How to Improve Your Daily Blogging

You read somewhere that it is a good idea to blog daily. So, you made that one of your blogging goals for the new year: post something every day by noon. 

And it worked.

You started out invigorated. Ideas kept rolling from your noggin to the computer. With increased writing your traffic naturally increased. Before you know it a handful of people who didn’t give birth to you are actually following  your blog. And you are actually becoming a better writer.”This writing daily thing is easy”, you tell yourself.

And then you hit a brick wall.

Nothing comes to you. You don’t feel like writing daily anymore. But you also don’t want to bring your new year’s resolution. You’ve grown to appreciate the rewards of daily blogging, but at the same time you are worried that your cheap deodorant isn’t holding up with your profuse sweating as you try to get something out into the ether by 11:40. 

For weeks now your writing is following a predictable pattern. In the morning you stress out, wondering what you are going to write for the day. Finally, you throw something together and hit publish at 11:56. You live off the high for the rest of the day, at least until it dawns on you that you have to do the whole thing over again tomorrow.

And let’s be honest. You are keeping up on the promise of quantity but the quality is suffering. More than half the time you are embarrassed to hit publish. When you finally do, you find yourself hoping that nobody reads it and that it doesn’t go viral on a Fail Blog. 

So how do you blog daily AND blog with quality?

I don’t pretend to have this mastered. Far from it. But I do believe that I have improved. Here is one way that happened: I got ahead.

If you can find a way to write a couple of weeks in advance you will have a wonderful advantage over the blogger that is sweating bullets 15 minutes before her usual posting time. When schedule a post a couple of weeks in advance this gives you time to edit and to tweak it. (As an example this post was written two weeks before publish date, and I’ve tweaked it a couple times).This also gives you time to let others look over your work. And perhaps the greatest advantage—you can change your mind. Blogging ahead will give you the freedom to hit delete.

Sounds like a wonderful luxury. But how can you even think about getting ahead when your sweating bullets to meet your daily deadline?

Consider doing one or two of these things:

1. Recruit Guest bloggers. Listen, nobody is knocking on the door begging to write at Borrowed Light. It doesn’t come with a ton of glamour. But when I asked for a few writers I didn’t have difficulty filling out a weeks worth of articles*. There are plenty of people who love to write and would be honored to write for your audience. Just ask.
2. Take a break. Unless you are Tim Challies you don’t have a crazy streak of consecutive days blogging. And even if you do, you’ll never pass Tim because he is a robot and likely has articles scheduled until sometime in 2046. I know it is hard to imagine but you can take a week off of regular blogging and it won’t cause your blog to implode. In fact it might even improve it.
3. A week of quotes. If you absolutely cannot bring yourself to take a break and are convinced that you cannot get guest bloggers, there is still one more thing you can do. Raid your bookshelf for some great quotes. Have someone like John Owen be a guest blogger for you as you plunder one of his works. Type up a week or so of this type of post and then get yourself ahead.

Get yourself a week or two ahead and stay there. Take advantage of it. (I’m guilty at times of not taking advantage of the extra time to do editing). If you get a week ahead you should be able to write at about the same pace as you are now, but instead you are doing it ahead of schedule. If you want to really keep ahead have a guest post or two every week.

If you want quantity and quality on your blog this is one way to grow towards that.

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*And I’ve been blessed with some talented writers that have submitted articles that I’ve been honored to publish.