Consistency is hard.

You feel like you’re on top of the world when you bang out one amazing blog post.

But one amazing blog post isn’t enough.

One amazing anything isn’t enough.

If you disappear for an extended period of time after publishing once, you run the risk of losing your audience.

Staying consistent is especially hard when you’re just starting out—after all, you haven’t gotten into a rhythm yet, or you might not be producing much.

When things are already up and running, you might have the opposite problem—you may be overwhelmed or lost in the chaos of too much activity.

In the long run, consistency is rewarding. When fans know that they can expect new blog content regularly, then they’ll keep coming back for more. (Of course, that’s provided you publish quality content.)

So, how should you schedule your blog posts?

To create a consistent content strategy, consider the following steps.

5 Steps to Schedule Blog Posts Consistently

1. Conduct Weekly Team Meetings

Schedules are easy to create, but following through with them is the real challenge.

Sometimes your content team is busy with a guest post or press release. Other times, they’re busy with edits or revisions, so they may not be able to write the next blog post. In these scenarios, it’s only natural to adjust the schedule of your blog posts.

These adjustments are a lot more common than you think. In fact, Altimeter found that 70% of marketers struggle to maintain a consistent content marketing strategy.

To ensure that blog post schedules are maintained, it’s important to schedule weekly team meetings.

One way you can ensure that these meetings are efficient is by setting an agenda. Here’s a sample meeting agenda from the Harvard Business Review.

Here you’re presented with a meeting agenda that’s divided into columns: Topic, preparation and proposed process. You’ll all know the plan when it’s time to meet. When the team is given this information ahead of time, they can prepare for the meeting, easily make decisions related to the content schedule and bring up any concerns they may have.

If you’re a little more modern about collaboration and have a remote team, you can conduct these meetings using team messenger apps like Slack. You can even combine a weekly group chat-meeting and one-on-one chats as needed, allowing you to always be on top of things.

2. Use a Project Management Tool

Managing your content team is easy once you set up a system.

In this section, we’ll discuss the steps you can take to create content calendars and scheduling systems with tools like Asana and Trello.

Make Content Calendars with Trello

What’s great about Trello is that you can create various sections such as article ideas, articles in progress, articles awaiting publication and published articles.

By pressing the “Add a Card” button you can easily schedule blog posts in the content calendar. For this example, I’ll type the words “article on scheduling blog posts.”

Another great feature of Trello is that it allows you to attach links and tag members of your content team. This way, you can easily preview articles and notify your team if you’ve made changes with their cards.

Manage Tasks with Due Dates in Asana

Alternatively, you can also use Asana to schedule blog posts. For this example, I’ll add a task named “Blog-Consistent Content Marketing Strategy.”

Afterwards, indicate the due date for the task. And, click “Create Tasks” once you’re done.

Asana allows users to add a description, due date, attachments and followers in each task. Followers of the task will be notified once someone in the team makes changes or adds comments in regards to their tasks.

After creating your tasks, you can click on your Team Calendar to see all of your due dates for the month displayed.

So, you can use both Trello and Asana to create organized content calendars and easily mange your team.

3. Brainstorm Blog Topics in Advance

Since there are a lot of challenges with creating a consistent content marketing schedule, it’s important to brainstorm and schedule blog topics at least one month in advance.

This way, your team will have the flexibility to complete the tasks another time, especially if they fall ill or feel burned out.

4. Measure Your Success

Since you spent a lot of effort in creating consistent content, you have to at least make sure that your content strategy is making its intended impact. Fortunately, measuring your blog post’s success is simple.

For starters, create an account in Google Analytics and click on the Audience dashboard. Here, you’ll be presented with an audience overview of your site’s traffic.

What we’re interested in is the data on new vs. returning viewers. To check it out click “Audience” then “Behavior” and “New vs Returning.”

In the dashboard, you’ll be presented with data per page such as the sessions, pages, average time on page, average session duration, bounce rate and new users.

Here’s a breakdown of what these measures mean:

Session — A session is a group of user interactions in a website. These interactions may encompass multiple page views, events, social interactions and e-commerce transactions. A single user can have multiple sessions.

New Users — The first time a device or browser loads your website content, Google Analytics tracks the users with a random, unique ID called the client ID. When a first-time user is tracked with a unique ID, Google Analytics counts this as a new user.

Pages — Total number of pages viewed. If a user reloads the page, this counts as an additional page view. If a user returns to the page, this is also counted as an additional pageview.

Average Session Duration — Average time people spent on the page.

Bounce Rate — Percentage of single page visits or sessions. Single sessions occur when users leave the website from the page and do not browse any further

Goal Value — When you create objectives, you can assign a monetary amount that denotes the value gained for the completion of the goal. Each time the goal is completed (i.e. buying a product from the webpage) this amount is combined together and is seen as the Goal Value.

Goal Conversion Rate — The average percentage of goals completed by visitors.

Goal Completion Rate — The percentage of visitors who have completed requirements for a particular goal.

What if you want to look for a specific page? Assuming that the keywords in your webpage URL pertains to the title or topic of your blog post, you can find these pages by using the search bar.

5. Experiment with Blog Post Frequency

How many blog posts should you publish per week?

According to Feedspot, major publication Forbes publishes 350 posts per week, whereas Entrepreneur publishes 175 posts per week. These frequencies seem to denote that more is better.

But, is it?

Brian Dean boasted that his blogs generated 1 million unique visits, despite only publishing about one blog post per month.

Additionally, popular sites in the industry such as SmartBlogger and Wait But Why publish about one blog post per week or month.

This means that success isn’t just a numbers game. Other factors such as content quality, SEO and popularity play a role in the success of your content strategy.

So, how often should you schedule blog posts?

It’s entirely up to you, but take into account the data from analytics. Ideally, as the number of your published blog post increases, the number of your pageviews and traffic should also increase.

If you don’t see your results improve, then perhaps it’s time to improve SEO, write guest posts or build backlinks.

In short, feel free to experiment. Find out the topics that work and the topics that don’t. Find out the maximum number of blog posts that your content team can write each week. Think about how your topics can rank first in the search results.

But, don’t expect immediate rewards.

Experimentation takes time but its rewards are definitely worth it.

The Blog Scheduling Summary

So, let’s recap what we covered today.

How do you schedule blog posts? In the end, it all comes down to consistency.

• Conduct weekly team meetings.
• Use Trello and Asana to create a system.
• Brainstorm blog topics at least a month before.
• Measure blog post success.
• Experiment on blog post frequency

When it comes to scheduling blog posts, these steps are the key to your success.

 

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