Is Your Blog Stealing Your Life?

Hello everyone!

A few days ago I was on Plurk talking to some off my fellow artisans, and the topic of blogging came up. It seems that a common concern is having enough time to do quality blogging every day. Well, let me let you in on a little secret: you do not have to blog every day! You can blog just one day a week and still have a new post show up every day! "But Jenn, HOW???" you ask? Easy! Both of the "major" blogging sites (Blogger and WordPress) have this nifty little function that will allow you to schedule your posts for later publishing. Hopefully, by the end of this post you will understand how to use that function, and you will have freed up tons of time in your schedule!

Just keep reading to find out how!

Ok, I'm going to use blogger to show you how to do this (since I think most of you are using blogger anyway), but the steps are very similar on WordPress. Just be sure you are logged into your blog, open your dashboard, and follow along!

1. On your dashboard, click the "new post" link and it will take you to a window that looks like this:


2. Type anything you want in the title area and the message area. For mine I just typed "TEST" in both.

3. Find the link that says post options at the bottom of the screen and click it. The bottom of your post area should expand and look like this:


4. Now, all you have to do is change the date and time to some time in the future. I'm going to make mine post on March 21st at 9:00 AM. Once you've changed both those values, go ahead and hit "Publish Post"

5. Once you hit "Publish" you should get sent to a screen that has a list of your posts. You want to make sure you see two things at this point. Look for this:


and this:


As long as you see both those things, you did it right! (At this point, you may want to click that little delete link on the right, just so you don't end up with a strange test post on your blog.)

Now, all you have to do is set aside one time a week to blog for the week. For me, that day is Tuesday. On my scheduled day I sit down and write enough posts to get me through the week. I scheduled them all to post on different days, but I try to keep all posts set to publish between 9:00 and 10:00 AM. That way, everyone who reads my blog can check each day around those times and see what has been added. This also serves the function of giving each post about the same amount of exposure at the top of the main page.

I hope this has helped! Please keep checking back as I will be posting about other help topics frequently!

<3