Setting up a blog is easy. Consistently posting quality content can be a bit more challenging. Writer's block, scheduling burdens and everyday life can and do easily interfere with blogging. So, how to keep your blog dynamic and relevant while still fulfilling your other duties and obligations? Scheduled posting.
Scheduled posting allows you to create useful content at your own convenience and schedule it for publication sometime in the future. This means you can write whenever inspiration strikes, and post to your blog whenever you choose. This feature translates to better posts, consistent quality and a continually-updated blog.
Too Busy to Blog? No Way!
Schedules always get crunched. There is no way to halt the ongoing flood of appointments, meetings and responsibilities. Your blog shouldn't have to grow stale just because your busy. Free up your time and let your creativity flow by scheduling your blog posts. Let's say you have an extremely busy week coming up which you know will afford you little or no time for blogging. You can begin to write some useful posts the week before your super-busy week, edit and polish them over the weekend, then schedule them to be published on your blog during the week when you will be, for all practical blogging purposes, unavailable. But your audience doesn't need to know that you're busier than a one-legged man in a butt-kicking contest. Visitors to your blog will assume your busy hammering out great content everyday.
Be Your Best
Quality is job #1. Remember that slogan? It should definitely apply to your blog. Poor quality content means a poor quality blog, and if your blog is a junker then why blog? Scheduling posts usually means publishing better-written, higher-quality content. It allows you time to think and plan. You can draft up a post, review it at a later time, edit and expand as needed and then publish whenever is most appropriate. The review process ALWAYS creates better posts. Better posts mean more visitors and more visitors means, of course, more business.
Competitive Advantage?
Small business blogging is, to some degree, about discipline. Going for lengths of time without posts or site updates will hurt your traffic to your site as people that are interested in topic visit your site and repeatedly see the same, stale content. The nature of blogging is dynamic and engaging. You can mirror this dynamic on your blog by using scheduled posting to write over the weekend, in the airport, etc. and publish the content during the workweek. During last year's winter holiday season I wrote a bunch of posts and scheduled them to be published during the first work week after the holiday blitz. I didn't want to post my great content during the holidays for fear that no one would see it (not too many folks on the Web on Christmas Eve), so I wrote like a demon over the holidays, edited to my heart's content then intentionally scheduled everything for posting when people would be paying attention - the first work week after the holiday. This also allowed me to be perceived as refreshed and ready-to-go after the holidays, when in fact, I was anything but. However, as other blogger waded through email built up over the holiday and groped around half-heartedly for things to write about, my blog was chock full of killer content.
Scheduled posting should be used by nearly all small business bloggers. It lets you be creative whenever the juices are flowing, producing quality content for your audience and providing dynamic, consistent posts for your blog regardless of your schedule and your "offline" world. So, give scheduled posting a try. Once you try it you may never go back to posting on-the-fly.
Blogging about news in your industry is smart. It provides ready-made content, plenty of discussion, consistent traffic AND helps to establish you as a thought leader. But, roaming the internet for every tidbit of industry news can be frustrating, time-cosuming and unproductive. Here's how to do it right.
