I’ve seen it many times at even some of the most prominent blogs. There seems to be multiple times each year in the life of a blogger where there is just no time to write a worthy-to-read blog post. Instead of trying to play off the lack of new content, it seems like some bloggers write two or three posts in a row that say basically nothing besides “Sorry I’m not writing much right now”. If you suddenly find yourself without the time to write on your blog for a while, don’t mention it very much to your readers. If your readers know that it’s going to be a while before you write again, they might erase your site from their mental “daily visit” list, and they could end up forgetting to ever put it back on again.

So, what should you do?

In the case that you don’t have the time to write, and you haven’t thought ahead enough to make rainy-day content, then you should play off your absence as if it’s not really that long. If you are going to be gone for less than a week, you should just casually mention it in your last post before you leave. Don’t make a huge deal out of it, that could possibly be a turn off to some readers. If you are going to be gone for considerably longer, then you should make it more noticeable that you aren’t going to be writing. Yes, that will probably result in a (hopefully temporary but perhaps permanent) loss of traffic, but it’s your fault for not writing rainy-day content.

The moral of this post? Write backup content that you can post. Save completed posts without publishing them so that on your extremely busy days you can just change the status of the post to published.
If you don’t do this now, you may regret it later.