5 Ways to Leverage Advance Posting

I’ve had quite a few questions and comments about how I am able to post so many blog entries across so many blogs while working two-four jobs without getting burnt out and without losing my edge, etc. It’s quite simple… Advance Posting. There are alot of benefits to advanced posting that I’ve picked up in my time blogging. Here’s a few.

1. Consistency – Search engines as well as readers like to get regular content. Search engines, especially, place a higher value on regularly updated sites than hit-or-miss sites. When blogging, try to avoid the start-stop approach to blogging.
2. Getting the most out of Pings – My friend, Jayvee, over at Cellphone9 pointed this one out to me. In order to optimize my content for the most exposure, I try to spread my entries out at least 30 minutes apart. Most blog tools, including WordPress, send out “pings” or notifications to sites like Technorati or Google to alert them to new content. The problem is that alot of these services have strict intervals of time between allowed pings. This is to prevent them from overloading their systems. If I post twice in 15 minutes, the second entry is likely to be ignored. By advance posting, I can optimize the exposure I recieve on the big boards. As an example, The Not So Free State has almost universally been pre-scheduled entries and has begun quite a rapid growth.
3. Out of Sight, Out of Mind – while it is not realistic to really have any of my blogs out of mind, it is beneficial to sit down on Sunday night (or whenever) and schedule 7 posts in advance for the week… one for each day. That frees me up to post other relvant content at my leisure without feeling the pressure of posting at least once a day on each blog.
4. Understanding Reading Trends – I look at my stats, though not as religiously as I should, so I know that most of my readers are in North America (typical for most blogs, I’d guess). If my stats tell an accurate story, I know that folks will tend to catch up on their blog reading between 8:30am and 10:30 am (after they get to work and settle in and check email, etc) and again in the late afternoon between 4-6pm (before they go home or after they get home from work). Therefore, to try to get the most bang for my buck, I will try to advance post entries for those time frames. It’s slightly complex because timezones come into play. Because I am in the Eastern timezone, an entry posted at 4pm will be available in the 4 o’clock time frame for east coasters but still be posted in time for the west coasters reading time. As a sidenote, I try to avoid night time posting for content I want to get alot of exposure for. By the time readers check in in the morning in the United States, the fresh content I posted has disappeared off of the front pages of the search engines.
5. Avoiding Burnout – For the first year and some months of my blogging career, I would take the run and stop approach, blog alot then stop blogging because I lost my focus. By spacing entries out, I take advantage of the times of inspiration and cover my ass in my uninspired moments. No one knows the difference.

Maybe these 5 tips can help you. It took a long time for me to realize these things, but now that I do, things are so much easier to manage. Remember, you’re not in a race. Unless you’re a breaking news journalist, anything you blog now can likely be put off until tomorrow. Your readers will thank you. The search engines will thank you. And you’ll find yourself actually growing in blogging.