Keeping organized as a blogger - Write your posts in advance

The best advice I ever learned about blogging was this: Write your articles in advance. It's a lot easier to blog several times a week (or every day) when you have a big pile of drafts waiting to be polished up and posted, rather than having to pull a post out of thin air when it's time to publish.

I try to keep 2 or 3 fully-written articles on deck, between my three blogs. Besides that, I keep at least 10 fragments and dozens of one-line post ideas to further develop. The trick is to get blog posts written when you have time, so you're not rushing to write something when you need to update.

There are varying opinions on how often a blog should update - some people say as many as 20 times a day! Personally, I think a blog should update at least twice a week, with more often being better, but more than once a day is generally overkill. People aren't going to be constantly refreshing your blog for new content, and do you really think you can write 10 quality blog posts a day? Unlikely. So do your writing when you have time, and reserve those quality blog posts to publish another day.

Your organizational skills don't have to be anything fancy - just type some things up in your favorite word processor, or leave articles as unpublished drafts in your blogging software. I personally use the Yahoo Notepad that comes free with my email account. I have one file for each of my blogs, along with a general to-do list.

I start my new blog posts with ideas - just a phrase or short sentence, like "generating passive income" or "best new summer reading". I don't expand all the ideas I write down, just the good ones. I expand them paragraph by paragraph, until I have a full blog post. I like to hop from article to article, filling in ideas as my "inspiration" strikes. You can do that if you like, or you can write an entire article in one go. It all depends on your preferences, and what provokes the best writing from you.

The best way to build a valuable blog is to take blogging seriously - have fun with it, of course, but treat it as a priority. By writing your blog articles in advance, you'll always be prepared with a post even if you're busy. You never have to apologize for not updating regularly.

(By the way, that is about the most horrible thing you can post in a blog: "Sorry, this blog has been kind of dead lately"... Don't ever do it! And don't ever give yourself a reason to.)

To keep people coming back to your blog (or any kind of website), update often. And the easiest way to update often is if you've already got your posts written in advance. I can't recommend it enough!

~Joy

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