If you are writing twice a day about a topic, you can start to plan out a week's worth of work and know how to pace yourself. The writing may all be narrowly focused on a single aspect of a single topic, or you might be doing broad exploration of a field. As always, newsworthy items will intrude upon what you do if you need to keep pace with information that's time sensitive or changing rapidly.
Here's some planning tips to make the most out of your week, so that blogging twice a day doesn't turn into a mad rush every day that's unsustainable.
1. Write ahead. Take good ideas, or even just good headlines, and file them away in your Drafts folder or paper notebook so that when you go to sit down to write you can start from something that was a good idea once. The incomplete image that looks promising can be turned into something more when you have the time to focus on it.
2. Schedule your finished posts. Every blogging software that is worth using has some way to publish things in the future. If you have written something which doesn't need to go out right away, or if you have enough completed material to handle a few days in the future, schedule those posts to go out the next day while you are away from your keyboard.
3. Pick a theme for a day of the week, and stick to it. The FOIA Friday column, which I wrote at AnnArbor.com for the better part of a year, was always published on Fridays. That synchronized with a weekly Twitter chat session on the Freedom of Information Act, and so I always had something new to say whenever that discussion rolled around.
4. Use your categories for inspiration. If you have 10 posts a week and 10 well designed categories, you have an easy to understand structure to prompt you to follow through on collecting materials in each category. Conversely, if your categories have grown weedy and out of control, use some time to bring them back into order by deciding where things fit.
5. Spend time connecting with people who have responded positively to what you are doing. At the early stages of a project that means phone calls, emails, and other out-of-blog side channels to see to it that you understand what prompted them to find this of interest. Use these conversations as prompts for new posts. Search out experts, and quote from them liberally.
6. Set some deadlines and stick to them. Figure out what part of your day or week is suitable for writing, and schedule it then. For some people it's early in the morning; others use late night time as their inspiration. The deadlines provide the rhythm to your day and week so that you know what time you need to get out the work you need to do.
7. If you are writing about things in the news, set up news clippings to help you digest parts of what other people in the world are writing. A daily automated clipping service, like the one that Google has, can jog your memory for ideas and provide sources for expertise.
8. Once you have written enough for a long enough time, you will find that some of your older work is much more popular or well-read than others. Don't be afraid to repeat yourself by rewriting or reworking old themes again into new posts, and also don't be afraid to use social media like Twitter or Facebook to post new links to old work when the time is right. My post about power outage maps always gets traffic when there's a big storm, and because of that I know to link to it again on Twitter before the skies turn green.
9. Cherish your comments, either the ones that come via your own site or those that arrive via social media. Reach out to those people and use those connections to build more ideas.
10. A commitment to write twice a day for six months, or once a day for a year, is a marathon and not a sprint. Pace yourself; not everything needs to be written at once.
Recent Comments