Creating Your Own Blogging Schedule

In the last three months or so, I have kept a pretty good schedule of blogging. It involves getting up an hour and fifteen minutes earlier each day, getting to work, and writing a post here every day. Of course, it hasn't been every day, mainly because on days that I don't go to my day job, I don't have the rest of the day's schedule to help me just naturally fall into the habit of blogging.

During this time, I would also import affiliate sales and PPC data from the day before. This process is semi-atuomated and I wrote the script before setting this blogging schedule for myself. The way I saw it that, currently blogging makes me no money that I can track. It may have made me $100 last month. But the affiliate marketing I have been involved in the last few years does. Therefore blogging cannot take from the time that actually makes me money. By automating more of that side, I can get more time to write.

But blogging is not just writing in a vacuum. There is commenting on other blogs and social networks also. So in that hour and fifteen minutes I had, I would try to squeeze these two activities in also, but they usually spread out further into the day, on lunch break and the like.

But there are some days that I cannot get my fingers moving on writing an article. There are days that it just does not work out the way I want to. I can go through my posts and pick those out that I forced into existence. I don't really believe in writer's block as something that effects me more than a short period of time. I know that the next day, it will be different and chances are that I will be typing as fast as I can and still not fast enough to get everything down. But that doesn't help when I am looking at an hour to break the block and write the post.

I have tried different ways to work around this issue. I have written posts out in longhand at night. Then just rewrote them in the morning. But I don't have the time every night to do this. So that won't work as a "schedule".

But I do like the idea of being a few posts ahead or maybe even more than a few. I have written up to four posts in longhand in advance. But I don't type that fast, so it still takes a while to type in the morning and I haven't made it more than one post ahead yet.

The new plan. When I get those days to write longhand and it feels good, just go with it and write as many posts as possible. Then the next day at work, type out and timestamp all the posts. This may take the whole time I have that day and limit commenting and social network time. But for days after that I can focus on other things. Getting more traffic to this and other blogs and monetizing my sites more effectively.

I think by breaking up the days differently can minimize the time spent shifting from one mode in my mind to another. Instead of shifting from analysis to writing in one hours time, I can break it up into bigger chunks of each mode and get more done. At least that's the idea.

When I was really new to doing this, I knew I needed to follow a schedule close to what I learned from other bloggers. It didn't really matter which schedule. I just needed to choose one that someone who had been in it for a while to know what they are doing. I followed Yaro Starak's basic schedule. And for a while, I needed to follow the schedule like a convert, until it became habit, dismissing any balking as laziness. This I know because I know myself. But I also know that I will only dismiss my bucking for so long. Eventually I had evolve the schedule into something that works better for me.

Those type of insights don't usually come to me while I am working hard at it. They come when I am not even thinking of working for a few days. When I come back, I know a change is needed. I also know that the change is temporary, waiting on future changes to make it even a better schedule.

I thank my family for breaking me out of the working schedule to see the bigger picture when I get back to work. I am doing this to give them a better life. I forget that at times. Without them, I would not be doing all of this anyway.