Work Smarter: See the future of your blog post flow

Wednesday, 29th April 2020

blog posts | Plugin Recommendation | Work Smarter

Your WordPress website is your marketing machine to communicate with your customers. In my case, that means I talk about websites, marketing online, graphics and the topics around my services. In your case, that means answering your customers’ questions, sharing what you’ve been up to, any new products or services and the benefits of them.

To do this you will need to be consistent .. consistency is king because it can be relied upon. So your viewers, your potential customers will learn that you release information via blog posts on set days. They know they’ll see something of value at certain days of the week 4 times a month. If you’re only writing four blog posts a month this may not be so pressing an issue for you.

But. If you plan to write and publish even twice a week on a Wednesday and a Sunday, having a way to see your future blog posts on a calendar is going to be really useful. You’ll know if you’ve forgotten to schedule in a blog post for that blank Wednesday spot or if you want to move the flow of your content so that it plans out a sequence better.

THD BlogTitle SeeYourBlogsFuture

So, how do you write consistently
with a good content plan and flow?

Take a look a PublishPress on the WordPress plugin repository. It’s full name is PublishPress: Editorial Calendar, Workflow, Comments, Notifications and Statuses.

THD PluginRecommendation PublishPress

At its simplest, it shows your blog posts as inserts on a month view of a calendar. So you can scan a column of Wednesdays and see, oops, I’m missing a spot for a scheduled blog post. I’ve written about how to write a scheduled blog post previously, but now I’m taking that advice one step further. So if you’re only posting once per week and you’re not bothered about sticking systematically to one day .. then go read the simple way to schedule blog posts.

So for those who want more control over the future of your blog post schedules, let’s continue.

One of the main features I wanted for my own blog is a calendar view of what posts are going out on what day, plus the ability to see the sequence flow of the content. So that if I were to write back to back content that expands on a previous post, I can see how the flow of that works.

THD Blog CalendarView

I also love that I can change the colour coding of my calendar posts so that I can easily see that for me green is published, orange is scheduled and pink are draft ideas. You’ll be able to do the same from the PublishPage menu under the settings and then the status tab.

THD Blog CalendarSettings
THD Blog CalendarSettingsStatus

It’s really useful to be able to see the status of blog posts if you are a business that accepts guest bloggers or you are the curator of a multi author blog. So set the colours to a system you can easily understand, for me something close to a traffic light system is very easy to understand, green is good, red is bad (so I made pink the draft colour) and orange is half way between so its scheduled.

THD Blog CalendarColours

Lastly the other main feature I like of this plugin that makes blogging easier on WordPress, is the content overview feature. When you write blogs for the specific areas of your business, its good to see a 10 day heads up on the areas you are writing for. For me, I can easily see that I’m writing wordpress tips and coaching blogs but nothing in 10 days for branding, graphics or photography.

THD Blog CalendarContentOverview

Something I can keep track of now and plan for the future so that I’m writing and advising on all areas of skills I have and not fixating too hard in one area. Except I am predominantly a WordPress design person so I’ll be writing most on that area.

Now, you can see the future of your blog posts and write well. To be consistent .. in a world that doesn’t feel very consistent is gold dust at the moment!

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