Toolbox Saturday: How to Create a Posting Schedule For Your Blog

So let’s talk about how often you should post to your blog, and when you should post. This is one of the most important aspects of your blog and content strategy.

First, define what you are trying to accomplish with your blog. How often should you post to meet your objectives?

Who are you trying to reach?  Who are these people, what type of information would they want from your posts and when would they be most likely to read them?

How much time do you have to write posts? This area should come with the caveat that generally, the more often you write, the easier the process becomes. So if you start writing daily, after two months you might be able to write several posts in the same amount of time that it used to take you to write just one.

For me, when I decided to relaunch my blog at the first of the month, I wanted to use my blog in two main ways: As a channel to create thought leadership articles, but more importantly, to raise awareness for who I am and what services I provide.

Many companies that blog want to use their blog as a way to build awareness of their business. The cold, hard reality is that the best way to build awareness with a blog is to write as much useful content as possible. More content simply accelerates the building of awareness. So you want to write as much as you can. Now you see why I committed to writing 6 posts a week!

You may not have time to write 6 posts a week, you may have to hustle to make time to write one. So you want to figure out which days are the most important for you to publish new content. If you could only publish a new post one day a week, which day would you pick?  Which day would be the most likely for your audience to read your blog?

Rank the days in order of most valuable to least. If you really aren’t sure, think about who your audience is, and when they would have time to read your blog. If you are trying to reach a professional audience, you would likely want to pick times during their typical workday.  Probably in the morning an hour or two before lunch, then in the afternoon an hour or two after lunch.

Here’s a general schedule I use:  If I can only post once a week, I pick Wednesday.  If I can only post twice a week, I pick Tuesday and Thursday.  Three times a week?  Tuesday-Thursday.  Four times?  Monday-Thursday.  Five times a week?  Monday-Friday.

Now this is NOT a one-size-fits-all schedule. For instance, some business bloggers only post on Saturdays, with the theory being that Saturdays is when their audience is off work and more likely to have some leisure time to read blogs.

So when you are creating a posting schedule for your blog, go through these steps:

1 – Write down why you are blogging. Think about what you are trying to accomplish with your blog.

2 – Write down who your audience is. What do they do for a living? How will your blog content help them? When will they likely have time to read your blog?

3 – How much time do you have for creating blog content?  Your answer to the first question will play a big role in determining how much time you will need to spend writing to achieve your blogging goals.

4 – Once you know why you are blogging, who you are trying to reach with your content and how much time you have, decide when you will blog. Figure out how many days every week or month you will blog and keep that same schedule. For instance, if you will blog two days a week, pick the same two days every week. This helps train your readers to know when there will be new content on your blog.

5 – Re-evaluate regularly. Give your new schedule a month, and see what your results are. Did you have enough time to stick to your schedule? Do you see that you could blog more often? Are you hitting the metrics you need to hit?

6 – Stay with it. Blogging is like a big rock rolling down a hill, it takes a LOT of effort at first to get it moving, but once it starts rolling, it goes FAST! You likely won’t see a lot of momentum at first with your blogging, so you want to stick with it for a few weeks or even months. Eventually, you’ll start to see the needle move.  Over time, the growth will accelerate and it will likely take you less effort to get the same results.

Good luck!