My life, it seems, continues to go in up then down cycles. A few days back I wrote a clever post, promoted it rather heavily and was pleased to get oh so many comments on it. The next day I published a post that was almost as clever. I didn’t promote it much though, and got zero comments. Some days it seems as though I am talking to lots of people all over the whole wide world. Then other days, it feels as though I am just muttering to myself.
My plan to write the posts for this blog two days ahead so I would never have to rush to meet a deadline, kind of fell by the wayside. I had no post scheduled to go live when midnight came around on the server, and after looking it over and re-reading it for the n-th time I decided not to use the emergency post that I had set aside. As I sit here struggling to compose this (not yet actually overdue) post, song lyrics flit through my mind, and it is sort of a struggle to keep my focus on what I’m writing and not just tap out a bunch of lyrics that might not mean much of anything to anyone who reads this.
As I have spent literally the entire day, off and on, struggling to get this post written, I found myself reminded of a post I published back in January 2008, about working all day on a post about two books- only to have the erratic DSL connection I then relied on flake out at the moment I pressed publish, making all of my hard efforts disappear into the ether. Re-reading that old post was a bit of a call to me to count my blessings. The cable internet we use now has proved much more reliable and it is an absolute rarity for the network to be down these days. Ron and I each have our own Toshiba laptop, so there is never any competition over who gets to use our one computer and no frustration of being over-flowing with ideas and no computer to write on. So I am trying to be a happy camper today, to get busy and get a few days posts into the hopper. And if you’ve read this far, I do thank you so much for taking a few minutes to read me on a day when I most certainly am not at my best.
Libdrone's Thoughts and Musings 
Make an editorial calendar ( https://www.google.com/calendar/ ). Plan your posts a week out (for a start) with deadlines for research, image collection, citation, drafting, editing and posting. it really will help.
Oh, be sure to include promotional activities on the calendar.
PS. When i talk about Most Wanted Actions and conversions, for you, it would seem, it is all contained in this “I didn’t promote it much though, and got zero comments. Some days it seems as though I am talking to lots of people all over the whole wide world.”
You would never have written that if you did not have a desire to convert visitors into readers, readers in to returners and returners into commentators and recognize the difference presented as a success and a not so much by those two posts.
I’ll go away and quit hogging your comment box now.
Dane, I know you’re right about scheduling, and when I was doing the books blog 3 to 5 days a week I did schedule topics sometimes well in advance. (The problem there was that having scheduled a book for a certain date I then had to read and digest it before the deadline, which actually proved more challenging. 🙂 I specifically chose to make this new site a personal blog, since I felt the personal niche would allow me to talk about a number of different things that interest me.
I’ve written before about feeling funny with the “Internet time shifting” of writing two days ahead. I’m honestly not sure, here in the personal niche, how much organizing is enough and how much is just too much. You are absolutely right of course that I am trying to get readers, returners and commentators. I will have to think seriously about whether or not more scheduling and working ahead would be a good idea for me on this particular blog or not.
Thanks so much for your help, Dane.
perhaps just a promotional calendar then. If you want to keep the blog itself more spontaneous, blog on what’s up now, but then when you hit post, have a checklist of post promotion tasks and schedule them. 😉
oh, and PS– I’ve written and scheduled another post since publishing this one. If I follow through and write another one soon as I hope, I will be back to two days ahead.