A few days ago, I talked about how to co-blog with others. My friends and I are still in the beginning stages of our blog and I’ve been struggling to remind everyone that it’s their turn to post. When monetary compensation is not involved, I’m telling you, it’s hard to ask everyone to stick to schedule. And since this week is our first week, everyone keeps on messing up, especially since we all came from various time zones around the globe. We’re our own little United Nations with bloggers from Greece, the UAE, Japan, the Philippines, Germany and the US. Here are the things I did to ensure everyone posts on schedule.

1. Set a Common Time

Since we’re from different parts of the globe, my today would have been someone’s yesterday and another person’s tomorrow. Just to be sure our days are the same — I’ve set a common time for all of us. So no one gets confused with the GMT pluses and minuses, I set our common time to Greenwich Mean Time (GMT). I tweaked the WordPress clock to show GMT and even gave them a link where they can see the current GMT time. This would ensure that they would post on their assigned day and there would be no conflict of topics and themes.

2. Sent Them Emails on the Eve Before Their Assigned Day

I sent them an email first last Sunday to remind them of their schedules. Afterwards, I’ve taken to emailing them one by one on the eve of their assigned days. I found this worked quite well because they’re reminded personally of what they have to do. I’ve had 100% success using this method. However, I can’t go on like this for the duration of the project. I can’t imagine myself emailing bloggers every day to remind them of their schedule so…

3. You Can Send Automatic Emails

There are programs you can use to automatically send emails in the future. One example of that is (http://www.lettermelater.com/)LetterMeLater.com. You could schedule your emails to be sent at an assigned date and time. The letters look just like how it would have, had you sent it using your real email address. It’s very handy especially for cases such as this when you have to constantly remind people. You can even set the letters to be sent in a recurring schedule, meaning they’d be sent over and over again depending on your specifications.

4. You Can Post the Schedule of the Bloggers at The Blog Itself

If everyone knows what day a blogger would post, regulars would expect their favorite bloggers to do so at their assigned day. It will be very difficult for someone to forget blogging when people are waiting for a post. Of course, this might only be applicable to more popular blogs, not for new ones, but it’s always worth taking a shot.

5. Have The Bloggers Post Ahead of Schedule

This will be hard to do, but I’ve been trying to convince my bloggers to create a backlog of posts and post them ahead of schedule. This is possible in our case because they’re only required to post once per week and hence it’s easy to create multiple posts all at once.

In the end, despite all these, it’s always up to the bloggers you’re working with whether they could stick to their responsibilities. If in case any of them suddenly disappears have a backup plan ready. You can either write a post yourself or have some write a guest post if necessary and if you can find someone to do so.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 7th, 2007 at 1:17 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.

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