How To Schedule Your Content

A schedule is one of the most important aspects to a successful blog on any platform. Whether you blog in a single niche or dabble in a few as I do, you need to have a set schedule for your work. If not, then the people following you for the content you create will not have a clue when to expect a new post.

Setting a schedule will help you stay disciplined and keep your readers engaged across multiple posts. Not every person creates, in fact most just enjoy reading what you create. So it is smart to make it easy for them to find your newest creation.

As followers increase so does your fan base. Not every single person who gives you a follow is a fan by my definition. What a decade in the blogging space taught me is that one out of every one hundred followers are true fans. These are the people who always show up to read you work.

The people who look forward to every new creation you produce. The people who will share your posts because you are the author. This rings true on Steem as well and upon inspection you will witness this. It is not an exact ratio though you may have more or less but it in a great rule of thumb.

We owe it to our fans to produce content on a schedule so there is no guess work for them. Whether it is every day, once per week or once per month we need to stick to a predetermined time. We as the creators are like a Broadway play. The people who see to read what we made expect the show to start at a certain time.

The viewers understand if they get to the theater a little before the show starts they will not miss the performance. What if Broadway did not schedule their shows in advance? How would anyone know when to see it or even that the show is playing? Our blog is our play and we need to do both ourselves and our readers a favor and set a schedule.

Single Niche

When scheduling for a single niche there is a lot of room to wiggle. Not only do you have control over the amount of content you put out but you are also in a better place to create a backlog of content. This backlog is great when a day comes where you scheduled to post but life hits and take your time away.

All you have to do in this case is copy, paste, and add images. Which takes a lot less time than writing an entire blog post from scratch. It also helps if you do not post every day but still write every day. You can look over your backlog and plan out series or at least publish your work in an order that makes sense.

If you are new to blogging, I recommend a single niche. Whether it is tech, food, cars, or whatever. You can read more about niches and how to find the best one for you in a previous post. The reason I tell new bloggers to stick to one niche is for a few reasons. The first being it is easier to grow a following and gain more of those true fans.

Second is due to lack of experience. Don't bog yourself down with more than one niche because this forces you to post frequently. If you are new, it is easy to burn out and quit before you see any traction. There is not much worse than blogging daily and realizing that no one is reading.

Find what will work best with your lifestyle when figuring out your posting schedule. There will always be a few days a year where the post does not get out due to life throwing you a curve ball. The goal is to be consistent a majority of the year. Blogging every day will wear down even a seasoned creator. Three days a week is a good medium between comfort and gaining exposure. The more you post the more chances you have to be noticed. Make sure you can sustain whatever number of post you produce each week.

Multiple Niches

If you are a new blogger not heeding my advice or have a few topics, you are passionate about as myself, there needs to be more structure. Let's say we have three topics we want to write about on our blog. The first is cooking, the second reclaiming old things, and the third gardening. We need to think of what day to write about what topic. It does not matter if we pick reclaiming for Monday, gardening for Wednesday, and cooking for Friday.

The day does not matter, but the consistency does.

When blogging in multiple niches on the same site it is best to never mix up the content. If we post cooking on Fridays then we should either post or not post but never replace the topic with another. This is because as we blog on the schedule we set the people who follow us will pick up the trend.

When someone follows us for the cooking content, they probably won't care about the reclaiming or gardening content. It is our duty to stay consistent on when we post for each topic. This allows the reader to expect that content on that day and to seek it out. This is good for us as well in it will grow our blog faster than if we posted whatever whenever.

Why not ditch the schedule?

In all honesty it is entirely up to the creator and only the creator. Many bloggers other than myself will say similar things if not the same thing I have here. The goal is to get our work read by the people who will find value from our effort.

So why shoot ourselves in the foot instead of using the stairs with two good feet? I makes little sense to put all this hard work into our posts and drop the ball on the little aspects that will only help give us the extra edge we need to succeed.