I’ve been asked by various people who blog, are thinking of starting a blog or are just curious about the process of blogging do I write the article the day that it is posted? This question also ties in with one my goals for this personal development website.
One of my goals is to always have three months worth of complete and fully edited articles, around 90 separate posts, ready for publication at any time. That’s a lot of posts to have sitting in your scheduling queue ready to go live.
That may seem strange to many writers who blog. I’ve noticed a lot of blogs regularly create top ten lists or very short, punchy, news items that are somewhere between 100 and 200 words. Whilst there is nothing inherently wrong with short posts, and I’m doing a few short articles between 200 and 500 words for the weekends when the traffic takes a dip as people go off and have lives, petite posts cannot by their very nature contain a lot of research and explain complex ideas that also contain examples and tutorials of how to do something.
Many articles I write, evergreen articles or ones that require considerable research and thought are written weeks or months ahead of time. I also maintain a list of article ideas that are either brief notes or outlines. With regard to reaching my goal, as of the writing of this post, I am about 20% of the way there.
Think about this, it’s kind of morbid but with so much scheduled content I could be involved in a bizarre accident with a Jack Lalanne Juicer and five kinds of fruit this very afternoon and nobody would notice for three months. Maybe longer! I would eventually be found buried under several hundred pounds of rotting oranges, bananas and Asian pears.
But there are also huge pluses to writing far off in to the future as I can time my posts to peaks in traffic. My website might get posted on the front page of a social bookmarking site or receive an influx of traffic from an event I am attending. With either of these events I can move one of the scheduled posts up to an earlier date to take advantage of the traffic spike ensuring that many people who visited once will have worthwhile content to come back to tomorrow, and a higher probability of coming back the day after that.
Another plus is that the pressure to write is not always there, it isn’t a constant force in my life, I can take two weeks off work or I can get involved with other projects that might occupy me for a month and nobody will notice. I can be gone quite some time before I need to think about picking up the writing again. One of my short-term personal goals is to travel around the entire United States in an RV for two years, visiting every state and seeing as much of the country as I can in that time, writing a lot of content allows me to pursue this goal without concerning myself about a daily treadmill of posting. By the time I am ready to begin travelling my video game software company will be further along and key staff positions will be in place that I will only be required at the studio for a few days a month to keep an eye on things.
By having months of content most of the posts for the immediate future are taken care of and I can insert shorter, newsy items that are time sensitive and bump all of my other posts by a few days. The current version of the WordPress blogging software makes it very easy to set up a scheduled post, but if I want to move the dates on dozens of posts simultaneously it becomes quite a chore. I might have a group of posts that should remain together as a unit or I might only want a particular post to appear on certain days of the week but I don’t care which week. I am currently working on a small WordPress scheduling plug-in that can keep groups of posts together so that they always schedule one after the other or only schedule a post for a particular day of the week or month.
With having a lot of scheduled content available I still have the drive to write every day, but I don’t have a pressing need to publish every day. I can take my time and ponder my ideas more fully before rushing to put virtual pen to digital paper. I can ruminate on an article for weeks before I finish it up and then schedule the post for weeks or months in to the future. If I think of something else to say or some new research becomes available or a personal experience occurs that is relevant I can add it to my article before it goes live on the website.
With scheduled content I can maintain a writing pace that allows me to collect related topics in to a batch of articles that are programmed to appear one after the other. I can build traffic based on a particular niche subject that I am interested in and continue that for a week or two before switching gears to another topic.
I am really scatterbrained when it comes to ideas and research, I have a tendency to bounce around from one subject to another. As I research one topic that turns up facts or information that gives me an idea for another series of articles. I often work on multiple articles simultaneously, bouncing from one to the other, and I don’t worry (too much) if I haven’t made a post to my blog in a week. There might be ten articles in development with lots of scheduled posts to cover for me. I can scratch the itch that drives me to research and write about a subject without the sidetrack impacting my posting, I don’t have to publish on a particular day so I don’t feel that pressure to post. Each week I can take a few days off from writing by creating 7 or 8 articles on those days that I do write. Some days I need to spend several hours updating the design or working on the backend software without allowing the non-writing maintenance work to affect the stream of content.
By having that pre-programmed content ready nobody reading my website will ever notice any of the side roads I took or ever be aware that I wrote on fifteen different subjects that week because the scheduling smoothes out the ADD roller coaster brain waves.
When I decided to create a personal development website I knew I wanted and needed to have content ready for at least the first two weeks as I would be worrying about technical issues, fixing glitches and ensuring that I’ve crossed all the I’s and dotted every T. It is Sod’s law that the moment I get involved with any personal project a client will have some technical emergency that requires our entire team to drop everything and fix whatever their problem is. When this website finally launched I only had twelve complete articles ready to go instead of the fourteen I had planned, the other two articles were only at the stage of the final draft and needed some editing and polishing done to them, fortunately no clients called with problems and the technical side of the website went reasonably smoothly so during the first two weeks I was able to easily create another five articles.
Another of the goals is an unbroken chain of articles for as long as it makes sense to maintain. A long tail of articles will take at least three years to create so making sure that at least one of my personal websites are updated every day will make sure I do achieve that goal.
As of this writing I have 17 articles that are scheduled for posting, 8 articles in a final draft status, 12 articles in early draft, and 19 articles are outlines with attached research notes. Having that much content in development really does take the pressure off of me having to produce every single day.
If you are writing for a blog right now, or are thinking about starting your own blog, I highly recommend you write daily, on any subject, and always aim to have at least a half dozen well researched articles prepared for publication. It might take you a month or two to pull them together but you’ll be happy you did once you realise that you can take a day or two off from writing and not have to worry about it.