How To Use WordPress Blog Post Scheduling — Do’s and Don’ts

(Reading time: 2 – 4 minutes)

I just had a draft post on There Is NO Box that—for whatever reason—was wrongly “scheduled” for publication, and got published.

Fortunately, there was a link from this post into a another post on a different blog that pushed a trackback into my email for approval, and I caught the post before it landed in my RSS feed.

Trust me: I was lucky.

Lucky is good. Good policy is better. Let’s make some better policy.

WordPress post scheduling “do’s”

1. Do leverage scheduling to create lots of posts in advance
2. Do write according to your editorial policy
3. Do have posts in publishable form when you press the schedule button.
4. Do review you draft queue regularly. Reread everything in your draft queue every couple of days, just before it drops, and immediately after it drops.

WordPress post scheduling “don’ts”

• Don’t violate your editorial policy for any reason. When you feel compelled to cuss up a storm, and cussing isn’t in your editorial policy, don’t do it. You will sting yourself.
• Don’t rely on finding time to “clean up a post” before it drops. Because you won’t find the time. Something always comes up. You will sting yourself.

These simple rules will help you smooth our your blog posting, and prevent accidentally embarrassing yourself for no good reason.

More tips

I found the following techniques really help organize my draft and scheduled post strategy.

Set time and date to anticipate scheduling. When you start a draft post, the time and date will be set to when you save it, that is, “right now” and “today.” If you have a fair number of articles in your queue, you’ll end up with these drafts located below your scheduled articles. I find this inconvenient, and prefer to set the publication date for the draft later than the most future post. This keeps my posts organized as Drafts, Scheduled, Published.

Show all future scheduled and draft posts. Set the number of posts on the “Posts >> Edit” administration page to a number that displays all the future drafts, all the scheduled posts, and a few of the posts already published. You can do this with WordPress 2.8+ and you should. I find it annoying to scroll back through posts displayed 20 at a time to figure out where each part of the ppost queue starts. Of course, for the WordPress 101, I have my post queue length set for 101 posts.

Keep “Draft” and “Scheduled” posts totally separate. This is especially important if you’re blogging on a set schedule, such as daily, every 3 days, weekly, etc. The idea is that you want every scheduled below ALL draft posts, even when you’re editing existing drafts. That is, when you jump around in your draft queue, once you finish with a post and schedule it, don’t assume you will finish a a draft post between two scheduled posts. If you do this, you will find that your posts start to own you, instead of you owning your posts. And that’s no fun at all.

Tagged as: Planning, Strategy