Quick Tip for Busy Bloggers
Mar 19th, 2007 by msdanielle
Here’s a quick tip for all you busy bloggers out there. When you actually find a good chunk of time in your schedule to create your blog posts, take full advantage of that time by creating more than one post and lining them up for future posting. For myself, I work a regular 40-hour week and try to fit in posting whenever I can. But this past weekend, I queued up a couple posts to post later. If your readers expect a post a day, or every other day, don’t disappoint them by forgetting about your blog for a week. Understandably, many bloggers won’t be able to line up a queue of five posts (especially if your site is about current events or the latest and greatest tech gadgets, for example), but even if you can squeeze in an extra one or two every now and then, you’ll save yourself from the anguish of trying to post when you might not have the luxury of time, and also from the disappointment of your readers.
Here’s my example. If you’re using Wordpress, all you need to do is edit the Timestamp from your write post page. Today is Monday, March 19th, but I could move the post date to Wednesday, March 21st very easily by changing the date, and even the exact post time. The post doesn’t appear until that date and time. So Bam! my post is done for Wednesday.
Darren Rowse, of ProBlogger.net, took an informal poll of his readers and listed his feedback results of the Top 34 reasons why people unsubscribe from a blog’s RSS feed. The top two reasons were 1. too many posts, and 2. infrequent posting. So common sense tells us all that spacing out your blog posts to some sort of “regular” schedule will lessen the likelihood that people will unsubscribe from your blog. Determining your posting schedule is up to you. But just make sure that once you figure it out, you keep to it!
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Good tip. I myself keep write blog entries by hand into a journal while I’m taking the transit to and from work everyday. I’m a fast typer so it doesn’t take me more than 5 minutes a day to type up the post, but I think I’ll queue up a few posts because sometimes I don’t even have 10 minutes.
I try to write my articles on the train too, but I think my transfers come too soon! I need to ponder when I write!
Same, I don’t have THAT much time between transfers and depending on the road conditions and whether or not you get a seat, it may be impossible to write at all!
Very good tip. I haven’t done this at all really and should. I have no problem pumping out a ton of posts, but never thought about trying to save them for one day at a time. I do weird things like post 5 one day and none for a week. I should be letting them slip out daily rather than all at once. It would certainly save me some time and keep my sites more active.
I dont have time to build up a backlog, I wish I had b4 commenting so heavily on JC….
Im going to give that a rest at the end of the month though…
That’s a great suggestion. Sometimes I’ll be really inspired and I’m able to write several posts… when that happens, I do change the timestamp so that it goes live at the scheduled time. I think it’s always important to have something new up daily.
On a different, but somewhat related, subject, sometimes I have several ideas for posts but don’t have the time to finish it… when that happens, I’ll write the first two sentences to those posts and save it as drafs for me to come back to them later.
The drafts idea is a good one, I usually just write 3 or 4 words that will help me remember what the idea was on a piece of scratch paper. Then it sometimes gets lost in the pile of scratch paper on my desk. It’s a pleasant surprise to find an idea for a post when you least expect it (and probably most need it) though
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