Recently, I’ve decided to change the way I schedule blog posts. For a very long time, I would schedule blog posts for 5 PM Eastern, with the idea being that my employer would know I wasn’t blogging on the job. I also would sprinkle in posts whenever I could on whatever topics I wanted.
After going to the FreeCon, it hit me that I was doing this wrong all along. This has led me to my new scheduling strategy. My strategy consists of a few basic components:
- Blog posts are scheduled for 9 or 10 AM Eastern. This is because I want there to be new material when people are at work, wondering what to do. If I have new material available when they’re bored, they’re more likely to come back.
- My most technical posts will be scheduled to run Tuesday-Thursday. This is for a similar reason: people need to fight fires on Monday and probably are taking it easy on Friday, so peak boredom tends to happen Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday.
- Posts are more long-form, broken up with headers. You might have noticed that with some of the more technical posts lately, but I’m trying to include more images, more headers, and more resources. My recent post on R and the housing market is a model for where I want to go, not just in content but also in style. These posts take longer to write, and it’s okay for me to have fewer of them.
- Non-technical “fun” posts will tend to be more on weekends. I do more than talk about SQL Server, R, and Hadoop…unlikely as that may seem…
- I want to have my stories queued up a week in advance. Blogging every day means that I need more story ideas, more topics. I might hit a wall and run out of topic ideas, but for right now, I’m good into December.
Next up, after all of this, I might start advertising the blog a bit more. Tony auto-tweets when he has a blog post, and I may start doing the same. I resisted this measure for a long time but one tweet about a new blog post isn’t going to overwhelm anybody’s timeline.
36 Chambers - The Legendary Journeys: Execution to the max! 