The sooner you get started on things, the sooner they’ll be done. That’s a saying I recall hearing across my childhood, and when applied to the world of blogging, it essentially means you should always endeavour to work as quickly and as far ahead as you possibly can.
Downtime for writers and creators is important, so here’s why staying one step ahead is a must-do part of long-term blogging.
Keep Writing to Stay Ahead
In the case of this website, staying ahead can be difficult if I’ve fallen behind on my reading. Sure, you can technically read a book in less than a day, so why am I not putting out new reviews daily? Because I fail to stay ahead and be consistent in my reading habits. This means I sometimes struggle to uphold a content buffer, a period between creating the post and when it is publicly released.
Actually, 2024 marks the first time when I have been reliably ahead in outputting content, but you may notice reviews still only trundle out once or twice a month. If you’re going to be a reviewer, you need to keep engaging with the items and media you review, lest you have nothing to write about.
Writing, itself, is also essential. You need to create general content, even if it is off-topic and not the primary appeal of your project. This general content, typically not as engaging or as extensive as your main writing, is excellent in facilitating a content buffer.
A lot of what you see under the Blog section of this website is created several weeks in advance. Yes, that also includes this post! And this particular section of the website was created not only as a means of providing extra content, but also to aid myself in creating and upholding a desirable content buffer.
Scheduling Matters
Scheduling posts is a must when it comes to running a consistent blog. No matter how much content you write, you can’t hang around every day to publish it manually.
Not being able to schedule your content essentially undoes the hands-off benefits of a content buffer (which is supposed to enable you breathing time to recharge or work on other posts).
Scheduling is perhaps the only advantage of dedicated websites over most social media, and in-depth blogging hasn’t really made its way over to platforms that are designed more for memes/videos/images/personal updates. So even if third-party scheduling tools do exist for the likes of Instagram, is anyone really going to be paying your well-written post any mind?
Ultimately, scheduling is what makes the content buffer all the more effective. If you create and schedule months’ worth of content, it results in months’ worth of time to dedicate to yourself and creating more content. Just don’t think you can schedule everything ahead of time, especially if you want to capitalise on trends and news.
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