You can not expect to come up with a great new subject to blog about every day you need one. There will be days when you have no ideas, and others when they just keep coming!!! Ask every successful blogger, podcaster and youtube creator and they will tell you a simple secret.
I dont come up with my ideas on the day – I plan them out in advance.
As soon as you are producing content for today you are on the cliff edge. One slip and you are over.
Create your content in advance. Try and keep a dozen days in advance. This does not stop you dropping in something more immediate to reflect a current news story. This approach is really easy to do with WordPress. You can start creating content and save it as a draft. You can even schedule it to go live at a time and date in the future.
There are even tools to help you with your planning. We use a plugin called WordPress Editorial Calendar. As the creators say
- See all of your posts and when they’ll be posted.
- Drag and drop to change your post dates.
- Manage your drafts with our new drafts drawer.
- Quick edit post titles, contents, and times.
- Publish posts or manage drafts.
- Easily see the status of your posts.
- Manage posts from multiple authors.
- It also behaves on our custom post types!
Once you have created your store of great articles you will find that you have more time to plan the SEO optimisation, the tie up with your twitter feed and other social media activities and you can plan a whole series of articles gradually working through bigger topics.
Also while you are planning your new posts, do not forget that you may be able to ‘refresh’ an old post for some more traffic. We use code to show when our posts were last updated, not when they were first published. This shows we work to keep content current and can enhance good content rather than repeatedly posting old content or having to write the whole thing again from scratch.
Now I have finished this post to my satisfaction, I will put it on the schedule and start thinking about some other ideas.
Featured photo by Nathan Shipps on Unsplash
