Maintaining your brand’s blogging schedule shouldn’t feel as challenging as it often does. But when you run a business and you have a million things to manage on behalf of your clients’ satisfaction, keeping up with your own blogging schedule is often the first thing to fall off your plate. Sometimes, we even push our own posting plans off the plate ourselves in order to accommodate other priorities. Clients come first, but it’s important to find a way to manage your time against their needs in order to keep up with the blogging schedule that supports your brand.
Here are four hints that should help you create a blogging schedule that’s right for your business. How will you know it’s right? You’ll post consistently without feeling like it’s a push to do so…
Be Realistic About Your Routine
It’s common to feel gung-ho at the start of any project or new initiative. You know you need to blog for your brand and you’ve got a million ideas ready to write posts about and publish. After all, you love your business, your industry, helping clients, living the dream — great!
Invariably, life and business will interrupt your best-laid plans because that’s just how this works. Your momentum, for whatever reason, will lag and you might find yourself pushing off posting because you have a million other things to do.
When you find yourself procrastinating about posting, recognize that this is the perfect moment to ask why and reevaluate your efforts.
For example, if you set yourself up with an expectation to post every single day, you’re going to feel frustrated when you miss a day, try to catch up on that missed post, and then somehow fall a week behind… and then maybe two. All of a sudden, you’re in this backdating mode, while trying to manage your brand NOW, and plan for tomorrow. Not a great dynamic… and certainly not conducive to creativity or productivity.
So…
Set Your Schedule in Stone
Determine what is actually realistic for your blogging schedule and set those parameters with the same strong and steadfast approach you depend on to manage client work.
Sure, you read something about best blogging practices state that businesses should post twice a week. You tried and failed. Rather than stay stuck, regroup and reconsider your reality. Maybe you, realistically, only have time to blog once a week, but you know without a shadow of a doubt that you WILL absolutely blog once a week because it’s manageable.
Guess what? Your new blogging schedule is set — it’s now up to you to determine which day of the week you want to publish your posts make time well ahead of that day to craft and schedule it. (FYI: best practices still stay Monday and Thursday mornings are ideal blog posting times, but you do you. Seriously.) Maybe the weekend provides the extra wiggle room you need, away from client work, to focus on your own marketing efforts. In that case, schedule your posts to publish Monday morning and make Sundays your personal blog post deadline day.
Challenge yourself to keep ahead of your own curve and schedule your posts in advance, (work up to a month, if you can) that way you can avoid the creative slump that results from feeling short on time… aka Brain Drain.
Don’t Let Brain Drain Become a Roadblock
When you’re pressed for time, frustrated, or otherwise feeling like a failure (as in, ugh… I haven’t posted in two weeks!), it’s tough to channel the creativity needed to craft original, compelling blog content. Ideally, you want to envision what kinds of information your audience is looking for and create helpful posts in response. Putting yourself in the position of your audience and attempting to come up with topics can be challenging when you’re otherwise tapped out.
Help yourself with the creative process by keeping a running list of topics, questions, ideas, even quotes that motivate you to tap into the why of what you’re doing and express the value you offer your clients. A simple “Blog Post Ideas” Google doc is a great place to update this running list, or even a notepad on your desk is a close-at-hand option for scribbling down thoughts whenever they strike. Don’t underestimate the power of doodling when it comes to dreaming up ideas…
Full disclosure: I keep a sketchpad by my bed because it seems that ideas often interrupt my sleep or introduce themselves first thing in the morning while I am just starting to get going and a million to-dos are already competing for my attention. Make it easy for yourself to add ideas to your blog post list so that you never feel stuck and end up skipping a post… or two…
Edit, But Avoid Self-Censoring
Of course, you need to edit your posts before publishing, but try not to do so before you even put a word to the page. So often business owners second guess their authority, their voice, the fact that they DO have something to say. Or, if they have confidence in their message, they doubt their ability to capture and convey it to a wider audience. The result? An empty page… a post not published. Get the words down, take a breather, and give your post another look with your editing eyes before hitting publish. We all make mistakes, and a typo is pretty small on the scale compared to bowing out of blogging entirely.
At the end of the day, if time and confidence are in short supply, reach out so we can help you establish the best blogging schedule for your brand.
