Can your small business run without you?

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If you were on vacation, sick, too tired or just plain sick of working 16 hours a day, would your small business still function? What about if you’re a blogger; would your website still run properly or would it fall off the face of the earth?

I recently wanted to answer this question myself on this blog. If you haven’t noticed, I last posted 1 week ago. I wanted to see what a one week disappearing act would do to the blog and see if it could hold its own if I just wasn’t able to post. Yes, I had posts lined up and I have friends who I could have had guest post awesome bootstrapping articles for you to read, but with them posting, my tests wouldn’t have shown the same results. So for the past week, I’ve been sitting by tracking results on the blog and I have to say, I think the results are about what I thought they would be.

Feedburner Stats (Who’s subscribing to my feed)

Last thursday, I had 337 subscribers. I watched this past week as the number went up, went down and came back up again. Today, the number is 336. Fluctuations in feedburner stats are normal so seeing only a 1 subscriber drop after 1 week, I am not worried at all about it and see it as a positive result.

Newsletter subscriber stats (the top left of the sidebar)

These results were just about the same. I just launched the newsletter recently so the subscriber count was at 11 at the time of this test. In the week this past week, the number has doubled. A definite success and something I know will continue to slowly grow over time, weather I post all of the time or not.

Website traffic (checked with google analytics)

This part of the study came out about the same. Minus the stumbleupon and other social media traffic I got from a few posts, the traffic pretty much stayed the same. With only a 4-5% decrease in traffic from last Thursday to today, I see this as a pretty standard indicator that my bootstrapping blog traffic can remain about the same if I had to take a small break.

What does this mean (where does this leave me - the owner, and you - the reader)

Don’t worry; I am not taking these results as a free way out of writing on a normal basis. I want to provide the best bootstrapping and small business marketing information that I can, on a regular basis. I only did it as a test to see if for some reason I couldn’t be here, if the website would still run as normal.

How about you? Will your small business survive without you for a few days, a week or a month? Let me know if you’ve ever had something like this happen to your business. Were the results the same as mine?