Posts In The Bank

I am finally feeling like a real blogger. I have a nice looking site, some good content posts, and now I can stop stressing over the design and code of my site. I can finally start focusing on writing posts and getting more traffic. I do still have some things to do to my theme, but this is my third post I have written tonight. The first one was posted, and I have 2 in queue counting down to liftoff.

I believe it was John Chow who said to “have posts in the bank”. What he means is to have multiple posts already written and in line to be shown on your site. You could only write posts one day out of the week, and use the rest of the week to work on your site, play golf, whatever. It will look like you never left.

I suggest deciding on an interval. Most people will probably want to post once a day. Posting once a day keeps the Google Gods happy by fresh, updated often content. People like John Chow have a lot going on, so they may want to have 2 posts a day or so. It would probably be helpful to ensure your post is shown before peak times of your blog. Say your site picks up traffic at 6PM, then maybe at 4PM you want your post to show up. Once you get some frequent visitors, they may come back once a day (or check the RSS). You want to have your new content shown before they get to the computer. Kind of like gas stations. Right before a holiday they jack up the gas prices to get the most out of the high traffic.

Whip out the old notepad and think of the next few post topics. Under each topic list what you want to include. This is kind of like an outline you probably did in speech class. Go and write a new post. If you haven’t written a post for that day, then have it publish right away (or in a few hours if you want to space it out better). Then go ahead and start writing the next topic on your list. (Yes now, you are probably in a writing mode now and this post will probably be better than the first). Do everything like normal, but DO NOT HIT PUBLISH YET!

You need to tell Wordpress when to display this post. If you are using version 2.5 you will see “Publish Immediately Edit“. Click on edit, then select the time and date for when you want it to become active. The times are in military time, so 1PM is 13 and 24 would be midnight. Once you have this set, you can now hit Publish. If you hit Save, it will save the post as a draft and never post it!

I have a couple posts lined up right now. The next one is scheduled for 11am tomorrow. This is very helpful, and allows you to take some time away from your site, or work on things you need to (like design/code) without sacrificing potential visitors. Now there are no more excuses for not having posts regularly.