5 Reasons for having saved draft posts

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Photo by: shortfatkid

I’ve been reading a lot lately from different bloggers about the importance of keeping a schedule when you’re blogging and at the moment I’m reading the book Zentodone by Leo over at Zenhabits.net.  This started me thinking about and understand why planning for your blog was so important, and why working on your blog for periods of time during the day was a good way to go.  I then realised that I needed to sort out my own habits and a schedule that would suit my lifestyle and my blogs.  After all, I want to add to my blogs each day, market and promote them (as well as my own profile) in the blogosphere, and establish myself as a recognised blogger in many fields.  There are however, five reasons why I keep a couple of draft posts in my wordpress admin panel:

1. I’m Sick  –  I get up one morning and I really don’t feel well, I have the flu or a really bad cold, or worse a migraine and I just want to go back to bed.
2. I just feel like taking the day off  –  I do work each day of the week and any blogger who tells you otherwise is a little mistaken.  Even checking your email or stats (on your ‘day off’) counts as you working.  Some days I just want to take a full day away from the computer and have a day out.
3. A family emergency crops up and I have to drop everything – Sometimes these things do happen; it could be that a family member is taken into hospital, or someone dies (it does happen everyday to someone), or if for you if have children (I currently don’t) and one of them is too sick to go to school – you may have to look after them, and you’re not going to be able to fully concentrate on writing for your blog now are you?
4. I experience a technical malfunction – I have woken up one morning and my computer just wouldn’t switch on, quite embarrassing getting a tech guy round, but good job there was a real problem and I didn’t look like a moron!  Sometimes technology just won’t work and even though I did have a laptop and I could write my posts for the day, the laptop just didn’t have all the stuff on that is on my main computer.  Just didn’t have the same ‘feel’.
5. I’m going to a conference/meeting for a few days  –  Now, this isn’t really going to apply unless the conference is abroad, but for me if I was ever lucky enough to go to the US to attend a conference then I’d make sure I had a few draft posts.  Why?  Well, what if my flight was delayed, or even cancelled, how would I write a couple of posts for my blogs – it would be pretty darn difficult wouldn’t it.  Or, if I just was so knackered after getting back that I really didn’t feel like writing anything – a draft post would come in handy wouldn’t it.

These are only a few reasons for having a few draft posts in your blogs admin section.  Now I don’t mean for these draft posts to be half written, but complete and ready to be published to your readers.  These should be generic posts, meaning that they can be posted on any given day and they would be fine to read, maybe something like this one.  I suggest always keeping a stack of five draft posts for each blog that you have, even if you have only one, as you never know what will happen today, next week, or next month.  Always use your posts after a while too, as your wiring style will change over the course of a few months, so every month take your oldest two and publish them or re-word and re-draft them – DO NOT delete them.  If you really think that they’;ve been sat in your blog building some ‘dust’ for a number of months and they’re just totally not in keeping with how your blog has developed, then why not post them as an articles on ezinearticles.com, or stretch them out and make a squidoo page on the subject.  I’ve done this with a couple of my drafts that I really didn’t want to show off to people on my blog and I published them on ezine and on squidoo – you know what – I got some traffic and a little bit of revenue from it.

So, I’d suggest getting into the habit of writing a set of draft posts as backup to your blog – writing one extra post each week until you have five is a good idea (something I saw Skellie write on problogger) and try to keep doing this.  You can use the extra posts on an article page or even on a squidoo page if you don’t want to put it on your blog.  Writing and keeping 5 draft posts in your admin section will help you when you get those days were you just can’t post to your blog.

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