Spend an Hour, Save Your Week: Why You Need a Blog Publishing Plan

Much like a home, a blog has to consider three things: expectation, expectation, and expectation.

The first expectation is from everyone: if you're not blogging at least 3 times a week, you're not holding enough variance and value, not keeping up your part of the bargain. Sure, not everyone will visit your blog every day, but when they do, you don't want them disappointed because your last post was 2 weeks ago. There exists a blogger/reader relationship of trust and if that trust is broken or there is not enough to build that trust on, people go away.

If the first expectation is frequency, then the second pertains directly to your readers and revolves around consistency. So you've made the commitment to blog three times a week. Squeezing those three posts in right before dinner on Friday evening doesn't cut it. Pace yourself, use theme days to garner more interest, give readers something to look forward to. You'll get more readers for it.

The third expectation is for yourself. I'm sure that some people love flying by the seat of their pants, improv-ing their way through the day. For some folks, it's the breath of life. For most of us, that is the touch of death. You don't want to wake up having to worry about what you should blog about, whether it's timely enough or if it's too personal or if you'll even have time. You need a plan to keep yourself happy as much as you need one to keep your readers happy.

The Plan

I am going to suggest the plan I am taking up (okay, so it's as of this week) and continuing with as far as I can see in the future for this blog.

First, answer the expectations to others:

• Frequency: I will be blogging 4-6 days a week.
• Consistancy: I will blog 4-5 times a week M-F with the occasional Saturday or Sunday post as time allows. Meaning: if you check this blog at 7pm EST 5 days a week, you will find a new post 80% of the time. For themes? We'll start tomorrow with Tech Gadget Thursday.

Secondly, we need to address the personal plan. For this blog, I will be reserving one hour every Monday (after lunch) to plan my week. I enter my blog editing interface on one tab, create 4-5 titles and save them. If I'm feeling particularly inspired - or have nothing to do - I can put future dates on the posts, fill them all out, and sit back the rest of the week (on blogging) while the posts populate the blog.

In order for this to work, I'm dedicating 30 minutes after lunch every day to blogging, whether that's producing a post, commenting on, or following other blogs.

FYI, tomorrow is Tech Gadget Thursday and Friday will be best practices on Twitter, and constructing a Tweet Plan.

So how do you plan? Do you plan? Do you think you should? How long do you think I'll stick to this one? Comments always welcome.