Learn more about (and possibly join) Blaugust Reborn!
With the official start of this year’s Blaugust blogger event next week, us participating sites have been asked — demanded at gunpoint, really — to chew on the theme of “preparation” for new bloggers. As I’m sure that many of my contemporaries will be covering blog setup and the like, I’m going to take a different tack and discuss my approach to post preparation.
Probably the most difficult and challenging aspect of blogging is keeping the posts coming. It’s a constant, ongoing event, unless you don’t care about building up an audience and want a once-in-a-blue-moon post frequency. Everyone gets excited about writing at first, but consistently churning out posts requires discipline, effort, routine, and — pertinent to this article — strategy.
There’s nothing wrong with coming up with a good posting strategy and preparing for your upcoming days. While you can surely write up posts the morning they go live, that can become stressful quickly as you feel pressured on a daily basis to get something, anything, out on the site.
My strategy? I work ahead.
The busier I am in my life, the more I work ahead with projects, and that includes writing for Bio Break and Massively OP. I don’t need the stress of “this has to go out NOW” if I can avoid it, which is why I often write and schedule my posts a week or more out from the current date. For Bio Break, I start writing for the next week on Wednesday evening, trying to go for one post a day through Friday (which gives me Mon-Wed). Then two additional posts are written up on Saturday, and wowzers, I’m done for the next week. It’s a good feeling and quite helpful if there’s a day or two of writer’s block.
But what if there’s a timely issue or event that needs to be written about right here and now? Then I just do it and bump a non-essential post to the following week. Recently, I took two weeks off for vacation, but I doubt anyone noticed from my blog. That’s because for the month before, I slightly increased my scheduling output so that I ended up with a three-week buffer. Let me tell you, it was a great feeling to not have to worry about writing or disrupting the regular posting schedule during those weeks!
One other strategy — a tip, really — that I employ is that if there’s an idea that pops into my head, I try to write it up right away. I find that, at least for me, jotting down the general idea to write up later ends up filling up my drafts bin but never getting done.
Anyway, good luck preparing your blog wherever you’re at, and enjoy writing and reading Blaugust this year!
Bio Break 
Heh! I really need to do the anti-post to this for Blaugust. I never do anything in advance, not ever. The nearest I get is having some vague idea in my head of a topic a day or two ahead of when I find time to write it, but even that would be rare.
Mostly I have no idea what I’m going to write until the day I’m going to post. Something usually comes to mind when I open Blogger and hit New Post. If it doesn’t I give it a while and come back later in the day. Something always crops up that gioves me an idea, either while I’m playing or when I’m reading other blogs and comments.
My Draft folder is always empty except for fragments of posts where I got interrupted and forgot I’d started. There are no half-finished ideas in there and never have been. Every idea I get makes it onto the blog. I’m hardly discriminating!
Working ahead – that’s what I try to do! 🙂 Still need to be flexible enough to side step, prepared material should the need arise though.
Like, I’m probably not going to post my working ahead suggestion now. Haha ^_^
I’ve gone through phases of being ‘ahead of the game’, and many phases of writing posts that morning for immediate publication. I’ve always treated blogging moderately seriously – not enough to get stressed about, but I try to stick to the schedule even if I’m not in the mood. The tip at the end about writing as ideas come is so true for me, I have easily 60 or more ‘dead’ posts that were general ideas that I never developed. A lot of them are reaction posts that I failed to get written in a timely fashion, I generally avoid, personally, referring back to other people’s posts that are already a week or more old.
Reblogged this on DDOCentral.
It’s good to know I’m not alone in my inability to finish a draft!
If I don’t get a post done in one sitting – occasionally two in quick succession – it pretty much never gets completed at all.