It’s rare that the latest 35hunter post you’re reading was written just hours before publishing.
Usually, I have three or four posts queued up ahead of time ready to be published.
This gives me a buffer that absorbs the inevitable fluctuations in my writing time (I don’t write a fixed amount every day, or even every week) and takes the pressure off having to write something so soon before publishing, and rushing it unnecessarily.
This also helps with editing, I believe.
If I wrote a post then published immediately, it’s inevitable it would be more clumsy grammatically, and there’d definitely be more typos.
Returning to a draft post to tidy it up reduces the errors, and hopefully helps it read more fluently for you.
From experience though, there’s an optimum limit to this buffer of new posts.
At times I’ve had perhaps six or seven posts lined up.
The upside is a greater buffer and less pressure to write a new post quickly.
But the downsides, for me, outweigh any benefits.
First, I have a pretty steady stream of new ideas for blog posts, and sometimes I want to share those ideas as soon as possible.
Writing a new post then switching it with the next one in the pipeline is pretty simple.
Even pushing back two or three others is no great hardship.
But when it comes to six or seven, trying to reorder them one by one, or even just push each one back to the next 48 hour slot, becomes fiddly and laborious.
I’m a big fan of WordPress on many levels but one thing I’ve not been able to understand is why they don’t have simple drag and drop calendar, where you can reorder your upcoming posts in seconds, by just clicking and dragging a post to a different day.
But they don’t, and since I finally succumbed to the new “blocks” update to the WP editor a couple of months back, it’s even more manual than before – the calendar only ever shows the post you’re editing, not other scheduled posts. Why??
Anyway, so all this reworking of the publishing dates becomes very tedious with any more than about three posts.
Second, I just like the fundamental concept that a blog is about what’s going on in your life now.
I wouldn’t like to have a blog that’s constantly weeks out of date, because I always had 10 or 12 or more posts lined up.
Whilst I try to write in a way that’s timeless and still useful to the reader long beyond the date I wrote it, I don’t want to feel like a newsagent constantly selling last month’s magazines, and nothing newer.
Third, the bigger the gap between the writing date and publishing date, the more detached I become from the post.
Again, a week or so is fine, it’s all still current to me.
But those times where I’ve experimented with publishing weeks in advance, once the posts are published, my thinking (and usually the cameras and projects I’m working with) have already moved on, and my interest has significantly waned.
Which means I’m less engaged in the conversation around the post, than if it was something far more “hot off the press” in my photography life.
All of this is personal preference, of course.
I know some do schedule far more in advance than me and are happy with it, it works for them.
And others have no particular schedule, write when they feel like it and publish immediately.
And this is as always the crux of blogging – trying to find the ways, and the platforms, and the topics, and the frequency, and the audience that makes it works for each of us.
How about you? What works for you as a blogger – and a blog reader, and how “current” do you like the posts to be?
Please let us know in the comments below (and don’t forget to tick the “Notify me of new comments via email” box to follow the conversation).
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35hunter 
Very helpful
Glad it was useful, thanks for reading Sudarshan.
Sometimes I post nothing and sometimes I break my posts into multiple days. I like to share images not words. it depends on when I make photographs.
My sharing of photos works like that too Sherry. One decent photowalk will yield enough images for the next half dozen blog posts.
🙂
I’m experiencing something that happens to me sometimes: I have a month of posts queued and ready. On the one hand, it’s wonderful. I don’t have to worry about the blog if I don’t want to, it’s set. On the other hand, if I want to say or show something I did today, either I have to rearrange posts to do it, or do two posts in one day. Lately I’ve taken to just doing two posts. But then I start to wonder if I’m posting too much for readers to keep up with.
I’m on WordPress.com Business. I can install plugins. There is a calendar plugin that lets me drag and drop to arrange posts. It is WONDERFUL and I do not for the life of me understand why this functionality is not part of standard WordPress.
I’m always walking that line between enough and too much. I think when I was posting every 36 hours it was too much – for me to write and for readers to read. And it didn’t bring any particular benefits, I wondered if it might increase readership.
I’m on a paid WP plan but I think it’s just the personal one, and the business one is significantly more, and largely unnecessary for my humble needs – and funds!
I spoke to a WP support guy a few weeks back when I switched to the blocks editor and couldn’t work out why I couldn’t see my other scheduled posts on the calendar as I could before. He said it was something that was lost in the “upgrade” and claimed it was out of their hands (WordPress.com are dependent on WordPress.org for the core code or something, I don’t quite understand) but there had been multiple requests that more functionality be returned to the calendar. Fingers crossed!
I’m yet to find any advantage to the blocks editor, it just seems to make things more complicated.
I’ve blogged on a schedule (there’s a plug-in for that) and “hot off the presses”. Scheduled posts takes the pressure off but publishing in real time leaves me feeling ore “connected”. It depends on intent. Journaling or publishing.
Khurt do you mean you just send your scheduled post to the plug in and it spits them out at a regular frequency of your choosing?
Yes, good distinction, writing just for yourself like a journal, the schedule is irrelevant, but with an audience I think it makes sense to publish at a regular rate.
Yes. Exactly. You setup a schedule – say two posts per day between 8AM and 8PM – and the scheduler picks posts of the queue and picks a random posting time.
I can’t remember which I used but this looks promising.
https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-scheduled-posts/
This one might suit your needs better.
https://en-gb.wordpress.org/plugins/editorial-calendar/
Thanks for these Khurt, appreciated. I need the Business version of WP to install plugins though, which is about seven times the price of the Personal plan I use. Not worth it for my needs, and I’ve managed for five years without plugins so think I can manage a few more. : )
Wow! 7 times the price? I’m so glad I self host.
Yeh I used to do that with a few websites of mine, code them all too! The good old days! But it’s just so much easier these days with sites like WordPress, so we can focus purely on the writing and photos.
Well, I did read this and was going to suggest the available plugins but you can’t make use of them. I do know that WordPress supports the email a post function. Is it possible to schedule your email or through Buffer to have them post when they are ready?
Thanks Daniel. That sounds complicated! What’s Buffer? I can live with WP as it is, it’s just frustrating when there’s a supposed “upgrade” and it degrades features rather than improves them. This seems rife in technology and software these days!
Sorry for the late reply. Buffer is an external service that gives you the option to schedule your posts. Whether it’s social media or your website. https://buffer.com/
Thanks Daniel, I’ll take a look.
These are great tips, I think not having enough scheduled posts has always been my downfall, so as my relaunch is tomorrow I have a good lot of scheduled posts and others that are in the works!
I think it’s a great approach to launch (or relaunch) a blog, otherwise you’re putting yourself under pressure right from the outset. I like to try to have at least a couple of posts queued up, ideally three or four, to even out life’s natural and inevitable fluctuations.