Whether you’re blogging for other people or for yourself, implementing and diligently following a blog posting schedule will help a lot in completing articles on time, while getting enough rest for ourselves.

Blogging Schedule Ideas

• List all the blogs you need to write for, and how many posts you need to write per week/month. For freelance writers, your clients probably gave you posting requirements, so this will be easier. On the other hand, bloggers writing for their own blogs need to enforce a bit more discipline.
• Group your blogs into the niches/categories they fall into, e.g. tech, gaming, pets, political, and so on. The idea here is that when your mind is set to a particular topic, it becomes easier (and faster) to write a string of blog posts about that topic. Jumping from one topic to another in a short duration of writing is doable, but a bit more tedious.
• Assign days to these groups as you see fit. For instance, writing for your pet blogs happens during Mondays and Tuesdays, while writing about iPods happens on Wednesdays.
• So, let’s assume you’ve followed the schedule. If you think the required posts you’ve finished written for a particular day needs a bit more polishing, don’t pressure yourself to publish all of them on that day. Keep them in your drafts where you can return to them a day or so later. Remember: these are posts that just need a bit more polishing. The purpose of the blogging schedule is defeated if the drafts are just going to be full of half-finished articles.

An Example

The schedule below is adapted (not ‘as is’) from mine, a full-time freelancing career, but the essence stays the same for part-time probloggers, too. Every month, I problog for 15 gaming blogs, a tech/geekery blog, 4 blog-centric blogs (along with doing reviews for a blog directory). I also co-own around 7 active blogs and sites.

Monday – Tech blog/Blogging blogs I

Tuesday – Gaming blogs (just short posts, so manageable)

Wednesday – Blogging blogs II

Thursday – Own blogs & websites

But where’s Friday? It can be your spare day, the day when you fill in missing blog posts, polish and publish your drafts, plan on how to expand your own projects…or simply take the time off. Full-time problogging doesn’t mean you have to work the whole week. (Aside from the putting-too-much-cake-on-my-plate syndrome, one thing really makes a blogger’s time vanish – lack of discipline.)

In the example above, Saturday and Sunday is also up to you; aside from rest, these days can be used to explore your other hobbies and interests (which can also be fuel for blogging ideas). In my case, the weekends are reserved for writing literature and attending a six month-long poetry workshop, so it’s time well-spent.

It’s Your Own Time, Your Own Sched

I know some people to whom the regular Monday-Friday workweek isn’t to their taste. Some like resting on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. Some evenly spread their work across all seven days, taking care to inject some rest and recreation to keep those days balanced between fun and business. It’s up to you.

Just remember, no schedule is wrong. Having it is way better than having none. As long as it’s comfortable for you and you’re getting the job done on time, the blogging schedule you’ve set is as right as it can get.

1. They provide the blogger’s readers a hassle-free venue to give feedback or compliments; and
2. They allow the blogger to easily build relationships (e.g. link exchange) with other bloggers by commenting on their  tagboards.

While there is nothing wrong with the latter – going around the tagboards of people and saying hello – this tactic is often abused (consciously or unconsciously) by many bloggers.

There are bloggers whose obvious purpose is just to advertise their own sites, leaving messages such as “Dropped by”, “Visit my blog”, or worse, just smilies. For regular visitors who are already known to the blogmaster, these are all right. But when total strangers leave these messages, they become irritating. Irritating, because:

1. They don’t provide anything meaningful to the tagboard’s owner, and the messages’ worth is one-sided: they’re just there to get the blogger a backlink and some visits; and
2. They simply pollute the tagboard.

A year ago, I had the unpleasant experience of encountering one such beginning blogger. He was a serial tagboard spammer – after victimizing my tagboard, in a day’s time he had gone through my entire blogroll and left the exact senseless message in each of my friends’ boards.

That fellow went on to have a fairly successful blog in my nation’s local blogosphere, but what he didn’t (and still doesn’t) know to this day is that quite a number of bloggers regard him lowly. (For the record, he also went on to launch a couple of spammy, made-for-ads blogs!)

The behavior above can be forgiven if the blogger is a high-schooler, but for adults, it shows bad ‘blog-etiquette’. If you’re out to gain some backlinks and return visits when you post on a tagboard, be fair and give something back to the board’s owner. Here are a couple of ways to achieve that:

1. Compliment. Every blog has a good side to it. Whether it’s the quality of the writing or the color combination of the design, praise it. It shouldn’t take too much time or words on your part, so don’t settle for “Nice blog”.
2. State your business. If you’re out for link exchange, then don’t get shy about it. Link exchanges benefit both bloggers, after all. It would be great if you can combine this with #1.
3. Comment on the blog posts themselves. Do you know what a blogger appreciates better than tagboard commentors? Visitors who take the time to share their thoughts on the blog posts. The blogger will remember you better, too.

Basically, an article directory plays host and categorizes thousands of ~500-700 word articles written by the ‘experts’ of various fields – from Internet marketing to pet dog care, from yoga to trucks, and everything in between. Most of all, they’re free to be republished (with the original author’s byline, of course).

I wrote ‘experts’, because it’s up to the reader to decide if the information presented by the article is indeed useful and credible. Usually, article writers are freelance writers, probloggers, affiliate marketers, and webmasters looking to promote their products and websites at the end of each article. (Disclosure: I used to be an article writer before I finally opened my own directory.)

That said, article directories can provide a wealth of information for any blogger who’s a bit short on blog entries to post. The depth and breadth (as well as the intuitive categorization) of good article sites make them especially attractive.

Here are some good article directories to visit:

• EzineArticles.com – a long-time favorite of mine, with strict attention to quality
• ArticleCrux.com – the article directory I co-maintain, where we pay extra attention to categorization
• GoArticles.com – a popular directory, though there’s not much of an editorial/review process, so quality might be compromised a bit
• IdeaMarketers.com – a directory where you can associate authors with their faces for that ‘sense of trust’
• ArticleGarden.com – another good article site in my ‘favorite list’

For those previously unacquainted with article content, I’ve given you a start…but don’t go filling up your blogs with articles from these sites! Here’s why:

Article directories are often abused by bloggers and webmasters looking for effortless, keyword-rich content.

In fact, many “splogs” (spam blogs) polluting the Net today rely on content from article directories. (The spammers’ favorite alternative is blog content scraped off someone else’s blog feed.)

Why would extensively using article content be ‘bad’ for you and your blog? Well, do you want your site penalized by Google for having duplicate (word-for-word) content? Do you want to appear as an unoriginal blogger in the eyes of your readers?

Still, that doesn’t mean that you can’t use these free articles for your blog. For example, you can use one article every dozen blog posts.

But there’s something better – you can use articles more frequently as long as you use them in creative ways. Here are some ‘techniques’ (for the lack of a better term), originally written in my April 2007 Performancing article:

• Add images. Quite the simplest thing to do in this list!
• Combine the most interesting points from different related articles. Several bits of quoted text + own opinions = new blog post.
• React to the article. Praise or condemn, support or rectify.
• Relate the article to a previous blog post. “In retrospect” + new info = new blog post.
• Compare and contrast the article’s points with those of a blog post from another blogger in your field. Better if he/she’s established.

The five items above can also be applied to other ‘borrowed’ blog content, such as when you’re quoting news reports and other blog entries. Just remember: borrowing blog content from other sites doesn’t mean you have to be unoriginal.

So, you’ve pinned down the core concept of your blog post, which built upon your very own sentences, opinions, and experiences. Now, you just need that piece of quotation, that descriptive photo, that matching video – blog content that supports your core idea and words. These will give aesthetic plus points, flavor, and credibility to your blog post.

But where will we get them? Here are some good sites to start with:

1. Google U.S. Government Search — “a single location for searching across U.S. government information…content located on either U.S. federal, state and local government websites”.
2. The Internet Archive — recently recognized as an official library by the State of California.
3. Stock photography sites – an earlier Blog Tutorial article has some good suggestions; stock.xchng is a popular resource.
4. Public domain image resources – check out this comprehensive Wikipedia list.
5. Good ol’ Wikipedia itself – borrowing content from Wikipedia isn’t an excuse for plagiarism; check the Creative Commons license and/or properly cite the source.
6. Article directories – the tried and tested source of free, free, free (can’t emphasize that enough) website content; examples and caveats in my next Blog Tutorial.



7. Syndic8.com – “the place to come to find RSS and Atom news feeds” across a wide range of categories; as of this writing, there are 513,458 registered feeds on the portal.



8. Video sharing websites – YouTube, Revver, and their ilk; Google Video searches videos from top video hosting sites.
9. Offline sources – don’t underestimate the power of hardcopy newspapers, magazines, and even events; read my May 2007 Performancing article for more.

When you install a Wordpress blog, it uses URLs that sport question marks and numbers. This isn’t the optimal permalink structure; here’s why:

1) Aesthetics. http://blog-tutorials.com/this-is-a-cool-post looks infinitely better than http://blog-tutorials.com/?p=123, doesn’t it?

2) Usability. Remember, whenever a blog reader hovers his/her mouse over a link, the URL is displayed on the browser’s status bar at the bottom. Having a URL full of numbers doesn’t give your reader any indication as to where he will be going if he/she clicks on that link.

3) Search Engine Optimization. Humans aren’t the only ones ‘reading’ your blog’s URLs. Search engines like Google, Yahoo, and MSN do, too. If your links are more descriptive and contain important keywords (such as ‘laptops’ for computer and gadget blogs), your blog’s permalink structure becomes search engine-friendly. This means that your blog will rank higher in the search engines, thus bringing in more visitors.

Fortunately, Wordpress gives blog owners the ability to change the default permalinks, and even to create a custom link structure. Here’s how:

1) You’ll need to change the permissions of your .htaccess file first, which is found on your server, so that Wordpress can access it and update the permalinks. Log into your server either through Cpanel or FTP; change your .htaccess file’s permissions to 666. After doing the steps below, change the permissions back to 660 or 644, which prevents other people from possibly accessing the file.

2) Login to your Wordpress Dashboard. Go to Options > Permalinks.

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3) Under Common Options, you’ll see that “Default” (the first one) is currently selected. The second one reads, “Date and name based”. If you’re uncomfortable tweaking your Wordpress blog settings, select this second option. This will include your blog post’s title inside the URL, making it better in terms of the three items we listed above.

The third option, “Numeric”, isn’t better than “Date and name based”, so don’t select that.

4) If you’re comfortable changing your blog’s settings, you can try the fourth option, “Custom”. Here’ you’ll have to enter the permalink structure you want, using the list of permalink tags. Custom structures allow you to create URLs that are shorter than “Date and name based”. One good example of a custom structure is /%category%/%postname%/.

5) After choosing/creating a new permalink structure, don’t forget to press the “Update Permalink Structure” button.

6) That’s it!

However, there’s a bit of problem when you’re importing from Blogsome (which also runs on Wordpress, albeit the Wordpress MU version). As you can see in the image below, Blogsome isn’t included in the list of import-able blogs.

(Click on the thumbnail to enlarge.)

This doesn’t mean that you can’t move your Blogsome posts anymore. You’ll just have to use another option in the list: Import RSS file.

When you use this option, Wordpress imports the content of the RSS feed and publishes them in your new blog. All Blogsome blogs have an RSS feed, which you can access by adding “/feed” after your Blogsome address, such as http://corsarius.blogsome.com/feed.

With the basics set aside, let’s proceed to the steps (examples were carried out on Wordpress 2.1.2):

1. Login to your Blogsome Dashboard. The Blog Stats on the lower left displays the number of posts in your blog. Remember this number.



2. Go to Options > Reading. Under Syndication Feeds, in the Show the most recent field, enter the number of blog posts. In our example above, it’s 53 posts. For the For each article show option, pick the Full text option.
   

   

   (Click on the thumbnail to enlarge.)

   Technically, setting the number of blog posts displayed on the feeds should be fine already, but in my case, not all the posts were included in the RSS feed. If you experience this, don’t sweat — under Blog Pages (just above Syndication Feeds), set the Show at Most field to the number of blog posts (e.g. 53) and “posts”, instead of “days”. This will cause your blog’s main page to display all posts. You can revert all of these once you’ve completed all the steps.

   Be sure to save your settings by pressing the Update Options button. Your Blogsome RSS feed should now include all your blog posts.

   

3. Go to your Blogsome RSS feed (for example, http://corsarius.blogsome.com/feed). Save this file to your computer (default filename for Blogsome feeds is “feed.xml”).
4. Now login to your new Wordpress blog’s Dashboard. Go to Manage > Import. Select the “RSS” option (in the middle of the list). This will take you to the Import RSS page, where you can upload the RSS/XML feed file you saved in Step 3.

   

   (Click on the thumbnail to enlarge.)

   You’ll get a similar result when the importing is finished:

   

5. That’s it! Check your blog’s main page. Your old blog’s posts should already be there. (Unfortunately, blog comments aren’t included in these migrated posts.) In our example, I imported this Blogsome blog into my own test Wordpress blog.

Sponsored reviews

Writing about sponsored reviews (or advertisements) on one’s blog is already a tricky issue being debated over on the Net, and I’ll not be taking sides here. If you do decide to write sponsored reviews, don’t immediately jump into the water – think about these two points first:

1) Do you have the time to regularly write both sponsored reviews and your own ‘normal’ posts? If you follow a regular posting sched (let’s say, 3x a week), don’t include sponsored reviews among that three.

Your normal entries should still arrive with the same, or even greater, frequency. Otherwise, your readers will feel you’ve traded away their loyalty (they were the ones who gave you the Google PageRank and the Alexa traffic rank, right?) for a shot at quick bucks.

2) Don’t get haphazard in mentioning the sponsored product in the review. It’s already advertising, so don’t make it even more blatant. Before blogging, think well of how you can blend in the name of the sponsored product (as well as the required keywords, if any).

A great technique would be to insert your own experiences regarding the product’s field (not the product itself). For example, if it’s a plastic surgery advert, you can start by saying that you’ve always felt a bit shy because of your inch-wide mole (hehe), and if you had the bucks, you’d go for surgery. But don’t lie!

Blogorrhea

Most people who aren’t Net savvy think of blogs as merely online personal diaries. Because you’re reading this, you know that this is wrong. But the perception remains because there are still lots of blogs out there with no other content than “I saw my crush today!” entries.

While that kind of posts is monotonous for personal blogs, it’s downright ugly for tech blogs, political blogs, sports blogs, and so on. Moderate what makes it through your blog from your offline life. Avoid blogorrhea, which Ia wrote about a while back.

Unconfirmed reports, untested products

Don’t ever recommend/heap praises upon a product you’ve never even used. (This is tied to the earlier piece of advice; just remember that showing ads isn’t equal to outright recommendation.) If your reader uses the product per your sugary suggestions and ends up with an awful experience, it’s your reputation that will be damaged.

Also, if you blog about an unconfirmed event (product launch, celebrity news, business deals, etc.), it’s better to add the word “unconfirmed” somewhere in the post. That way, you can come up with an attention-grabbing post while being truthful to your readers. (Unless your blog specializes in hoaxes, of course.)

When you don’t feel blogging

The main part of blogging is writing; hence, writing discipline tips apply to blogging, too. One particular tip is of great interest, and it goes as:

“Force yourself to write even if you don’t feel like writing.”

That’s very difficult to accomplish, but the great writers and novelists became great precisely by following that tip.

You might be asking, if this discipline applies to blogging, why the hell is the title of this section “When you don’t feel blogging”?

The answer: force yourself to write…but don’t force yourself to publish the post you’ve written.

When one is forced to do something, the result is sometimes of lesser quality than that which came from unrestrained creativity. For offline written works, this is no problem – the author can go over the piece after completing it, and revise it at will, anytime. For blog posts, this is a problem – bloggers usually hit the publish button just after completing the article and skimming over it for a couple of times. And voila, the blogger might have just published a post ridden with typos and grammatical errors!

That’s why my suggestion is to write the post, keep it in your Drafts, and leave it alone for a while. A few hours or a few days of separation will allow you to more easily pick out the errors in your post.

However, there are times when you shouldn’t force yourself to write/publish a blog post. Doing so might hurt your blog’s quality and your reputation as a blogger.

Here are some instances that you might want to avoid:

Parroting another blog post

Have you heard of the echo chamber? The blogosphere is fast becoming one. In the echo chamber, bloggers just quote and link to the content of another blog, without even adding their own thoughts and reactions. The result is a blogosphere filled with duplicate content.

If you’re an A-lister, you can get away with this. However, for the rest of us, you run the risk of turning off readers by filling your blog with parroted content. Also, remember that search engines hate duplicate text, and sites guilty of it are penalized in the rankings.

This doesn’t mean you can’t talk about what others have already discussed. To avoid the echo chamber, put your own spin to the topic – don’t just quote. Write what’s on your mind, and write it in your own voice and tone. You can even do some Google research so you can add more fodder to your post. Inserting images will also spruce up the post.

Emotional, fired-up moments

Ever heard of the advice that goes something like, “Cool off before you send an emotional letter you’ve written?”

If your blog is open for public viewing (which is probably the case), then your posts are like open letters to the world. You need to make sure that your words 1) don’t damage whatever reputation you’re building for yourself, and 2) don’t needlessly hurt other people’s feelings.

Let’s face it – we sometimes regret the actions we’ve committed in emotional moments. That’s why after you write an emotional post, don’t publish it pronto. Leave it for a while. Let your feelings – seething anger, giddy happiness, deep sorrow – subside for an hour, a day, a week, it’s up to you. Then go back to your post and edit it, armed with a calmer mind.

Let’s go back to the two items we listed above. First, don’t damage whatever reputation you’re building for yourself. One example: if you’re maintaining an online persona that’s deathly serious, a sudden off-character mood swing where you’re spouting “W00t! I am so friggin’ happy! YAY!!!” will leave your regular readers in amazement, or worse, disgust.

Second, don’t needlessly hurt other people’s feelings. If another blogger’s post or a commenter’s opinion affronted you, don’t snap back with an insult. (Obvious trolls are an exception.) As I mentioned in an old Performancing post, you’ll earn more respect by taking a stance and whipping up a response worthy of true statesmen (a witty retort might also do). We’ve got too much hate in the offline world already.

Of course, as with all pieces of advice, there are exceptions to this one. There are times when you just can’t keep out the emotions from seeping into your post. That’s all right. One of my personal maxims is, “Keep everything in moderation.” In blogging, this includes emotions, insults, and praises.

Hasty writing right after an event

So, that big, big event has just wrapped up, and you can’t wait to write a comprehensive blog post about it, covering the event’s start to finish, from speaker A to speaker Z, from the booths to the raffle draws, and complete with a smattering of pics. Just like dozens of other bloggers.

Breathe first before you write. You might be aiming to be the first to get the story out, but really, what are the chances of that happening if it’s a popular event? What’s more, livebloggers have beaten you to the punch. Better to come up with an excellent and complete post. Remember, the excitement over the event will not die down for the next few days and people will still be on the lookout for posts, so you can afford to trade 1-2 hours for a comprehensive article.

Compile and organize the resources at hand – media kits, souvenir programs, brochures, your self-taken photos, notes you jotted down – and sort out the sentences popping inside your mind. Run a quick search on Technorati (Google might not be as updated with blog posts) or go through the blogs of people you saw at the event. If they already have articles on the event, you can link to them and provide summaries, in addition to your own coverage. This will make your blog post a one-stop, everything-is-here shop. A sterling case in point: Basang Panaginip’s round-up for the Philippine Blog Awards.

Tomorrow we follow up with the second and last part of When Not to Blog.

When properly used, images can help your blog’s search engine optimization. You’ll need to pay attention to two attributes/HTML tags: alt and title.

The alt attribute stands for “alternate text”, which stands in for the image when it can’t be displayed properly. The alt attribute is a pillar of website accessibility, and is a boon for visually-impaired users and those who use speech synthesizers. But aside from this, the alt tag is the most important part of image SEO.

Adding an alt tag that’s keyword-rich (e.g. “A fake petunia sold at Willoughby Street, a popular street for fake petunia lovers” with fake petunia as the keyword) strengthens your post and your blog in the search engine rankings. While keywords are important, don’t forget that alt text is primarily descriptive text — don’t get too spammy with it.

Next, the title tag tells what text is to be displayed when a user hovers the mouse over the image. It can be less descriptive than the alt text (after all, a long description will not be displayed in full when used as a title), but that doesn’t mean you can’t put in some keywords. In our earlier example, you can simply write in “A fake petunia sold at Willoughby Street” as the title.

Of course, you can’t use these attributes if you don’t have any images in the first place. My old post at Performancing.com lists several sites where you can get free images.

By day, I’m a problogger and freelance writer. I’ve regularly written for over 30 websites,  and you can currently find me at Performancing.com, one of the leading sites for probloggers today. By night, I write literature, you know, the usual stuff — poetry, fiction, essays, and whatnot. (Mercifully, a couple of my works have seen print, hehe!)

As you can see, both my cash jobs and art revolve around writing. In the next weeks, I’ll be more than happy to share with you my writing experiences, as well as Wordpress tips (WP is my current blogging platform of choice) and SEO advice (together with fellow Blog-Tutorials.com writer Ia Lucero and Splashpress Media ‘blog overlord’ J Angelo Racoma, we managed to place well in two SEO contests.)

Keep on writing and blogging!

P.S. You can also visit my two main blogs, Slip of the Pen (writing/lit) and Crimson Crux (pseudo-tech).