Just recently, Skellie, a regular blogger on ProBlogger, posted an article on developing a habit of posting in advance. I agree with every bit of advice she’s given. It’s always best to post in advance or at least, to plan posts in advance. That way, you will always have something when an unfortunate even happens on what you suddenly want to go to a well-deserved vacation. If everything’s up to me, I’d always be posting in advance so I won’t be too harried every single day of the week. And if this was a perfect world, Skellie’s advice would work for everyone and we’ll all be happy campers all the time.

Unfortunately, things aren’t always the way we want them to be. Posting weeks or months in advance isn’t viable for all types of blogs. I’ve recently come across a comment saying that if one can’t plan a post for two months in advance, you’re very likely not an expert in the topic. While I agree on a general scope, it’s not always applicable to all niches. Two subjects which I feel writing in advance won’t work for are news and tech blogs.

I currently write for two blogs in the tech niche and let me tell you, posting weeks or months in advance won’t work. My main reason is that many tech blogs aim to report what’s new and what’s hot. If I’m to write posts in advance for the next month, the tech news would be stale by then. I believe that for tech blogs, you can write posts in advance for only a few days. Writing for a couple of months into the future doesn’t seem a viable option. As for news blogs, well, you really can’t post in advance unless it’s a feature article.

For the niches mentioned, however, you can still write posts in advance if they’re (http://www.writerspace.net/index.php/2007/10/19/what-is-linkbaiting/)linkbaits or feature articles. If you want, you can create topics with a long shelf life and will still be considered timely in the next few years to come. For the most part, however, you’ll probably post on the fly as you go by, churning out posts every day so they’ll have that hot-off-the-press feel to them. The tips you’ll be reading below are based on personal experience. If you feel that one or the other won’t work for you, you can always modify and create your own. I only want to provide a framework or a skeleton of how posting on the fly should be like.

1. Set a Schedule Every Day

I can’t stress this enough. When you’re posting on the fly, you can’t take the risk of not posting. Hence, it’s best if you set a certain number of hours each day for a blog. Set your schedule accordingly, depending upon the number of posts you’re required to do and the time for research you’d need. On one of the tech blogs I write for, I only need to write short blurbs. The hard part is in finding what to write about. Take into consideration the overall number of hours you’d need to post and stick to it. You should also set the exact hour of the day you want to write your posts. If you scheduled yourself to write posts every 9am, write posts as soon as the clock hits 9am. The sooner you start, the sooner you can get things done.

2. Manage Your Time

After you’ve set your schedule and follow it through, don’t forget to manage your time. For example, you set aside one hour for research and another hour to write the posts. Stick to your schedule. If that first hour is for research, don’t let your research time slip into the second hour because it will never end. You’ll keep pushing it off until you’ve already spent 4 hours on research alone and haven’t even started on writing your posts.

3. Know Your Niche

Because you blog about something, I assume you’re in the know in your niche. Not necessarily an expert or all-knowing, but proficient enough that when you come across a term used only for that niche, you’d know what it is and won’t need to spend time learning about it.

4. Train your Brain to Think Quickly

Being a quick-thinker is synonymous to speed-blogging. You must be able to switch discussing about one thing to the other in a whiplash.

Using all of the above tips, I hope you develop your own speed-blogging technique as I had. Good luck!

This entry was posted on Monday, December 17th, 2007 at 3:04 pm and is filed under blogging. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.

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