How Do You Prepare Your Blog For Surgery?

Many of you who follow me on Instagram or Facebook already know I am having hip surgery at the end of February and if you don’t you do now! I have dislocated hips which usually nothing needs to be done about unless it’s causing you pain which one of mine is causing significant pain. You may be thinking that this sounds like no big deal because hip replacements are done all the time but when you are Spina Bifida it’s more complicated and a little bit more involved than your standared hip replacement. After hip replacement surgery most people can be shown how to walk using ten-percent pressure but because I already have little to no feeling in my legs I can’t be shown that so I will need to be on total bed rest until my body heals. When a blogger finds out they need surgery the first thing that usually comes to their mind is this surgery necessary and how am I going to run my blog during this time without losing followers? If you haven’t been feeling well the surgery that was strongly recommended is probably necessary but I will give it to you that it can be stressful not knowing what will happen to your blog when you gone. I have had surgery before while being a blogger and my blog didn’t really suffer that much because I properly prepare for so here are some things that I do to make sure I still get growth while I am recovering.

Look for guest bloggers– I have had about thirty surgeries and a leg surgery where I was in a cast for six to eight months to put my foot back in the corrected position which worked in the sense that I survived the surgery but as far as keeping my foot straight which is what it was supposed to do it didn’t work that well because my foot turned back a little. I know what doctors tell me about hip surgery but there is so much I don’t know and won’t until I experience it which in a ways is terrifying because I don’t like not knowing! I don’t heal the quickest because of my limited sensation and have no idea how much pain it’s going to be because depending on doctors can go in the front or the back it could either be a lot of pain or hardly any at all. With any surgery you will have downtime and even if I don’t experience that much pain like any surgery I do expect downtime. Doctors will tell you how long they expect recovery to be but in my experience a lot of the time they are wrong and it turns out to be much longer so what I like to do if I am not prepared is put out a call for guest blogger because even if you only get one or two people that is better than zero! I haven’t needed that many volunteers this time around because I knew I was probably going to need surgery before I got an official diagnosis so I have been able to better prepare but if someone volunteered I wouldn’t deny this opportunity if I thought it fit my blog well.

Write a couple post ahead of time– I have had some pretty fantastic guest bloggers that write great guest post and deliver them in a timely but I have also had guest bloggers who did entirely the opposite. I have had people who said they would do a guest and hours before it’s due they bail and don’t tell me they are going to bail but I just kind of figure it out. It can be stressful finding a guest blogger that is reliable and best suits are blog so sometimes the most reliable is yourself and you just have to write posts ahead time to ensure you will at least have something! I try to get at least two weeks worth of pre-written posts and although that may not be enough I don’t think I could do more than that unless I starting writing like crazy which if I did that I still don’t think I would be able to because I wouldn’t be motivated to do it.

Schedule social media posts- Social media can really help grow your blog and if you use it you want to make sure you’re being just as consistent with your social media posts as you are with your blog posts. For your social media to grow you have to post consistently and pretty much every day because the algorithm favors people who post more so when you stop posting your engagement is going to drop. If you are recovering from surgery and are in a situation where you can’t make new graphics then schedule a few social media posts in advance because schedulers were created exactly for this reason. Sometimes schedulers fail and things don’t post but most of the time they do and it pays to have a few Instagram posts scheduled in advance because you can only do so many hospital selfies before it becomes repetitive!

Update old posts-  If you have been blogging for a while I want you to think about when was the last time you updated a post. If you were to go back and read some of your very first posts you may think to yourself “wow this is terrible and why did I publish this? I know I have gone through my posts a couple of times and even deleted some because sometimes I wonder that same thing. Lately, I have been updating a lot of posts because sitting for a long period of time has been uncomfortable and I just can’t motivate myself to write so I do something that is not going to take as long. Updating posts have significantly improved my DA which is not very high right because this is a new website but it is higher than my other blog that I had for several years so I’ll take that as a win! When there isn’t enough time before your procedure to make new posts revamp a couple of old ones and schedule them as new posts because you would be surprised at how much better you can make something you wrote two years ago. Make sure when your updating that the change is significant because followers will only find it annoying if you keep publishing the same post and only adding a period.

When you are a blogger and need surgery one of your biggest concerns is will I be able to still grow my blog even though I can’t be active on social media? As a blogger, you know you have to be active on social media so when you’re not able to does that mean your views are going to tank? Not necessarily and your views may suffer a little bit but all hope is not lost and you should not just sit back and give up from one minor setback. My last surgery was not easy and like this one that is coming up I was not able to sit up and write but I still got growth because I planned everything leading up to that day and focused on promotion. I am not happy that I need another surgery and wish there was another non-surgical way to fix this but there isn’t so I am doing everything I can to prepare for it because complaining or feeling sorry for yourself will get you nowhere in life! When I am recovering and watching Netflix I will be anxious to get back to writing and will as I can but not too soon because it’s important not to push your body to limits it’s not at for a faster recovery. If you do lose some views or even some followers during your recovery don’t stress over it and focus on healing because that is what is most important and without your health you have nothing! You can always crack down on your blog after you have recovered but don’t beat yourself up over the things you lost because you can always get it back. How do you prepare your blog for surgery?

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