Scheduling Posts
If you blog regularly, you need to think about when to schedule your posts. There are at least two ways to do this. Whichever approach you use, your purpose is to publish your blog to be seen by followers and new people.
How and When to Schedule
Inside the WordPress post editor, top of the right-hand column notice box labelled Publish. The fourth item in the box reads Publish Immediately followed by the word Edit. If you click on the link you can set the date and time for your post to be published.
Do this and click OK, notice the label on the blue button below changes from Publish to Schedule. Finish editing, press Schedule and the post enters a queue to be published at the date and time specified.
This has a number of uses:
- Use it to make sure you post at a regular date and time. You don’t have to be at your computer at your regular posting time and you can work on your blog posts at any time.
- You can queue blog posts to publish during times when you are away from your computer, eg on holiday.
- If you have several threads that publish on specific days, work on one thread and schedule it so as not to break your train of thought.
What Time?
When is the best time to publish? This is a difficult question. One issue is whether you broadcast to more than one time zone. If you are it probably doesn’t much matter what time you publish. However, if you know most of your market is likely to be in one time zone, you may be able to work out the best time to publish. Obviously, the same time will not suit everyone but it may be best to publish early to mid-morning so followers find it when they switch on their computers at work. Later in the day may be better for some people, once they have dealt with the back-log of posts from overnight.
Social Media
If you look again at the Publish box, you will find the last item in it reads Publicise. You can set up your system so that it post publishes on social media. There are various plug-ins that help you do this.
Email Lists
A second way to schedule your posts is using email lists. Set up your email service to monitor the posts you publish and to send out an email with all the posts published over a day, a week or a month. You can specify the time, day or date when the email post will schedule this summary email.
This is useful if you believe your market is active at different times of the day or the week. So, if you publish from WordPress in the morning, you could set up your list to send a notice to everyone on your list in the afternoon.
If you publish a lot of posts, a weekly round-up may be more acceptable, so that you are not sending an email to your list every day. People on your list will know when it appears and so may watch out for it. If your posts are infrequent and not urgent, a monthly post may work. The service does not send an email if you do not post.
Think carefully about scheduling as it is an essential part of your marketing.
Have you any tips or tricks for scheduling your posts?