This is the forth in a series of 5 blog post we will be doing. We are looking at answering 5 questions you should be asking yourself when you are looking at your business or professional service firm’s blog. Who are you blogging too? Why are you blogging? What are you blogging about. When should I be blogging? And finally, what tools can I use to accomplish what I want to accomplish? Or in other words, how do I do it?

Previously in Part 1, we asked and discussed the question, “who are you blogging to?”. In part 2 we asked “why are you blogging?”. In Part 3, we ask the question, “what are you blogging?”. And in this edition, we are going to ask “When should I be Blogging?

Short answer and the one I would hope you could meet is, daily. But, I know and you know, that might be impossible. So, what we have to decide is when can I find the time to blog and what tools are available to help me do that. While I am not going to address the tools available for you to use to blog and do your post. There are some built in tools and features in most blogging platforms you should be taking advantage of.

Time Management

Time management is really one of the keys. We all lead busy and hopefully productive lives. Both our professional and family obligations take up a lot of our time. However, if you are using a blog to market and/or promote your business or professional service firm, blogging should be one of those professional obligations you should make the time to do.

One of the best tools you have is to take advantage of any free time you have to quickly write a blog post and store it away for later. And built right into WordPress for example is the ability to edit the default “publish on” date of that post. You can schedule or as I like to call it, post date blog post to be published on a future date and time. During those days you have extra time, sit down and draft multiple blog post. Edit the default publish on date to the future and you have just added to your blog in one sitting.

Pre-Planning

One of the tools I use is to have a folder on my desktop where I keep post ideas. I put the title of the post on the .txt document and then add to it as I think of ideas. Another way to do this is to take advantage of a third party application like MarsEdit. It has one of those “save as draft” features. Start a blog post with an idea and expand on it from there. One of the advantage of using a third party app is you don’t have to be connected to the web to actually do any drafting.

Find a way to do some pre-planning and drafting that works for you.

You should be blogging all the time

And you can even if you are not sitting in front of your computer screen writing a post. Take notes and keep track of your ideas and you are well ahead of the curve. And by doing this one little step, you will be blogging all the time.

So, go forth and post to your blogs. The more you do, the faster you will see results on a new blog and the quicker you can kick a blog in the butt that might need a little push.

As always, I am glad to discuss blogging with you further. Drop me an email at grant@g2webmedia.com or leave your comments here with your questions.