Maintain an active blog publishing schedule

This is something I need to get cracking on, because time is passing and I’m still pissing away at this blog thing. I planned to be in a very different spot by now with this at the beginning of the year, I can’t believe it’s August and I’m still not making a dime with my blogs. Well I am making some dimes, but nothing substantial. This could be a lucrative stream of income for me, and that starts with publishing interesting, compelling stuff that people will want to read on a regular basis.

I recently added 2 new blogs, the Positive Emergence Zine Project:
http://pezine.com

and the Futuristic Motherhood Book Project:
http://futuristicmotherhood.com

As they are new I think I need to start posting to them daily. Other daily blogs are Supple Mama, which is easy to do because I post about my fitness and food and general outlook for the day:
http://supplemama.com

and Family Earthprint, this is my eco lifestyle blog! I have so many posts and ideas for this blog to take it the next level I have to start posting daily:
http://familyearthprint.com

Dread Mama is my most popular blog, it’s about dreadlocks, I’ll start posting to it daily also:
http://dreadmama.net

Seed & Flame is my blog about living a creative life, I post about projects I’m working on:
http://trula.org

Texture Bookstore is my blog about my bookstore, even if I don’t have news/updates about the store, I need to start posting daily about books: http://texturebookstore.com

Ok now the blogs I will post to just 3X a week are:

Mercury Lynch was a domain I had just pointed to my Seed & Flame blog, but I really want to develop it back into a site purely about science fiction (mercury lynch is the pen name I use for my sci-fi writing): http://mercurylynch.com

Earthy Style is about my teeny fashion house, basically stuff I make and sell using recycled/upcycled items. Bags mostly, a few skirts, things of that sort:
http://earthystyle.com

Trula Kids is my mommy blog and the one I started out blogging with many moons ago. My kids are now 20, 14, 11. I still have lots of mothering stuff to write about though:
http://trulakids.com

Brian and Trula is my marriage blog and was/is mostly about our upcoming marriage renewal vows and general marriage stuff:
http://brianandtrula.com

and finally my blog for MSPmedia.net, basically I just post about the various projects happening, indie production, and things like that: http://mspmedia.net

So that puts me at 7 blogs to post to daily. I’ve already set up topics several months in advance, and I’m a fast writer, but that still forces me to commit to an hour of blog writing daily, and 1-2 hours on days I have to post to all of them. That’s going to cut into my writing time on my book projects. It will be worth it though when this pays off.

I’ve totally fallen off the wagon on this one. Still debating whether I want to get back on…

...I have been kicking butt on! Granted, I don’t make much use of the “editorial calendar/database” I set up, but I’ve been super-diligent about putting something up every three days. I still have tons of ideas so the biggest obstacle is more in the making-time department. I still need to improve the actual writing as well. But the discipline of putting something out there has been going well. :P

I officially have an editorial calendar now. :) And, although I can remain open to better ideas, I have the blog posts planned out from here to March 1. I’m hopeful that this is going to work really well.

This has been happening like clockwork – every third day. I need to take it up a notch though and develop some kind of a better database for post ideas, notes, development, and scheduling. It would be great if I had a week’s worth written in advance so that I could take some mental time off from it once in a while as well.

So far, so good!

I have one blog I’m focussed on and I’ve managed to publish a post every third day for some time now. However, this has happened at the expense of not publishing to other blogs I had going. I think the next step is to get out in front of the publishing schedule enough that I have time to go back and make the actual writing better.

I seem to have fallen into a schedule of posting something about every third day. It’s not that it’s too difficult to come up with ideas at this early stage in the game, it’s more challenging to find the time to develop, research, and then write an idea. I am maintaining my Backpack calendar though for scheduling posts.

I’ve started marking dates on my Backpack calendar for when I expect to post to my various blogs. It helps me plan the writing for that week and see what’s coming up. Hopefully, it will help me keep each of the sites fresher if I can stick with it.