Seven weeks from Wednesday, the April A to Z Challenge will start.  If you haven’t signed up yet, all the details and sign-up list are here.  Do it, you’ll enjoy it!

The key to that enjoyment is scheduling your posts in advance.  So here we are, halfway between the start of the year and the start of the A to Z, and I find myself doing double blogging work, remembering to work through my plans for April, which are more or less on track, and then finding I haven’t written the post for tomorrow… or next Monday, as the case may be.

And in the time I have left I am publishing my Dad’s memoirs, White Water Landings.  I seem to have been blogging about publishing that for over a year now.  In the topsy-turvy world I live in, I’m going to do a cover reveal and release date next Monday (I’ve just decided that), which will put me under all sorts of pressure to get it out!

Meanwhile, back to scheduling posts.  What I do is to draft a new post and put the right date on it whenever I think of a suitable topic, or have something to say on a certain date.  The draft consists of the title and the date, with maybe some note to me in the body of the text.  So that could be

  • a blog hop or giveaway hop I have or want to sign up for
  • a book review tour or key date for a specific review
  • an event of some kind like the Read An E-book week, which I did a draft for on the day I noticed it would be here soon when making a coupon for another book on Smashwords.
  • regular features like #Fi50, which occupy the third Wednesday of the month through to June – just the heading and the month’s prompt; Reading Challenge update, on the last Wednesday of the month

Having these things drafted and put for the right dates means I can see in my list of posts what needs to be done before then.  Then I try to get them written and published for the scheduled date at least a week ahead. That means that if something goes wrong, the blog will have a week of posts until you notice!  If I want to change the post for a certain day, I can either change the scheduled date, or set it back to draft, or delete it, depending on what I think of the content!

I find this particularly useful with book reviews, especially when I get ahead with my reading.  Scheduling the Saturday review posts is a real motivator for finding time to read them!

If you aren’t sure how to schedule your posts on WordPress or Blogspot blogs, leave a comment below and I’ll talk you through.  I didn’t learn until I did my first A to Z Challenge, and it’s been the best thing I ever learnt about blogging!

Now – I’ll just schedule that post for next Monday about my cover reveal, and then I’ll get to work on the cover.

On scheduling posts
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11 thoughts on “On scheduling posts

  • 9 February, 2015 at 7:02 am
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    A little run down on how to schedule posts for WordPress would be very handy Jemima. Up till now I’ve never thought of doing that.
    xxx Huge Hugs xxx

    • 9 February, 2015 at 10:40 am
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      Thanks, David.

      When you are looking at the “New Post” form (or Edit Post) there is a box on the upper right hand side labelled “Publish”. If it’s just a bar, click the arrow at the end of the bar to open it. That displays click boxes like Draft, and Preview, which vary with the status of the post. Then the status is listed – Draft, Published or a few other options. The next two lines are Visibility and Revisions (which can be handy if you want to hide a post when it’s been published but you don’t want to delete it, and if you want to go back to an earlier revision).

      Then you get the key thing for scheduling – the ‘publish on -‘ date. It’s set to ‘immediately’ with the new post form, but you can edit that using the ‘edit’ link, and a set of boxes appears for you to change the date and time you want it to appear. You can set things in the past if necessary, as well as the future. I’ve scheduled things a year ahead, I have no idea how far you can go with that.

      When you’ve set your date click OK and it appears in line as Publish on (the date you set) rather than ‘immediately’.

      When you’ve done your post Click the Publish or Update button as you normally do, but it will now say ‘Schedule’. If you want to keep it as draft for the time being, click the fainter box at the start of the ‘Publish’ dialogue box, which says ‘save as draft’

      Remember to turn drafts into scheduled posts before they are due to be published. If the date goes by and they are still drafts, they won’t be published. If you still want them, you can change the date, or just publish and they’ll go straight out with the date you originally scheduled them for showing as the publish date.

      Let me know if any of that doesn’t make sense!

  • 9 February, 2015 at 3:39 pm
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    You are so organized! I love that approach to tracking all the hops and things. I have been using that technique for book tour commitments, and need to join more groups and hops–and schedule them in advance 🙂

    • 9 February, 2015 at 11:08 pm
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      I enjoy planning. I can spend hours doing it – especially when there’s something else I’m putting off 😀

  • 10 February, 2015 at 1:27 am
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    Thanks for the reminder! Now I am really paranoid!

  • 11 February, 2015 at 8:56 am
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    I don’t have a blog or website yet, but reading about scheduling posts and things now will help me when that happy day arrives. Thanks, Jemima.

    • 13 February, 2015 at 11:16 am
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      I’m sure you’ll enjoy it when you do, Suzanne. It can take up a lot of time, or you can manage your time better and use scheduling to help spend just one day a week on it.
      Or, like me, you can use scheduling to spend all day, any day of the week on it, but take holidays off!

  • 11 February, 2015 at 10:33 pm
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    Seconded. Scheduling rocks. Write stuff when you have time and it appears when you have not! Toptastic!

    Cheers

    MTM

    • 13 February, 2015 at 11:18 am
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      Toptastic indeed! I love your style 😀

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