Monday 18 January 2016

5 Reasons NOT to Batch-Write Your Blog Content

Have you been batch-writing your blog posts to save time and be more productive? Here are a few things to think about.
Are you thinking about batching your blog content?
Batching your blog content can be incredibly beneficial as a business owner and/or blogger – it can help you save time, be more productive, and work more efficiently.
It can also do more harm than good if you’re not careful.
In this article, we’ll explore some reasons why you should not batch your blog content.

5 Reasons Not to Batch Your Blog Content

1. You might find you’ve moved on

While it sounds like a great idea to write all of your content ahead of time, doing so can also cause you to lose focus on what’s happening day-to-day on your blog.
For example, if you write all of your posts and have too many of them ready ahead of time (2–3 months worth of content), you might move onto something else you need to focus on and forget to come back to your blog.
While you may have moved on, your readers are only just coming to this information and will be excited and enthusiastic about talking to you about it. Ensure you’re not just posting and running, but are there in the right head-space to interact with the content in real time.

2. You might find the internet has moved on

A second reason not to batch your content is because your content can become outdated.
While you may feel like you are ahead because you wrote your content early, if you didn’t write evergreen content, your hard work might go to waste.
It’s easy to fall into the trap of planning too far ahead and writing about topics that are popular at the time, but with the internet (and plenty of niches on it) constantly changing, you could lose momentum if you’ve written posts when they were popular but scheduled it for later.
To avoid this issue, organise your writing and scheduling plan so that you’re writing on-topic when its hot, and scheduling more evergreen content for when it’s not. You can also move the schedule around when you want to take advantage of reader interest in a topic even though you’ve already got something scheduled for that time.
Keeping some spots free for current topic content can help your blog to feel fresh and like it has relevant information for the people reading it today.

3. You might waste too much time going back and correcting old posts

A third reason to avoid batching your content is that it can lead to having to go back and correct a previously written post – thus wasting your precious time and also potentially looking like you’re out of touch – not a good look when you’re trying to establish yourself as an authority in your niche!
When blogging, if you write too far ahead, you may have to go back and re-do your work if the content has changed before you’ve published your post.
This can be very unproductive if you have to do this for a lot of your posts.
Be sure when you’re sitting down to plan out your blog posts and put them on your editorial calendar that you think about when you’re scheduling your content for, this way you can minimize the need to correct a post you’ve finished but haven’t published yet.
If you end up having to re-write a post, this can cause you to fall farther behind and can lead to a loss of momentum that you may have built up online. While it’s inevitable you will have to at some point, do try to make it minimal.

4. You might end up writing content unrelated to your blog

Another reason to consider not batching your blog content is because the content is not relevant to your overall strategy.
Writing content ahead of time can be useful, provided it has a purpose.
If you are writing just to say you have a certain amount of posts, you are not helping yourself. Instead, focus on writing quality posts versus writing a large quantity of posts. Ensure you’re putting all your energy into that post to make it the best you possibly can. It will be far more worth it to you to have a great post that does well and stands the test of time, rather than lots of little posts that don’t mean nothing much at all and get lost in the never-ending rabbit hole that is the internet.
Although you might want to capitalise on current trends to see a boost in traffic, don’t start writing about topics that are unrelated to your niche just for that. See if you can find an angle that relates to your niche and write about that (but don’t schedule it for too far in the future!).

5. You may lose sight of your goals

One final reason to avoid batching your blog content is that it can cause you to lose sight of your goals.
A lot of bloggers just start blogging. As you pick up momentum, you can get yourself stuck in the mindset that you have to keep writing and publishing a certain number of posts each month.
Essentially, you’re on a hamster wheel.
While it’s good to get ahead, this can lead to spending too much time focusing on writing.
As a result, other areas of your blog might get neglected in the process. You might forget to research, to find out who your audience is and how you can actually help them, you could be missing out on social media trends that will help build your readership. Try not to get so caught up in content, content, content, that you forget to nurture the other aspects of your online life.
To help combat this, at the beginning of each month, come up with the posts you plan to write for that month. Also consider adding other goals you want to accomplish for the month. It is fine to create a larger editorial calendar for the year, but you don’t want to be writing your Christmas posts in January, however efficient it makes you feel. Your post will suffer for the lack of a whole year of information you could have learned in that time.
Ensure you’re not only fulfilling your writing goals for that month, but also the other goals you are hoping to accomplish.
Don’t be a slave to your write-in-advance mentality – use it for when it is useful and practical, but stay flexible.

Wrap up

While batching your blog content sounds like a great idea, it can give you a headache if you have to go back and correct your work or even worse, re-write it completely because information has moved on and you now look like a bit of a dinosaur. Don’t be so blinded by the efficiency of it that you lose touch with the rhythm and pulse of your blog.
Besides the ideas mentioned on why you shouldn’t batch your content, can you think of any others?
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