Big Blogging Mistake: Avoid Just In Time Writing

Let’s assume you have a blog and read about the suggestion to blog on a regular schedule. Yeah, readers like regular schedules, but there’s a serious downside to them: You need to produce enough valuable content to come up with a new post every time your posting schedule dictates it.

Ideally, you would produce a lot of content in advance, so you just need to upload your already finished posts. But what if you have run out of already finished content or have trouble writing posts in advance? Then you need to write your posts just in time.

I have done that over the last month and it had worked out relatively well. But there was the problem that I tried writing long and great articles, but have run out of time to complete them in time. Oops!

That’s why you need to avoid writing posts just in time!

You see? If you can’t finish a great post in time, and you still want to stick to your blogging schedule, and have no already finished articles to post, then you need to do something else: Come up with a filler post that isn’t great, but can be completed quickly.

Filler content is not cool. It’s not terribly helpful and you feel bad for resorting to that strategy. You think it’s better than posting nothing, and you might be right. But it’s still not a good strategy. If you can’t create the content in time, then you simply need more time!

There are two ways to get more time:

1. Put more time into blogging.
2. Change your blogging schedule, so that you have more time for writing each article.

Of course you can also do both at once. If you do that, you can also prepare more content in advance, which will make your blogging operation run even smoother.

Maybe you wondered whether this post is a filler, too. Yes, it is. Why do you think I’m writing about this problem? I’m suffering from it myself. Well, basically that means I have to come up with a potential solution for a problem. I haven’t tested the suggestions in this post, but at least they sound reasonable.

Writing about problems that you have already solved is much more valuable for readers, because they are given advice that really works in reality. See? This post is a good example for that. If you have the problem I’m writing about, you might not be sure whether my advice is good, because I haven’t solved that problem already.

But at least, this post is a perfect example for the trouble that results from finishing a post just in time:

• This post is too short and doesn’t provide a lot of valuable information, because I’ve only taken about 35 Minutes to make this post.
• Proofreading takes a lot of time, so I haven’t done that for this post.
• It’s less inspiring than it could be.
• It’s not well structured.
• It doesn’t fit into the general theme of this blog.
• The overall quality of this post isn’t really great.
• I feel bad about marketing it, so I just don’t do that.

Maybe you wonder whether I have also written other filler posts here. Yes, I have. Take a look at these posts – and compare them to my other recent articles:

1. Speed-Post: News and Thoughts
2. Sources of Inspiration
3. Aura: An Open Content System Idea

Do you notice a difference? This is not a rhetorical question, I’m really curious. Perhaps those posts were not the worst I’ve ever written, but I still think there’s a real difference in quality (and word quantity) between those filler posts and the posts I’ve taken more time to write. Or do you disagree with me?