This is a standard feature of WordPress which is severely under-utilised. Scheduling your posts could be the best thing you can do for your blog.
Write to your heart’s content
Gone are the days where I sit every night and try to write. Most days, I’m just not feeling like writing; other days, I can write up to ten articles in a matter of hours. If you’re blogging as a hobby, like I am, and you have a full time job, and probably school or kids, or even both, then you don’t have the time sometimes to write daily, or even weekly. Day to day distractions will cause your blog to suffer.
With post scheduling, I can write as much as I can on those creatively productive days and then just schedule them, allowing my blog to get populated at a desirable rate, and not having to post all the content on the same day. I try to do this, but there are just weeks where I don’t feel like writing, and I don’t believe in writing if you’re not feeling like it.
Keep your blog fresh
You will always have fresh content. And that is very important to the health of your blog. You need to have fresh content for your visitors to read (I really should remember some of my own advice, I’ve had quite a few dry spells on this blog). I’ve noticed that I get the most amount of visitors when I publish something. I push all my featured and evergreen content to social media all the time, but nothing spikes that traffic like a new blog post, especially one about new technology or social media.
Keep a healthy writing schedule
Spend a day in writing, and put aside a couple hours after to tidy up your posts on WordPress, add featured images, and schedule them. By doing this, you can write once a week for a daily blog or once a month for a weekly blog. It also won’t feel like a chore, which is how many blogs tend to suffer.
Keep it Evergreen
If you’re going down the route of scheduled content, then you need to keep the content evergreen. You shouldn’t be publishing time-relevant articles a month after the fact. Recipes, photos, how-to guides, and tips are great types of articles to use as scheduled posts.
My recommendation is to write some articles to schedule, and if you get time-relevant ideas during the week, write and publish immediately. I tend to write in batches, mostly on early Sunday mornings, but I have lots of ideas during the week, which I write in my Evernote. Evernote is great for time-consumed bloggers.
Post Scheduling is not for all blogs
As a blogger, you have to keep in mind that scheduling is not for every blog type. If you have a blog which depends heavily on news-worthy time-relevant posts, then maybe scheduling a week after writing isn’t a good idea. If however you notice that your readers hit your blog more for articles published at 11am, and you’ve written a piece at 8am, then by all means publish at 10:55am.
