Why Scheduling Regular Posts is a Good Idea

At the beginning of 2016 I decided that I would post one new story every week on this blog. Every week. Without exception.  More than that would be too much both for me and my readers; fewer would have made the blog seem less active. That much is clear enough. But why is it so important to be regular?

Creating regular content is good discipline for a writer because it reinforces one of the foundations of professionalism: dependability. Writing occasional brilliants posts at erratic intervals is much less impressive than delivering a new post every Monday morning. Any editor looking for a freelancer is going to be much more interested in your ability to deliver copy on time and take quality for granted. Other people commissioning writing work are also likely to be impressed.

But unless you have no other work to do and no other distractions, creating a new post every week can be a challenge. Sometimes on a Monday I am in some conference room delivering a workshop, or I might be busy coaching a speaker somewhere. Luckily there are some methods that make it possible to work around these problems and deliver a new post every Monday morning.

This is how to do it:

Keep a Pipeline of Ideas. Maybe your plan is to post a new article every week but you are not going to get a great new idea every Monday morning. Ideas come when they come and they usually they come in clumps. One day you might get seven new ideas, then for two weeks you have none. That’s why you need to keep a pipeline of ideas. Write down all the ideas that come to you and then each week just pick the one that seems most relevant or easiest to finish. Today, for example, this topic seemed appropriate for post number 52 of 2016.

Work on the pipeline. You should at the very least have an ideas file where you keep all your ideas for future posts, but its also good practice to work on these ideas in your drafts folder so that for some you have just a title, for others you have a title and an outline and for some you have the post half written already. When you have some time you can go through the drafts, bringing them all forward a little. Then when it’s time to create your weekly post you just pick one that seems almost ready and finish it.

Actively Seek Ideas. Some ideas will just come to you without warning and in these cases you should be careful to write them down immediately, before you leave whichever room you are in. These ideas might not be enough so you need to have some active processes for generating new ideas. One very effective method is to look through the questions on Quora. Often in answering a question you generate also the backbone of a useful post. This answer, for example, was inspired by a question on Quora. 

Once you get your ideas pipeline organized you will probably find that you always have plenty of unused ideas just waiting to be finished. Many years ago I used to worry about running out of ideas when writing a weekly column. It doesn’t happen. For every idea you use there are three more waiting to replace it.

Lectures, Workshops, Coaching, Writing

You can contact Andrew Hennigan for lectures, workshops, one-to-one coaching or writing about this and other topics at 0046 730 894 475 or speaker@andrewhennigan.com