image from openclipart.org by JayNick
For the unaware, you can schedule blogs to post in the future, the present, and in the past. Scheduling blogs to drop automatically is convenient because I can write everything at once, proofread it, gather the images, and set up on the blog all together. It lets me keep a stack of planned content at all times, and once written, I can forget about it (excluding promoting it).
Posting content as soon as it’s complete, is what most people assume is the norm. I haven‘t polled any bloggers, so I don’t know if people usually schedule content out or if they add it each day. I used to post my “Monday Metrics” blogs same day, but my work schedule no longer allows for this and I have to write them ahead of time.
The least intuitive of these three schedulers is to predate blogs. An unscrupulous person may predate a blog so they can say they “posted” first they can claim their blog has been around longer than it‘s been up and running. I don’t care for either of these uses.
Still, I like to predate blogs sometimes. My “Writers’ Blogs” and “Company Blogs” were both post dated for Jan 1st 2018. I created both posts in October and I update them as needed. Why are they posted in the past? Simple: when I created lists of blogs I follow, they were small and I didn’t want the lists to take up the front page. I thought of these posts as “reference” posts which would become relevant as time went on but held little value in the present. Once I had more suggested bloggers, once I had a larger following, these posts would matter, but as things stand, I don’t believe they add value. One can find them under the “Resources” page and readers I hope to gain will one day find these posts helpful.
Why not just keep the content as a draft and publish when it has more value? First, I have a hard time finding floating drafts. It’s easier to set a date for publication and I don’t know when these lists would be welcome. Second, I hold the slim hope that some people find suggested blogs to read helpful now. Even if the list is small, it may help people connect to other bloggers that hold like goals. Plus, having a published page creates a place for readers and fellow bloggers to recommend more resources I can check out and this may increase my list.
I may create a list of books I read in 2017, and I would post date the list to 2017, even though I’m creating the list now (using Goodreads for reference).
If I ever wanted to create a post defining literary terms, if I wanted to write a list of helpful descriptive words for taste/smell/touch, and so on these kinds of posts would become post dated and exist for me to reference, not showcase at the top release of my blogs. If I ever wanted to create a blog post response for Twitter hashtag conversations, I would date the blogs to the day they asked, not the date I answered the question.
The common factor with all these posts they are references, not featured content. While they may hold helpful information, it‘s as an aside, not a main article. I create them more to build interwoven links within my blog than to be the main feature.
Talk to me! Do you blog and if so do you schedule posts? How many interconnected links do you create within posts? Do you go back to older posts and add links when more recent posts may also relate?
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