How to Maintain a Consistent Blogging Schedule
One of the difficult parts of maintaining a blog is that it takes a lot of time to put together blog posts everyday. Like anyone, you get busy and won’t always have the time to post something on a daily basis. My first advice would be to not just blog for the sake of it. You can tell when you read a blog if the author is just writing because he or she feels they have to. Once you have a steady blogging schedule in place, if you do find you aren’t able to write any new posts for a couple days or you have a big project coming up so you won’t be able to put your typical effort into your blog, try using future posting in WordPress.
I often write in bursts where I’ll write 4 or 5 blog posts at once just because I’ll get in a groove or I’ll have the time to put the effort into writing. It is tempting to just post them all right away, but that’s really not a good idea. If you do post those 5 entries right away then your readers might think you are going to maintain that post frequency. Then when you don’t write anything for a week, your readers will get disappointed and unsubscribe. So when you do write 5 or 6 posts at a time, setup their timestamps to be in the future. Maybe have one get posted every two or three days, assuming they’re not time sensitive content. That way if something comes up you have to post about right away, like a news item or something, then you can and your other posts will get posted in the future. If you do find that you have a bunch of posts coming up in the near future and you want to write about something else, then you can just update the future post so that it doesn’t get posted until in the future.
I try to write something at least every three days, and rarely have more than one post per day. I don’t want to set a precedent and not be able to live up to it. So every time I write something that isn’t time sensitive, I mark it to launch a day or two from when I actually wrote it. That way I’m just saving it for a time when I don’t have time to write anything. Then if something comes up I can post something new and extend the time stamp to post the entry in the future. That way I can write 5 or 6 posts on a Sunday afternoon and then future post them to launch during the week while I’m too busy to devote a lot of time to my blog.
You might be thinking that blogging is about writing about other web sites and linking to them, and that most of the content on blogs is about news items and other time-sensitive content that you don’t want to save until later, however, I kind of disagree. Sure those posts make up a lot of the content on blogs on the web, but those aren’t the ones I subscribe to. I like reading blogs that have a lot of great unique content, and less linking out to other sites to discuss other people’s writing. I’d rather just read that other blog instead, so I try to write my own unique content that can stand on it’s own.
