Do you tend to publish blog posts as you write them or schedule the posts for future publication? Some bloggers advocate publishing blog posts as you complete them.
My personal practice have been to schedule blog posts. At times when I am in the flow and is able to write multiple blog posts, I almost never publish all these posts at once. Instead, I would schedule these posts for future publication.
This is especially true if you are making and publishing videos on YouTube. For vloggers, you need to keep producing content else your channel or videos would not appear in the newsfeed or recommended videos. There is long time that goes into making each YouTube video- writing the script, setting up, putting on makeup/dressing up, filming and editing. Many established vloggers have since learnt that the way to make their publishing consistent is to film a few videos all at once (they would go and change into different clothes) and batch edit their videos. If they don’t do it, they would easily miss their schedule.
Yes, I know that after writing what you feel to be some really good posts, you would be so excited when you want all your posts to go out to the world. And it seemed such a bummer when you have to practice delay gratification to have the posts scheduled at block interval of times.
I feel that too and I would like to provide my point of view why scheduling your posts may be better:
1. There is something for visitors at times when you do not have time/ no inspiration to write.
Trust me, you would encounter this from time to time. In the beginning when you are all driven up, you may think that nothing could separate you from your blog.
In the year 2008 when I migrated my blog to paid hosting, I started to take my blog real seriously. However, that year I was spending a lot of time travelling and away from home. The term ‘digital nomad’ was unheard off then. Anyways I was staying in real remote areas of Thailand with very bad internet connection (sometimes there is no signal to make a normal call).
Therefore, during the times when I was back at home, I would write as much posts as I could and schedule them for future publication.
Note: This has changed tremendously- now almost every person in Thailand owns a Smartphone and reception is relatively good… unless you are deep into the jungles or mountains.
Then from the years in 2009 to 2011, I was very active into blogging. I had day jobs during that time and spend after work hours pumping out content for my blog. I really love what I was doing and never thought that I would stop doing that. Even though I was producing a lot of content, I still schedule the content to publish once every few days.
However, I became very busy in my day job and work was mentally exhausting. I lost the mental energy to write blog posts at the end of the day. And weekends were purely use to recuperate and do some housework. I was literally not able to write any new articles for sometime. And what came to the rescue….past blog posts which I scheduled for future publication.
2. It creates continuity in your blog, so that it does not look abandoned
In life, you never know. Circumstances change or sometimes you may just develop an equivalent of a writer’s block or some downtime. But if you suddenly stop producing blog posts, it would make your blog look abandoned or give out the message that you do not take your blog or site seriously.
Internet readers have a very short attention span and a continuous hunger for new ideas and posts. They may forget you very fast as there would be many other bloggers who would take your place. In the beginning, they may come back to your blog from time to time and bounce off when they do not see any new content. A higher bounce rate and lower time spent on the site would signal to search engines that your blog may not be relevant. Gradually, your site would drop in rankings.
3. A fixed publishing time enables your readers and subscribers to know when to expect a new post from you.
There is 2 ways to achieve a consistent publishing schedule. Either you blog at the fixed period of time. For example, if you have new posts being published on each Wednesday, you may dedicate a fixed time to sit down and write the post. The disadvantage of this method is that something may come up and disrupt your schedule, or you may sit down and after an hour of staring at your laptop, you still could not write a single sentence.
Alternatively, you may type your blog posts in advance and schedule them for publishing at fixed intervals. Then you would always have backup posts available for scheduling. And if you suddenly have the inspiration and wish to publish your awesome post on the next publishing date, you can easily move the back-up post to a later date.
How to organize your scheduled posts
For me, I just schedule my posts in the Posts section of my blog. It is the easiest and most straightforward way.
And I prefer not to use ‘drafts’ format. I use ‘drafts’ for unfinished articles or those that I am not ready to publish yet.
Conclusion
One day you may write 5 articles and choose to publish all of them. And then the next day, another 3 articles which you may choose also hit the publish button immediately.
If your blog is already ranked and indexed, this approach can help you to get ranked for more topics. However if your blog only have 5 or 10 posts, you need to add more articles to your blog till it hit about 30 articles so that it looked like a real serious site.
But know that there would be downtime or events that may interfere with the time or inspiration that you have in updating your blog. It is good to be prepared if you take your blog seriously and plan to grow your audience.
