When you are going to be unable to post for awhile, you have a two main choices: (1)Tell your readers or (2)Don’t tell your readers.
When you really think about it. It’s really that simple. And neither one of these options is perfect. So let’s discuss the pros and cons of each.
Telling your Readers you’ll be Away
The pros of this are that if you haven’t prepared posts in advance to automatically post, your readers won’t have to wonder why your blog isn’t being updated. This may or may not lessen the irritation they feel at your lack of new content.
The cons are that some folks may just immediately give up on you. So make sure you are clear on how long they can expect a lack of fresh information before they unsubscribe or take you off their “to-read” list.
Overall, this is an acceptable strategy if you have no advance posts prepared or if you aren’t going to be gone for too long. However, you run the risk of losing readers if all you leave is a post saying, “Be Back Soon!” This is especially true for new readers.
If you want to tell your readers, but not leave your blog with a “see you soon” post above the fold, you can easily make that post effective in several ways. Just quickly explain you’ll be away and then seque into a list of posts. Just include a quick “Posts to Catch up on While I’m Away” and now you have created something for your readers to do and improved your internal linking structure.
Not Telling your Reader you’ll be Away
If you post daily or every other day, you’ll be making a big mistake if you don’t let your readers know you’ll be gone. Readers come to count on you for quality content and if you don’t continue to deliver it you can lost them. Fast. However, if you only post once a week or less you might be able to get away with not mentioning it.
It is extremely important to post consistently so your readers know they can count on fresh content. If they don’t know when to expect it, they might just give up on it.
In fact, I firmly believe that my inconsistent posting at Pajama Professional has had a detrimental affect. My feed subscribers yo-yo like crazy and I’m almost positive that if I stuck to a regular schedule – even if it was only twice a week – I would see that number stablize and then grow at a regular rate.
You really don’t want anyone to think you’ve abandoned your blog, so if you don’t want to tell your readers you’re going to be away then you really should set up posts to automatically publish while you are gone. WordPress has a built-in future posting option so just set up posts to publish on your regular schedule or – if you don’t have a regular schedule – every few days.
A Win-Win Solution for Going Away
If you’re going on a six-week vacation, you don’t want a post explaining you’re on a vacation to be the first thing people see. At the same time, you don’t want folks to think you’ve abandoned your blog.
A good way around this is to keep your last post up and place a little – yet noticable – icon somewhere that says “I’m on vacation” or “Expect new Posts on…” This lets your readers know what’s going on while still keeping interesting content (assuming your blog content is interesting 
) above the fold. You could use something like Page Peel plugin or Peel Away Ads.
My favorite option is the MaxBlogPress Ad Stripe Plugin to put a nice little message at the very top of your blog. It also allows you to add a hyperlink so you can link to another blog or your RSS feed.
As you can see, that’s what I have done. It lets readers know what’s going on without being annoying. I love it. This plugin is reviewware so make sure that if you try it and like you write a review. I will be writing one once I return.
The other thing you can do is what I’ve done. Use your hiatus as a post topic. Like this one. See you in February!
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