How to Schedule a Blog Post in WordPress

Previously we discussed how to make use of best times for sharing your content on social media and recently we discussed 6 ways to drive more traffic to your blog. Now that you know how to create inspiring articles and when to share them with your community, let’s discuss how and why you should schedule your blog posts in advance within your WordPress, to create more consistent results.

Why Should You Schedule Posts?

If you want to engage with your users, gain more followers, shares and likes on your posts – consistency in your posting habits is key. First, you should consider writing down a posting schedule. You can do this very easily in Google sheets. Since everyone is different, some of you will schedule your plan for an entire month, others will plan for the week, it all depends on how much content you want to push out. Once you have your schedule in place, it’s time to start creating!

Our recommendation is to have a set day for creating your blog posts, so other tasks and responsibilities don’t get in its way. For example, we like to write our articles for the week on a Monday, so they’re all prepared and ready for the week. Pick a day, and make writing the article your top priority for that day.

Scheduling and writing content in advance has several advantages:

It Creates More Freedom
Planning and scheduling your posts in advance saves you lots of time. By putting a plan in place, you are able to sit down and calmly create your content in advance, to focus later on pushing your business forward or learning new things. Many of you are sole traders, so maximizing your time is going to be crucial for the success of your business. It also allows you to focus on your other social media networks, and drive more traffic to your site.

You Can Create a Consistent Publishing Routine
By creating your content plan and scheduling everything in advance, you can establish a structured plan for weeks, or even months ahead. This consistency might also lead to more traction for your posts, as your audience will get used to your posting habits, know when to expect them and look forward to each new article. It’s much better to have quality content, posted consistently, rather than large amounts of articles shared sporadically.

You Can Schedule for Peak Traffic
Posting at peak time is very important, if you want to maximize your engagement with the audience. Scheduling your posts ahead of time allows you to make sure that your content is being pushed at the best time. You can also monitor your site’s traffic using Google Analytics, to determine the best posting time for your market.

Now that you know why it’s important to create and schedule your content ahead of time, let’s look at how you can use WordPress to help you publish your content in advance.

How to schedule posts in advance with WordPress

Scheduling posts in advance with WordPress is easy.

Step 1 – Create Draft Posts
If you don’t already have blog posts written, in the WordPress menu, navigate to “Posts” and click on the “Add New” option. Here you can edit your new blog post and save it as a draft.
NOTE! Do not publish the article as it will then be posted immediately to your blog. Not to worry, if you did hit publish by accident – you can go back into your dashboard and change the status of the article back to “draft”. Don’t forget to hit “Save Draft”:

Step 2 – Set a Date and Time
Once your blog post is ready, take a look at the Publish widget and click on the “edit” link beside the “Publish immediately” text. You can then set the date and time to publish your blog post and click ok.

Step 3 – Preview and Review
Don’t forget to check the appearance of your blog post. Click the preview button and fix anything before it is scheduled to be posted.

Step 4 – Schedule
After setting the scheduled date and time, you will notice that the “Publish” button now says “Schedule”. Click it to confirm the scheduled post time.

Your scheduled posts will now be displayed in your “Activity” widget in the WordPress dashboard. You may want to move the activity widget further up your page, so it’s easier for you to check it.

As you have noticed, scheduling your posts in advance is easy and can be made in 4 simple steps. Creating your content may and probably should take longer, and you can always consult our article on How to Blog like a Boss to get some inspiration and additional ideas on topics for articles.

If you have more hints or tips on how to schedule your posts in a simple and efficient way, let us know!

Flothemes.
Empowering You.