Do you tend to write your blog posts on-the-fly, writing and publishing all at once? Did you know that blog platforms often give you an option to pre-schedule your posts instead? For example, you can write the post at midnight on Wednesday and have it automatically go live at noon on Thursday. Did you know that pre-scheduling your blog post drafts can be a great thing for your business?
Here are three reasons you should consider pre-scheduling blog posts on your business blog:
1. Improve Efficiency
Sometimes you’re simply in the mood to write, you have a lot to say, or you have a nice flow going and you don’t want to waste it. At other times you need to get a blog post up but nothing comes to you. If you do most of your blog writing while you’re in one of those productive and creative stretches you can cut down on the overall time you spend blogging. But being virtually yappy one day doesn’t mean you need to send all of the posts live right away. Schedule them for future post dates instead (unless, of course, they’re incredibly timely and really need to go live right now).
2. Improve Quality
No one has “fresh eyes” immediately after drafting a blog post. That means you’re more likely to miss things when you proofread the post before publishing. The only way to get those fresh eyes is to walk away from the project between the writing and editing phases. If you’re writing evergreen content or at least something that can go up in a day or two, consider writing your posts a day or two before they’re scheduled to be published. Then you can proofread them and catch more errors before they go live to your customer base or other target audience.
3. Improve Consistency
When you pre-schedule blog posts you don’t have to worry about making sure you publish things at the right time each day or each week. Because things are written and scheduled early you can make sure each post is published as consistently as possible so readers know when to expect them (and you don’t have to rush out a blog post at the last minute, trying to stay on schedule).
Pre-scheduling blog posts could be a great idea for your business. But it doesn’t apply to every blogger or every blog post. If your blog is about timely stories (like a news commentary blog), you’ll need to put posts up shortly after writing them. But for most business blogs there’s a mix of content. So even if you can’t put up something like company news a few days in advance, your tips and advice can enjoy that cooling off period and you’ll still reap some of the benefits.
Are you ready to move forward with your content strategy and pre-schedule your posts? Contact me if you need a hand with content creation or planning.
Great post, great points. I try to stay ahead of the game by writing more than one article a day so that I don’t have to worry if I don’t have time on certain days, but I’ve never tried pre-scheduling my posts. Thanks for sharing!
Another way to look at it — especially for independent bloggers — is that pre-scheduling blog posts lets you take a break without your blog having to do the same. So if you do write a few extra, never hurts to keep them as drafts and pre-schedule them to post when you need some time off. 🙂