Scheduling Blog Posts And Automating
Ever since the human race could find a way to accurately measure time, we’ve been obsessed with the notion of keeping track of it, organizing ourselves to use the maximum of time we can, and scheduling things. Timetables, personal timed agendas, calendars – you name it. But there are a great many uses to proper scheduling in business, and if your blog is all about that ,you’re going to need a way to schedule your posts. We’ll explore the options in this article.
So why exactly would you need to schedule posts ? Well, let’s say that you have a very busy day outside of your blog, or perhaps some personal matters to attend to out of town ( friend’s wedding, a reunion in your home town). In order to preserve the practice of having a post per day, you’ll need to write the posts before them and schedule them to be posted afterwards.
Some people also find it easy to write several posts at a time, because once you get into it, it takes less time to do it. When you’re in the right mood , you can write tons of interesting things, but you’ll need them published regularly. These are just some of the uses of scheduled posting.
So how do we do it ?
The included WordPress scheduling functionality
There is a module in WordPress, by default on the right side of the post editing page, that is called the Publish Module, it has options for preview , saving drafts, visibility and most importantly to us – Scheduling. So let’s go step-by-step on this matter :
- Find the Publish module. You know where it is if you’ve posted even once.
- Look for a little calendar icon and the text “Publish immediately”.
- Next to it, on the right is an Edit link, click it.
- Define your date and time for scheduling, the time zone is the local time zone for your WordPress installation. Type in the year, month, day and time you want the post scheduled for.
- Click the OK button.
- The publish button will change to say “Schedule”, click it.
- Voila, all done.
Plugins
Some plugins offer more advanced options for scheduling, like the ability for the system to hold a post from being published if it’s a particular day of the week. An example plugin is Auto-Schedule posts, which gives you lots of filtering options for withholding a post from actually being published.
So now that you have the basics in check, you can easily schedule any WordPress post , for your comfort and your reader’s satisfaction.
