Practical WordPress Tip #14: Manage a huge Draft Queue for Daily blog posting

(Reading time: 2 – 4 minutes)

Benefit: Daily blog posting increases search engine visits to your web site.

Problem: Having a large number of Draft blog posts helps you find something to write about, but becomes increasingly difficult to manage. Using other tools such as MS Word to store draft posts just leads to different problems.

Practical WordPress Tip: Space your draft blog posts on regular intervals as far into the future as necessary.

Here’s how:

Assuming you want daily blog posts:

1. Have the next 7 days of blog posts scheduled, either for publication or in draft form with a publication date in the future.
2. Past 7 days, schedule your published or draft posts for every other day.
3. At the start of the next month, schedule all your draft posts for odd days, starting with the 1st of the month.
4. At the start of the second month, schedule all your drafts for every third day starting at the first of the month.
5. If necessary, for months beyond the second month, scheduling every fourth day should be sufficient.
6. Repeat this procedure at the start of every month.

Why: This schedule framework is really convenient, and will let you slip in new posts easily and regularly to fill out your daily posting calendar. For example, this Practical WordPress Tip slots into a date about a week later than when I wrote it. Using the scheduling procedure, it got slotted into date between two posts already scheduled. Very convenient.

When you need to write and publish a post immediately, move the next scheduled post to the first open date, no more than a week away.

Keeping your stock of draft posts within the WordPress environment is very convenient. Using the procedure above, you can easily handle 60-80 draft posts in your queue (which allows you to finish and schedule 5-10 posts in a single session).

The method works posting on any other posting schedule as well, simply adjust the intervals. If you use day of week posting, have a calendar handy while you are setting dates.

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