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Benefit: Writing regularly reassures readers of your commitment and lures search engines into regularly indexing your content.
Problem: Having a lot of drafts in your “Edit Posts” can get really messy without having a good system for organizing drafts as you go.
Practical WordPress Tip: Keep your publication time for all of your drafts out in the future to cleanly separate drafts from published articles when viewing your combined article list.
Here’s how:
- Schedule ALL of your drafts for publishing in the future. If this is your first time scheduling, push them out a month or two at least.
- If desired, sort like articles into adjacent publication dates.
- When starting a new article, if you don’t finish it, move the modification date up 1 month. This is extremely easy to do.
- The following day, move every article with the current modification date up one month.
- Keep rolling articles ahead by month as you go. If you have them sorted, this will preserve the relative order of the dates.
The result is a clean separation by date between your draft articles and your published articles. No more paging back through screen and screen of articles figuring out which drafts need to be moved where.
Note: Using just the “Draft” view isn’t helpful when you need to keep track of what you have already published… and what’s coming up ahead. It’s extremely helpful to see everything in context.
Why: Once you make a commitment to writing regularly, the agony of finding something to write about becomes a distant memory. The new agony is finding time to write about everything you want to write about. WordPress can help out. The key is effective use of your Draft articles queue.
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Dave, maybe I’m just obsessive…But wouldn’t it be just as easy (or maybe easier) to set up a private, draft version of your blog with password protection, just to fine tune your posts before moving them to the main blog?
Granted images would be a bit more work to add then move.
Just thinking out loud here…
Gary´s last blog ..An Embarrassment Of Riches…Blowing In The Wind
Gary, this is a superb question!
You have a very good point.
Here’s the benefit: I only have one place I need to worry about for WordPress posts. I manage a staggering amount of information, so any way I can reduce thinking about it, the better.
I don’t need to back them up, I won’t lose them, I won’t need to transfer them later, and I can get an overview of my scheduling.
That being said, here’s two disadvantages:
1. If I’m offline for whatever reason, I’m locked out of writing on existing drafts.
2. My draft has filled up with too many draft articles consisting of a headline and a couple of bullet points. I’ve taken steps to deal with that already.
Thanks for stopping by!
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