Have You Written a Plan?

When I worked full-time as a university lecturer I often asked my students when handing back work if they’d written a plan ahead of starting an essay. More often than not they owned up to just sitting down and bashing it out in a couple of sittings.

I’d sigh, and suggest a bit more planning in future might go a long way to helping them achieve their goals.

iWork's Numbers. Great for blog scheduling

Essays written without a plan are often sprawling and lack focus.

The same applies to keeping a blog. If you’ve not got a clear idea of where you’re going or what you’re trying to say, your blog may come across as lacking cohesion.

Create a Posting Schedule

If you’re struggling to generate regular content for your blog or hastily writing posts when you can grab a moment in between clients, try to plan a posting schedule for your blog a week at a time.

Ideally it’s even better to have a road map for your coming blog posts over the next month, but that can be daunting. So try a week first.

My approach is to write down the headlines for the posts that I plan to publish each week in an Excel file.

At this point I also plan to write the most important posts each week on a Tuesday or Wednesday as these are the days my blog gets most traffic. I know this because I use Google Analytics to keep track of who visits my site and when. Over time I’ve learned these are may key days.

I use Excel (or Apple’s Numbers, actually) because I’ve found it useful to track certain data each day such as how many comments or tweets a post generates. I also note the category I’ve published it under.

All this helps me track my blog’s vital signs: traffic, customer engagement and ROI. A bit of data gathering, in short, gives me leverage to check my ROI.

Blog Maintenance

I ghost blog for some clients too and I keep an Excel file for each job I work on. This partly helps me give feedback to my clients as well as keeping tabs on what I’m doing.

If you’re thinking about outsourcing your blog you might want to think about asking your blogger to keep to a blog schedule that you jointly work out, as well as collating data that you can study.

Other Resources

I recommend you check out:

Kristen Wright’s take on Creating a Blog Management Calendar in 10 minutes
Darren Rowse’s Thoughts on How Often to Publish Your Blog