Ride The Inspiration Train

Typically, blawging is more of a regimented, intentional thing that I do for the long tail value and because I enjoy writing. Every once and a while though, I get inspired to blawg. Today was one of those days. I wrote three articles today (not including this one). I posted one on JavaScript at Ordered List (my business) and two for RailsTips.

Abide By Expectations

There are some sites that post multiple times a day. When they don’t, their readers are disappointed because they expect the volume. Nowhere that I post do I set the expectations that high. In fact, if I started posting multiple times a day, it might be considered bad or annoying.

That said, what am I to do with the inspiration that struck today? Hit publish on them all and hope for the best? Nope. I make sure that I never publish more than one a day. I would rather see 2 articles 3 days apart than 2 articles in one day and then nothing for a week. It is all about expectations and consistency.

Future Publish

So, when inspiration strikes for me, I publish the articles for the future. I don’t want to leave them sitting in my admin as a draft as I am guaranteed to forget about them, so I publish them and set the date to one in the future. On RailsTips, I published one today and the second one I set to publish on Tuesday. This gives people time when they get back from the weekend (since today is Saturday) to read and digest the first post before the second one pops up in their feed reader.

I have found that because readers have the expectation that I will not post two articles in a day they almost tend to choose between them rather than giving both a fair shake. Again I’ll say that this isn’t the case for every blawg, but if your readers are use to 1-3 articles a week, you shouldn’t bombard them with a few in one day.

C’mon Ride The Train

Next time you feel inspired to post, ride it. Pump out a few articles and then set them to publish over the coming days. You’ll get more eyes on each individual post and it will appear that you are really consistent, even though they were created the same day.

A funny side note is that I often forget that I wrote the post and I wake up to a pleasant traffic spike the morning that I set it to publish.