Scheduling Blog Content

One of the best ways for you to generate traffic for your website is to create and publish blog content.

It provides evidence for your industry specific expertise and authority and most blog readers trust information published on a blog. It is also one of the best ways to get your site ranked on search engines such as Google and Bing.

With good content you can also receive lots of inbound links from other blogs who reference the information in your blog articles; this can also help with your website’s search engine rank.

While many businesses believe in the benefits of building and publishing content through a blog; their blogging efforts can fail because they cannot keep up with the demands of blog writing. Often what happens is that the first couple of weeks perform well and the business produces sufficient content to keep publishing. But soon project commitments or another problem arises which reduces the time the business can dedicate to their blog. This leads to a scenario where the business misses deadlines for publishing blog content.

While many business leaders believe that this is only a minor problem, it can cause significant problems with search engine ranks and the opinions of your customers.

The opinion of your customers is very critical. If you don’t keep up with a schedule and customers notice gaps in your publishing history, they may feel your blog is no longer active or the business has shut down.

For the same reason, Google and other search engines will believe you are inactive and will lower your site’s rank on their result pages.

This can lead to a significant drop in web traffic for your business. Google is one of the main traffic generators for most small businesses and the lower your rank, the less traffic that will come to your site.

Another problem with not scheduling your content in advance is that when you are manually uploading and publishing content, you can often miss the best times of the day. This will reduce the traffic to your site, the number of interactions each piece of content can potentially receive and finally reduce the awareness of your brand.

How Can You Prevent This From Happening?

One of the best ways to avoid these problems is to create your content in advance and schedule it for release. This can have several benefits for your organisation, the biggest of which is that you will never miss a publishing date and will retain your search engine rank.

Another benefit includes the ability to perfect and plan your content better. This makes your marketing campaigns more effective and your search engine optimisation strategy better in the long term. As your strategy becomes better, the results will improve and you can grow your business with limited paid advertising.

For this to happen however, you need to have strong management skills and a clear process for developing the content for your website’s blog. Without these skills, you will not keep to the schedule and you will miss publishing dates.

So What Is The Best Process To Have?

There are several steps to the process of the scheduling blog content, which if you follow will ensure that you will never miss a deadline. Here is a brief overview of this best strategy for developing, creating and scheduling in your business’ blog content.

1. Content Idea Development

The first thing you need to do is to decide on what topics you’re going to cover in the short, medium and long terms. With each topic, you need to assign several titles so that you know what you are writing. These titles don’t have to be exact. You can optimise them later or you might realise, during the writing of the content, your title is no longer applicable and it needs to be adjusted.

At the same time, it is best practice to write down some notes on what you would like to cover in the topics. For instance, if you were writing a blog post about what are the best programs to complete your tax returns on, you would write the list of software programs and the reasons why you have chosen them.

2. Write The Content

The next step is to create the content. This is where most of the work is completed and can take anywhere from 30 minutes to several hours. There may be some research involved which can obviously lengthen this process.

While you are writing the content, include all the links to references you have used. Google includes the outbound links in their ranking formula and they add creditability to your content. You don’t want to forget where you got that key statistic from when you are uploading your content later on; so it is best to include it in your first draft.

3. Edit Your Content

Very rarely is content brilliantly written on the first attempt. Therefore, ensure that you are reviewing your content for factual information, spelling and grammar. If this is not your best skill, ask for a colleague or a professional proof-reader / editor to look over the content for you.

4. Schedule In Your Content

When you have finished editing your content, upload your content onto your chosen blogging platform. This should be done with at least two weeks to the publishing date to go. This allows you to check the content once more for errors and ensures you aren’t completing the task last minute.

5. Check Content

A couple of days before the publishing date; do a final check of the content for errors. A little time between your first edit and the second edit can often be needed for seeing some of the small errors that escaped you the first time.

6. Check Your Content Was Published Correctly

At some point after you have scheduled your blog post to go live, check your website to ensure the blog post did go live. Some blogging platforms can accidentally delay the publishing of content. If this happens you can manually publish the blog post within seconds.

Conclusion

Your blogging schedule is as important as the content itself. Irregular or missed content is often assumed to be the work of an unprofessional business owner. Therefore, ensure this is not the image you are promoting to your audience by regularly updating your blog with fresh content by writing and scheduling it in advance.