Stay Ahead of the Blog
Everyone wants the benefits of a blog but few people want to put in the effort to maintain it. I fully understand because if you don’t really love it, blogging begins to seem like just another old task on the to-do list.
Besides, coming up with idea after idea can get tedious after awhile. That’s why I always try to stay ahead of my blogs. By that I mean that I try to have a few blog posts post-dated so that I don’t feel as much pressure to constantly update.
Here’s how it works.
I start a blog on a normal schedule, which means I write and post on the fly. Then after awhile I’ll take a day to write 4 posts for a particular blog but I’ll date them for the next week. That puts me a week ahead and I make sure it stays that way.
Note: This blog is now on a post ahead schedule. I am writing this five days before you’ll actually read it.
If something newsworthy and time sensitive comes up then I’ll post on the fly, but otherwise I try to maintain a “post ahead” schedule for each of my blogs.
Life gets in the way of blogging, work gets in the way of blogging, motivation gets in the way of blogging, but when you put yourself on a “post ahead” schedule it becomes less of a concern; especially when you get to the point of writing 5 or 6 blogs.
Great tip DJ! Of course, finding that day that I can dedicate to writing posts in order to get ahead in the first place can be difficult.
This is SO true – pre-writing posts is a huge helper. But I’ve run into the same problem Laura mentioned – when I sit down specifically to pre-write I find myself just as uninspired as when I sit down at the last minute trying to post. *sigh* My goal for this year is to knock my posting time down to one or two “big” days a week though; hopefully I can take inspiration (no pun intended) from this post!
I had to start posting ahead because I got married and I wanted to fully enjoy my honeymoon and last minute planning arrangements. It lasted a month then I went back to just posting piece by piece, week by week. Then the holidays came and I went out of town again so I wrote 2 weeks in advanced. When I got back I found that once you get that far ahead, you really don’t want to mess up the flow. So I’ve made sure to stay one week ahead of my posts.