Blogging Tip: Schedule your editorial

As always, Darren Rowse at ProBlogger has great advice for people who struggle with regularly finding interesting things to blog about.

All too often, a potential blogger will raise the very valid concern: “I’m worried that I’ll run out of things to blog about,” and some new media maven who has a literal hardline between their frontal lobe and the Comcast pipes running to their house will casually dismiss it: “There’s always something to write about. You’ll see.”

That’s not necessarily the case. It can be very helpful to schedule your editorial, and if you’re a blogger (or a potential blogger) who is worried about being regularly inspired, Darren’s post is well worth a read:

The first step in a journalistic system for blogging is having a plan for each month. Set up a spreadsheet, a table in a word processor, or a calendar on your desk - it doesn’t matter how you do this, but you need a monthly plan. On that plan you need to mark out the days you will definitely blog. This might be every day, just the weekdays, the weekends, every Wednesday - whatever works for you and your audience. Now you have a visual plan of what’s needed you can start filling in the blanks.

Essentially, he advocates mapping out, by month, the days you will blog and the topics that you will blog about.

If that sounds like too much work for you (it sounds like a lot of work to me, and as a blogger I am both inherently lazy and constantly wearing a bathrobe), you might try a more “intermediate” system like the one I like to use. It works especially well if you have a blog that covers a particular beat or topic:

1. Create a folder on your hard drive.
2. Whenever you run across a link that fits your topic, ask one question: do you need to blog about it immediately for it to be relevant?
3. If the answer is yes, blog about it.
4. If the answer is no, add it to the folder.
5. If you think of an idea not tied to a link, create a text file, put in the headline, and save it to the folder.
6. Whenever you do not know what to blog about, refer to your folder.