If you wish to develop a steady blog readership, it is important that you post to your blog frequently. This could be viewed as hassle. However, thanks to the automation features of the WordPress blog, you don’t have to be a slave to your blog. You can sit down to write posts according to your schedule and set the blog to post them on the dates and times you desire.
All you have to do to take advantage of this feature is to click on the ‘edit timestamp’ box and enter the date and time that you want the post to appear to the public before you click publish. The post will show up as a scheduled entry in your admin dashboard but it won’t show up on the blog until the time you set.
One little quirk to the system involves ‘pinging’. When you first installed your blog you probably set it to ‘ping’ the popular blog directories and let them know when you publish a new post. When you schedule an entry, the blog knows not to make the post public, but it still sends a ping – which can create some confusion.
The solution to this issue is found in a simple WordPress plugin called wp-cron. You can grab this plug in here:
http://www.skippy.net/blog/category/wordpress/plugins/wp-cron/. The plug in will ensure that your blog doesn’t send a ping before the post is actually added to the blog site for public viewing.
Automated posting gives you the freedom to enjoy time off without missing a beat with your blog readership. You can also use it to schedule a series of posts just so you don’t have to think about it again. For example, you may have written a special series of short articles that you want to post every Wednesday over the next ten weeks. Just set them and forget them. You won’t miss a Wednesday and won’t have to worry about it.
If you have a big event coming up, you can sit down and write out all of the promotions at one time and set them to post on a set schedule. 30 days, two weeks, one week, three days – then the day before.
Using automated functions help you to work smarter not harder and that is a good thing!