Blogging tip #8: How to define your blogging schedule

bysmartketeer

6.8K followers

Updated 6 years ago

Another extremely important factor of your blogging strategy: your blogging schedule.

One of the main reasons why blogs are so effective as marketing tools, and why search engines like them so much, is because they constantly have new content. In fact, the very essence of blogging is to create and to publish content on a consistent schedule. If you can constantly create and publish more and more new high-quality content, you’ll be able to earn money with a blog or to make a living with blogging. Also, you’ll be able to indulge the visitors and the search engines, and the interest will rise accordingly. According to Curata …

91% of the best business bloggers publish weekly or more often. Only 70% of all other bloggers post at this frequency.

Defining an achievable and sustainable blogging schedule is literally vital to the success and the future of your blog. So, take your time and work out a realistic blogging schedule! Revisit your goals, re-evaluate your resources, and more importantly, re-analyze your content strategy! If you are planning to run a news blog, most likely you are going to publish new – relatively short – content pieces on daily basis. If you want to focus on long, content-heavy tutorials, your optimal publishing frequency will be much lower. Also, the content creation process can be more or less time-consuming depending on your preferred content types and content formats. While a text-based newsflash is not very time-intensive, a professional video tutorial will require much more time and patience.

There are 3 essential questions you should ask yourself when planning your content strategy and blogging schedule:

1. Do I need to recruit any contributors? Creating a LOT of high-quality content and implementing an aggressive blogging schedule can be extremely exhausting and time-consuming. Depending on your goals and your content strategy, you may need to have one or more people actively and consistently creating content for your blog. And I won’t lie to you: finding the right contributors – and, also, getting them to vigorously contribute – can be a quite challenging task. Why? Because, you’ll have to find a way to leverage their skills and talents without “endangering” your unique style and online identity. Also, you’ll have to define some editorial guidelines, to create an integrated editorial calendar, and perhaps even to establish an editorial hierarchy. As I said, it can be quite challenging … So, ask yourself: does it really worth it? If you are not sure about the answer, you should probably reappraise your content strategy …

2. Do I need to define my editorial guidelines? My recommendation: if you want to earn money with a blog or to make a living with blogging, take your time and try to define some clear editorial guidelines for your blog. If you are going to run a one-person blog, it will help you to create your own optimized content creation frameworks. If you are going to use external or internal contributors, it will help you to provide a clear picture of what they can expect and what is expected of them. In this case you’ll have to establish a comprehensive set of editorial guidelines, including the company philosophies, a clear ethical code, the preferred content types, the accepted ways of handling and using specific content elements like images, links, etc, the clear editorial hierarchy, the content approval process, etc.

3. Do I need to establish an editorial hierarchy? This is very straightforward. If you are are going to run a one-person blog – and you are not suffering from multiple personality disorder -, the answer is “no”. If you are going to use multiple contributors or authors to create content for your blog, the answer is a strong “yes”. You’ll have to clearly define the roles and the responsibilities. If you have only a few contributors you can keep it simple, but if you have a multi-tiered editorial stuff, you’ll have to define a clear hierarchy. Here’s an example with four tiers:

• an editor-in-chief who is responsible for ensuring that all content is in line with your blog’s goals and policies

• a content manager who is responsible for finding and commissioning content for every topic

• content editors who are responsible for – guess what – editing, proofreading, etc the received content pieces

• content creators who are responsible for the content creation itself

The bottom line

You’ll have to outline a well-thought-out content strategy and an achievable, realistic blogging schedule, because blogging fatigue and lassitude will kick in at a certain point, and if your content strategy is too muzzy, or your blogging schedule is too aggressive, the fatigue will kick in sooner, and that could be the beginning of the end of your blogging career. My advice: define the best content types and content formats, find an attainable cadence, set expectations with your target audience, and stick to it.