Last week we mentioned that writing up several blog posts in advance and scheduling them to publish later can make things much easier on you. We also suggested the tack of writing posts that explore lessons you’ve learned that can benefit your readers. This week, we take both of those ideas, and relate an example of how we DIDN’T follow our own advice – and the consequences that followed.

One of the things we keep harping on is that your business blog needs to be updated on a regular schedule, and you need to be zealously committed to that schedule. MWD Web’s schedule is at least one post per week, every Friday morning. Since the launch of this site, we’ve kept to that schedule without missing a single week.

However, we’re not exactly shining examples of getting those posts written ahead of time. Often it’s down to Thursday night (or very early Friday morning), and we’re still writing out the post for that week. Usually this is more of a small inconvenience than a big problem, but then the unforeseen happens. And the unforeseen can cause a big headache if there’s only one person who’s really in charge of writing the blog. (That’s me, Matt, in this case)

Trouble strikes

One Thursday afternoon in February, my 1-year-old son had to go to the hospital with persistent tummy trouble. We spent the afternoon and evening in the ER, followed by a trip up the freeway to a specialized children’s hospital.

After speaking to the surgeon there, it seemed that drastic measures were not required after all, so they took a wait-and-see approach and we stayed overnight for observation. The immediate crisis being pretty much resolved, it occurred to me that I hadn’t finished the blog post for that week.

Luckily the basics were there already, because we do manage to keep several outlines going at once, to pull down and finish when needed. The post for this particular week was part 2 in our series on spam comments. Had I been faced with the task of thinking of a topic to write about, as well as creating the actual post, we might have been sunk for that week.

As it was, I sat down at 2 in the morning in the community room for the children’s wing, and fired up the laptop. Armed with the coffee dispenser on the counter, and trying to ignore Barney on the TV, I dealt with the pile of emails from the afternoon, and then cranked out the post. It was about 4 am by the time it was all said and done, but by golly I finished it.

Obviously this is an extreme case (the kid’s fine by the way), and it would have been perfectly reasonable to let the post slide that week. One of our upcoming posts, however, is about the many benefits of maintaining a regular blog schedule; we’re going to look back on a year of solid blogging and analyze our results for your benefit. “Here’s what we’ve seen from blogging every single week for one year” sounds a lot better than “Here’s what we’ve seen from blogging every single week for a year, well, except for that one time…”

And besides, we’re fundamentally sold out to the necessity of maintaining that regular posting schedule, for the benefit of both you our readers, and for our own search engine mojo.

Stay tuned, in just a few weeks, and we’ll look at how that commitment to posting has helped!

Photo Credit: sfxeric via Compfight cc