Business Writing Exercise

You’ve had most of a week now to get started on your blog posting schedule. If you’ve followed through on that, today’s writing exercise will take you five minutes. If you haven’t, today’s writing exercise is another kick in the pants to get you started.

One of the big benefits of a regular posting schedule is consistency — not just in timing, but also in content. There’s a good chance, no matter what sort of blog you have, that you’re making a number of different kinds of posts. On my old personal blog, I’d sometimes post journal entries, sometimes post comments that struck me as clever, sometimes post rambling essays, and sometimes post project updates.

Everything you’re posting probably has a place, on your blog and in the interests of your readers, but you can make it a lot easier on your readers if you let them know what to expect when they see a new item in their RSS reader. We do a little bit of that with categories and tags, and I even tried a handful of different ways of expressing it in the blog post titles. Most of the really successful bloggers out there divide their content by time, though, and that works really well.

Here at Unstressed Syllables, I follow the same pattern every week:

• Monday – Technical Writing Exercise
• Tuesday – Technical Writing Article
• Wednesday – Courtney’s WILAWriTWe
• Thursday – Creative Writing Article
• Friday – Creative Writing Exercise

That pattern emerged from my very first, halfhearted attempt at scheduling my blog, and I had it handy when I decided to do a detailed blog post schedule. That makes it easier for me to develop new blog post ideas, because I know exactly which types of ideas I need to come up with, every week. The schedule also makes it a lot easier for me to follow through, though. I can visually track the train of thought my blog is going to produce, post to post, and shuffle and tweak to get the best possible effect.

So your assignment this week is to finish your spreadsheet (if you haven’t yet), and tell us in the comments what you discover from that process. I want to know what your schedule actually is (whether that’s “I try to do one post a week,” or a detailed daily breakdown like I did above). Then, in addition to that, I want to know what you’re going to write about next week. Give me topics or titles, either one works for me, but demonstrate that you’ve actually done your homework.

If you want to get the most out of it, put a little marketing spin on all of that. Describe a posting schedule we’d like to follow, and tell us about some blog posts we’d really like to read. Who knows? Maybe you’ll pick up some new followers in the comments.