How To Manage Blog Writing

Posted on August 3, 2009 by LJ

Mondays are productivity days at SimpleProductivity blog.

Photo by lipar A dear friend, new to blogging, asked me how I managed to keep up with writing for my blogs. “I just got the Easter pictures up, and it’s July!” she told me over lunch. “How do you keep up to date, especially with all your blogs?”

It’s a good question, and I had to stop and think about it. There was a time when I only had one blog, and long droughts of no new content would be interspersed with dozens of notes and articles. It took a conscious thought process and effort to get past that. I made a commitment and figured out how to live up to it. The first part is the same for all my blogs; the execution of the commitment is a bit different.

The Commitment

Don’t get frightened at the C word. The commitment to my blog came from the realization that in order to sustain interest, I had to post regularly. I sat down, figured out what the minimum level of posting I would like to do for each blog was, and if those posts would be tied to a specific day, and put it on my calendar. Voila, commitment done.

For SimpleProductivityBlog, I have committed to posting five articles a week. I also made the commitment that these five articles would be published on weekdays, when most of my readers look at the updates.

For my rant-and-rave blog, I decided that two articles minimum a week was my goal. More so because it was easier, I committed to having these articles publish on Tuesday and Thursday.

The family blog is a bit different, because it is more about news and photos than anything else. I committed to publishing at least one article a week, on Sunday, and more if news warranted it. But I have to post at least a new photo every week or my mother sends me an email asking where it is…

The Calendar

Once I decided how much I was going to write and when it would publish, I sat down with a calendar picked some themes. I have regular-themed days here on SimpleProductivityBlog, and on the rant-and-rave blog chose two as well. Having guidelines makes it easier to pick what articles are going to get written when, and allows me to look for ideas for specific days.

But I Don’t Have Time To Post To A Schedule!

This was a problem. I had started out using a blog platform that didn’t allow future posting. If I wanted a post to appear tomorrow, I had to remember to login and post tomorrow. I solved this problem by switching to Wordpress, which allows future posting. I can queue up posts to go out, even putting out photos a month in advance. And they release when the day comes.

So my two tricks to managing blog writing are to have a calendar of posts, and to use a blogging platform that allows future posting. Not anything too earth-shattering, but it makes regular posting much easier.

Photo by lipar

Bookmark It