Today’s post is a guest post from the lovely Charlene who blogs over at The Moderate Mum (link at the end). If you haven’t visited Charlene’s blog before, here is a little more about her:
I live near the sea with my partner Graham, and after more than a decade mentoring families, I’m now a stay at home parent to our son, Roscoe.
Charlene’s post is all about helping us to blog to schedule, which all of us bloggers know can be tricky, but so helpful once you get your schedule nailed!
How to Blog to Schedule by Charlene Allcott
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| The Lovely Charlene with her son Roscoe |
We all start blogging with lofty aims to share our deepest thoughts with the world at least four times a week. Then the baby won’t sleep, the cat needs a flea treatment, life gets in the way and your blogging dreams evaporate.
Here are some tips to keep them posts coming and stay on schedule.
1) Get it in the diary – Make sure that you have a good chunk of time allotted in your diary for writing and scheduling posts. Your blog is entitled to the same level of prioritisation as Zumba or your dentist appointments. Be as generous as you can with your scheduling, remember you need to write, edit and organise pictures. Time
yourself writing a post from scratch so you know roughly how long you’ll need.
2) Share your schedule – There’s no point allotting time to write or post if no one else knows about it. If a
blogging calendar falls in the forest does anyone hear it? You need to tell your friends and family that you are not available at the time you have scheduled for posting and make sure you set incredibly firm boundaries about
being disturbed. If you don’t feel comfortable telling others that you’re blogging why not say you’re taking an online writing course, it’s only a small fib – anything it takes to keep that schedule steaming along.
3) Write in advance – If you find yourself with a few minutes spare, instead of mindlessly channel surfing or wondering what you would look like if you dyed your hair red, why not bang out a post? You can keep that bad boy in draft until you need it, so if your week gets unexpectedly hectic you can still keep to your goals.
4) Read other blogs – You’ll read a lot about bloggers block. It happens, the trick is not to panic. In the meantime make sure you keep reading plenty of other blogs for information and inspiration. You won’t be stuck without a topic for long if you stay engaged in the community.
5) Be accountable – Tell your readers when you plan to post, this will encourage them to pop back and check out what you’ve done but it will also give you the fear; fear is an excellent motivator. Instead of thinking, la, la, la – I should probably post today… You’ll think, I have to post, they’re waiting; they’ll hate me! They
probably won’t but just in case better get that post up.
6) Don’t break under the pressure – Please set realistic expectations. If you’ve got a job, a family and a reasonable soap schedule you may not be able to post three times a day. Even with an appropriate goal there’ll be a time when you can’t make it – don’t give up, just splash your face with cold water and start again next week. Personally I wouldn’t bother to apologise online, it’s only announcing to new readers that you’re unreliable. Just make sure that you get that great content back online and back on schedule.
Fab advice there from Charlene! Time to show her some love:
I've never really had a hard time keeping the blog updated. But that's just me.
I really struggled with this when I first started blogging – I'm a lot more disciplined now though, but I think for the most part that's because I have a schedule!