How I Binge Blog: one for now, one for the can (my rainy day queue of stockpiled posts)

People always ask me how I find time to blog so regularly in between everything else I do and I want to let you in on a little secret: I don’t blog regularly at all. I blog very sporadically and I just make my various blogs seem like they have a regular posting schedule and that they stay active weekly by using a mix of live posts and a queue of pre-written posts for the weeks when I don’t have time to write a new one. I call it Binge Blogging.

My blogging routine is usually thus: one for now, one for the can. In other words, whenever I have a few minutes to blog I write one post to go up either right that moment or the following morning and then one more post for the queue. The queue is a list of blog posts that automatically post one at a time whenever I’ve gone a week without a new post thanks to an awesome plugin called Time Release. In theory, this practice means that, as long as I get the chance to blog at least every other week, my blog should never go a week without a post. And, when I find a big chunk of unexpected blogging time, I have the opportunity to really get my stockpile built up to cover me in the event of a long spell with no time to blog. (For instance, almost the entire back half of 2012/start of 2013.)

Once you start this practice, it’s actually easier than you think to do two posts whenever you would have done just one. Let me give you an example:

This post, is coming at you from my queue meaning I forgot/didn’t have time to write a post this week. It started out as part of this post, which was an update on my writing goals. While writing that other post, I started to explain how I binge blog and realized I could just pull that section out and make it its own separate blog post. The more you practice the one for now, one for the can philosophy the better you’ll get at noticing opportunities like this and realize where a single post can be split or spun off into a second one.

The only challenge of blogging with a the rainy day queue as back-up is that you need to remember two key things. Firstly, posts you queue have to be timeless since you won’t know ahead of time when they’ll post (a post about looking forward to the 4th of July will make you look pretty silly if it posts in August) and, secondly, you have to remember to write queue posts as if they are live. Obviously, I’m peeling back the curtain for this post to show you how the sausage is made but, if this were a normal queue post, I’d be making sure to change things like tense, references to recent events and anything else that might make the reader realize the post she is reading was written sometimes months earlier. It involves a bit of an eye towards the future, but it’s well worth the rewards.

How do you keep your blog active in the face of life and all its many responsibilities? Have you ever attempted a little binge blogging yourself?