One Of My Smartest Business Decisions

I learned about how important blogging was for my business pretty early on, thanks to Amy & Jordan Demos and their business course. I'd had a personal blog for several years, but it was all over the place. Now, I would be trying to focus a little more, so rather than jumping into five days a week (a la Amy&Jordan), I decided to start with three days a week. That sounded doable. At times, it certainly was, but other times, I struggled to figure out content and it was stressing me out. Things that stress you out are never good for your business. What could make this better?

Batch writing.

I'm going to guess that somewhere between starting this blog and now, I heard about the concept of batch writing blog posts, but it didn't click until just a month or two ago. Some part of me thought that if I wrote a bunch ahead, then I wouldn't really be connecting or being personal. Plus, I couldn't come up with enough ideas at once!

Here's the thing, if you commit to writing three times a week, but you are stressed out, the odds are good that you'll give up. Or you'll miss a post and feel really bad. What happens when you have a busy week planned or a week becomes busy that you didn't plan on? Many people say that blogging regularly, whether that's once a week or five days a week, is so important to your brand and your business. You don't want to give that up.

I started with a few of my own ideas and pulled inspiration from a few monthly blog calendars. (Tip with those: use them as inspiration, not necessarily a direct post. Sometimes the prompt ideas aren't something I can or do blog about, but I can usually pull something from them). Now, whenever I have an idea for a blog post, I sit down quick and type in the title and enough words to help me remember the idea for the post. If I'm not home, I type it in my Notes app and write it up later. Then, if I have a lightly scheduled day coming up, I plan to dedicate some time to typing up a few posts.

This is key: do NOT feel like you have to write out a month's worth of blog posts at one time. I might type up three posts on a given "batch writing" day. Sometimes I write one post in a bit of free time. In all honestly, sometimes I just want to get it written that I write it all out when I have other things I could be doing.

Because of batch writing (and the handy scheduling feature on Weebly), when my grandma's basement had water in it, I could handle that situation, knowing that I didn't have to worry about my blog. I can go on vacation and not miss posts. VBS week is coming up and I don't have to write posts during that busy week. Let me tell you, it is so nice and freeing!!!!

I will add this - sometimes I have a post scheduled but I come up with something that is more time sensitive, so I bump the one I had scheduled to later and post the current topic. This is beneficial because it extends the time I have to write new content!! Win, win.

If you think that you can't batch write or that it somehow makes your blog impersonal, I used to think that too, but now I don't know how I was blogging without it. Give it a try. If you hate it, stop. But I think you'll find it saves your blog.

How To Batch Write Blog Posts

• collect ideas (monthly calendar prompts, family, friends, the web)
  
• write ideas down and create a draft with a title and a line of content to help you remember what the post will be about
  
• create some time to write one - three posts (if you work better like this, do the graphics and images for several on one day and write the content for them on another day)
  
• schedule them out according to how frequently you post