Do you have an editorial calendar for your blog? Sounds so professional, doesn’t it? Basically it’s a calendar-to-do-list showing, by date, your upcoming post ideas. It comes in handy to help:
- remind you of holiday-related posts
- schedule special event posts
- keep track of deadlines for sponsored posts
- make sure you post in time for contest entries
- schedule posts for deals/events that are too far in the future to post about now
- improve the consistency of how many posts you publish daily
- use time management to schedule your “screen time”
- you remember annual events and features
Hand in hand with an editorial calendar, scheduling posts to publish on a future date, will alleviate any pressure you feel to post daily. I haven’t mastered this yet – I’m like a kid in a toy store, as soon as I write something, I want to post it (picture a little kid with a secret, jumping up and down because they just gotta tell someone). But I do use it for my weekly features. In theory (at least this is the plan), every Sunday, I do my weekly feature posts and schedule them for their respective days. It gets it out of the way and helps me to stay on time.
It’s easy to schedule posts to publish on a future date. On the right side, when you are composing a post, you should see a drop-down box that is titled “Publish”. When you open it, it looks like this:
If you click on “Edit” next to “Publish immediately”, a date/time box will drop down. Just change it to the date you want. If you are posting at 12:01 am, on June 1st, it would show Jun 01, 2011 @ 00:01. Be careful of your time zone. Even though I live in the central zone, I have my calendar set to eastern time because that’s how my giveaway rules are worded. If you need to check what time zone you are using, on your left side, under “Settings”, open “General” and you’ll see this, about halfway down.
If you have any questions, please leave a comment below. Also, if you use a theme other than Atahualpa, does your screen look the same? If you schedule your posts, and have more tips, please share!
I love scheduling posts.
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