Scheduling Future Articles in WordPress

Posted on May 5th, 2008

Does your schedule vary so that some weeks you have extra time to write articles, while other weeks slip by? Are there other times when your article is due so it is on schedule, but you are out of ideas?

Unless you are on a strict schedule, there can be times when you just do not have the time or the ideas to write good articles. During the week I keep adding onto the list of ideas for articles.

Then I leave those ideas build until one of them just hits me with enough content to write that article. Once that is done, I will look at the list of ideas to see if any others can be written then.

Writing multiple articles in one day does not mean you have to publish them on your blog that same day. When entering them into your blog, there is an option in WordPress to set the publishing date and time.

The great thing about that is the article will not show up until that date and time arrives. I have tested this several times and found that it works so well, that when I saw a notice in email of an article had been posted, I had forgotten that I wrote it the previous week.

What a relief that was! Just when I was rushing to get the next article done, one showed up on time. So the next time you have the urge to write more than one article at a time, publish one and schedule the others for a future date.

Not only is that a time saver, but the search engines will only see the article on its scheduled date and will stay on its own schedule of indexing your blog.

Jim Hutchinson
Affiliate Referral Sources
A Division of Website Managers, LLC

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Tags: article publishing, Blogging, scheduling, time management, WordPress
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What is Podcasting and Why Should You Care?

Posted on April 28th, 2008

Previously we learned some Tips For Writing Articles, Recommended Plugins Your WordPress blog and Audio Books. Those Audio Books can be loaded onto an MP3 player, which is pretty much what an iPod does.

But the iPod does more than just play MP3 files. It can connect to the Internet to get more music and audio files, such as those you can record your blog articles in. You are keeping up with your blog and writing articles, right?

So you have the articles posted weekly and should be getting some traffic from them. Now you want to expand into more markets to reach a larger audience. Have you thought about how much more people are listening than reading?

A recent study has shown that an increasing number of people are downloading audio files and listening to them instead of reading the vast amount of information online. You will still be getting people to read your blog, but recording your articles and making them available online will broaden your audience.

That is known as podcasting. The term was coined when the iPod became popular. When you write an article, you can also record it and have the MP3 player shown above or below the article, so that your visitors have a choice: They can listen to it online, or download it to their iPod or other MP3 player and take it with them.

If your articles are generating interest, then your visitors will want to keep up with what you are writing about by taking you with them.

There is a plugin for WordPress called podPress. It has a whole host of options to personalize your podcast player. You can get a link to the plugin from the Blogging Secrets page on Affiliate Referral Sources. Download and install it, then go through the options.

Along with that, you will need a program to record the MP3 files. I use and recommend Audacity. It is easy to use and make smaller MP3 files than other recorders do.

Get Audacity at SourceForge.net

Once you write the article and record it, look below the editing box in WordPress for the MP3 upload button. Upload your file and when you publish the article, the recording will be there too.

Start broadening your reach with your visitors and do not worry about how you sound. People just want to hear a friendly voice. It will keep them coming back for more.

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Jim Hutchinson
Affiliate Referral Sources
A Division of Website Managers, LLC