A secret to growing a blog is to post daily.
Readers always love seeing new content and as a blogger, you always want to keep them coming back for more.
As with every rule, there are exceptions — some blogs do well in the search engines with “evergreen” posts — and during holidays, readership always drops off, so it isn’t critical to have a post come out on Christmas Day or New Years Day since there probably won’t be many people expecting content on those days.
Once nice feature of Word Press is the ability to edit the post time stamp. WordPress’ edit post timestamp allows a blogger to write a post, then publish it at a later time. While this might not be necessary for all posting, it is helpful when one will be away for vacation or unable to update their blog.
The edit time stamp feature comes in handy on those occasion when I’m inspired to write a lot of posts, but don’t necessarily want to have them come out all at once or when I know that I’m going to have a busy week and won’t have a lot of time to keep the blog updated. In fact, I wrote this post on Christmas Day but delayed it so that I wouldn’t have to worry about writing a post later in the week.
On news oriented blogs, it is helpful to be able to write several posts at once, but have one come out in the morning and another in the afternoon.
For other blogs where the content isn’t time sensitive, the post timestamp feature is a blessing because it allows a blogger to write a week’s worth of posts, then have them come out once a day.
Leo Babauta of Zen Habits write about he has adopted this strategy as part of his minimalist blogging habit.
In recent months, I’ve reduced the time I spend writing posts for my blog to about half a day’s work, and I spend about an hour or so more every day of the week responding to comments and emails.
Here’s what Lorelle says about using the post timestamp feature:
When you’re blogging, you want to post as consistently as possible. If you’re on a three-days each week schedule, then you want to post on the same days each week. If you’re posting once-per-week, you really want to try to publish a post each day.
Notice I said ‘post each day’ not write each day. Of course you can write a post each day, if your life allows. But how do you take a weekend off? How do you go away for short spurts of vacation? What about getting bogged down with work and not having the time to blog?
Leave it to the developers of WordPress to have a solution for you: Post Timestamp.
