience and how long you've been gone. Then you can figure out what feels like the right amount to say, being sure you keep the message balanced and in line with your heart.
The most important thing is that you don't let your absence keep you from coming back and sharing your message. You have important work to do, and the world needs your voice