Weekly and daily blog posts are important to your overall marketing plan, but this can become a hassle. Sometimes it’s hard to write all the posts you need, especially in a competitive niche requiring at least one post per day. Hiring a writer can help, but you will still need to set up the posts to go out on the right days. Here’s a strategy you can use with WordPress to ensure you get the posts you need at the right times.
Scheduling Posts in WordPress
By using the scheduling feature within the post editing screen, you can allow your post to “go live” at any future time and date you prefer. This works great for those looking to flood their blog with new content daily or even weekly. Just above the “Publish” button, you will find the section for scheduling your blog posts. Utilizing this feature can save you time and allow you to focus on other things, while your blog continues to grow.
Three Benefits of Scheduling in WordPress
1. Fresh Content
Scheduling allows you to add fresh content to your blog often without actually posting it at the same time it’s published. You can hire a write to provide you with multiple posts at the beginning of the month or write them yourself. Then, just schedule them at the appropriate time and you’ll be all set.
2. Cover Vacation Time
Maybe you need to go on a vacation for a week or two, but you don’t want your blog to lay dormant while you’re gone. Instead of working, while on vacation, you can write the posts ahead of time and schedule them to be published while you’re gone.
3. Schedule with Holidays
If you run holiday promotions or you want to make sure your post is published at the right time with a specific holiday, this feature will publish your post whenever you want. Introducing a series of blog posts leading up to a holiday is a great marketing strategy.
The Scheduling Strategy
For this example, we will assume you need five new posts per week. Instead of setting aside time every day to write a new post, you can write them all at the beginning of the week or month. This will help you to concentrate on your writing for a few hours and use the rest of the week to worry about other things.
If you want to write on a weekly basis, you can do all your writing on Fridays for the following week or on Mondays for the new week, whichever you prefer. Write all five posts for the week and schedule them to “go live” one per day. Now, you can relax and handle your other weekly tasks.
Writing all your posts on a monthly basis will take up a little more time, but you can knock them out over the first week of the month. Just write five posts per day for the first four days of the month, schedule them to “go live”, one per day (Monday through Friday) for the rest of the month. This frees up the rest of the month for other things.
Putting your Scheduling on Auto-Pilot
Unless you really enjoy writing or your blog posts need your personal touch, you can hire a ghostwriter to take care of this task for you. Try out a few different writers and find one with the style you prefer most. Once you’ve chosen a writer, you can set them up with a new profile inside WordPress and give them permissions as an “Author”.
This will allow your new writer to login and schedule the posts for you. If you don’t want to worry about the writing at all, all you have to do is send the topics you want covered and let the writer take care of the rest.
How to Know How Many Posts You Need
Some blogs won’t need more than one or two posts a week to say current and competitive. However, competitive niches may require daily posts or even multiple posts per day. Large blogs use an entire staff of writers and sometimes you’ll see three to five new posts per day because of the size of their staff. This usually happens in highly competitive industries, such as fitness or hosting.
If you want to know how many posts you need to publish each day, week or month, just look at your competition. Find the top three to five blogs in your industry and follow their posts for the past few weeks. See how many posts they schedule per day, week or month and you will get a good idea of how many you need.
Take a little time to set up your strategy and plan your writing time. Once you work with the new strategy of scheduling posts in WordPress each month, you will find that you save time and still get the content out to your blog readers as necessary.
TweetTags: Scheduling blog posts, Scheduling blog posts wordpress, scheduling posts in wordpress, scheduling strategy, wordpress scheduling