Jul 5, 2020
BBP 2: How to Stay Consistent with Your Blog
Hey Everyone, Welcome to the Blogger Breakthrough Podcast, if you’re new here, I’m your host, Liz Stapleton from ElizabethStapleton.com and founder of the Blogger Breakthrough Summit. In today’s episode we’re going to talk about how to stay consistent with your blog. Let’s get to it…
The first thing you need to establish is your consistency schedule - don’t set yourself up for failure.
Don’t say you’re going to post three times a week if you can only manage 1 every other week. There is nothing wrong with posting only once every other week or once a month.
If you’re behind or constantly scrambling to finish a blog post to make sure it goes out. Do a hard stop. Give yourself a month or two (and email your list to let them know - keep emailing your list during this posting sabbatical)
Use the month or two to create and get ahead on your editorial calendar. That way you’re not constantly scrambling.
Resist the urge to post something as soon as it’s done (unless it is super timely).
It’s okay to take a break, it’s the constant starting and stopping that gets hard.
If you are struggling to keep up, just like you keep those meals in the freezer, I’ve got some quick on hand solutions for your posting schedule.
First, Update an old post, if you’ve been blogging a while chances are you’ve got some posts that could use to be updated. So update it, and give it a new featured image.
Now, the trick to this is, that you update it just like you would update anything, then the day you want it to go live, go in and change the date to today’s date at a time that has already happened. You do not want to schedule an updated post. You also need to make sure your URL isn’t going to be changed, if you have dates in your URL then you’ll want to skip this strategy.
The next, quick and easy post, is a round up of your own posts. For example, say you’re a food blogger, you could do your top 5 chicken recipes, or instant pot recipes, or vegetarian recipes.
The same thing works for other niches too, for my personal finance site I’ve done, top 5 posts to help you payoff debt, top 5 frugal living posts to save more money.
Take a category on your blog and figure out a way to do a round up, and it doesn’t need to be a huge number either, you don’t need the top 17 posts, just work with what you have.
The benefit is, it’s quick to write - just write and intro to each post and then link to it, and it helps to get more eyes on those posts.
The last tip I have to help you stay consistent is to batch like crazy, but do one thing at a time. Which I know sounds a bit contradictory.
What I mean is this, if you’re working to create the featured image for a post, do it for several posts at once. But just do the featured image, worry about the pinterest images later. When you’re writing, just write, don’t try to edit and proofread at the same time.
The more you batch like this the easier it will be to keep things moving.
Jeff Goins spoke at the 2020 Blogger Breakthrough Summit about having a 3 bucket system for content creation and as long as those buckets always have something in them, you’ll always have work to do and be able to put out posts. The buckets were, 1. ideas, 2. drafting into something readable, and 3. editing into something publishable.
Capture the ideas into a bucket
A bucket of drafts
A bucket of edits to do
Work on moving something from one bucket to the next.
One final tip, don’t get hung up on what tools you use for ideas or drafting or whatever, do what works for your brain, trying out a new tool just because someone mentioned something is a distraction, it’s a form of procrastination. If your current toolset isn’t working for you then, okay you have permission to go looking for other tools, but don’t waste a ton of time on it.
Okay, so hopefully these tips will help you to be more productive and consistent with your blog posting. Thanks for being here, I’m so glad you could join me for the second episode of the blogger breakthrough podcast, stick around for episode 3 where I’ll be sharing some tips on how to prioritize when it comes to blogging. Catch You then!
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