What a Daily Blogging Schedule Looks Like (Free Template)

Blogging might seem like a relatively simple hobby or career. After all, what more do you do than just write, publish, and let it grow?

That’s fine if you’re writing a personal blog for friends and family or you’re just writing your thoughts for anyone to see, but that’s not really a career. Unfortunately, the millions of pieces of content published every day make it pretty much impossible to even get a single visitor without direct effort, marketing, and more.

So, if you want to make a career out of blogging, you need to put at least a little – and often a lot – of effort into it every single day. Only once you reach a self-sustaining level of blog traffic and income can you relax, and even then, blogs are hungry; you need to feed them regularly so they can grow big and strong and stay healthy.

I’ve been blogging for over a decade now. What I’ve put together below is a sample of how I divide and conquer my workload, so I’m always working, but I never feel overwhelmed, too far behind, or continually playing catch-up. Don’t get me wrong; it can be hard, and it can take a lot of time, but that’s the price we pay to blog as a career.

Decide Between Task-Focused or Time-Focused Scheduling

The first thing you want to do is something a lot of people overlook. You need to decide how you want to arrange your schedule. There are two general options: task-focused and time-focused.

Task-focused scheduling means you build yourself a to-do list for the day, and you work until you complete all of your tasks for that day. If that takes you an hour, great! If it takes you eight hours, fine. Over time, you can rearrange the tasks you do each day of a week to balance out the amount of work you do each day.

Time-focused scheduling means you have a list of tasks you need to accomplish, but you don’t particularly care which ones you do each day. Instead, you know that you’re only going to be productive for however many hours a day, so that’s the amount of time you dedicate to work. Some people aim for a shorter work day and do what they can; others aim for a traditional 9-5 with their non-traditional job blogging.

The trick here is that neither of these options is better than the other. They both work fine for the people who have the right mindset to use them. I’ve known people who can spend all day, every day, powering through a to-do list and are driven by the feeling of accomplishment of having finished it each day. I’ve also known people who find a task list to be oppressive and rely on a timer to get work done, knowing that there’s a fixed end-point to their daily work.

Find which option works for you, and build a daily/weekly blogging schedule that fits within that framework.

Build a List of Specific Tasks to Accomplish

The second thing to do is build a list of tasks that you need to get done. Even if you’re using the time-focused schedule, you still need to have a list of the things that need to get done for each blog post, as well as the more general tasks that need to be done periodically, like reviewing analytics, monitoring blog performance, cleaning up comments, and promoting yourself.

What should this task list include?

Think about everything you need to do to get a blog post up and published.

• Research topic ideas, or choose a topic idea and research that topic.
• Write your actual blog content.
• Review, edit, and polish that content.
• Add internal and external links to your content.
• Create graphics for your content.
• Create meta data for your content (image alt tags, meta descriptions, etc.)
• Go back to older posts and add links to new content.
• Monitor and respond to comments on older posts.
• Schedule and publish your new post.
• Promote your new post on social media and other venues.

Note that there are a lot of tasks you need to do on a rolling basis, like quarterly or annually, to keep a blog in good health. These include things like evaluating and improving site speed, joining new monetization programs, analyzing your audience shift over time, and so on. I’m not including these in a daily schedule because they’re sporadic tasks, but you still need to pay attention to them.

Everyone has their own list of tasks they need to prioritize and others they put on the back burner. You can also lift some of the burden on your schedule by outsourcing. For example, for most of the graphics I create for my sites and my clients, I actually pay a talented graphic designer to do it for me, because otherwise, I just don’t have time for everything else.

Determine Your Blog Publishing Schedule

Another thing you need to decide is how frequently you plan to publish blog posts.

I’ve done research studies and experiments with my clients, and I can say with a reasonable degree of confidence that the frequency you publish only matters a little; what matters most is the consistency with which you publish.

To wit, I’ve seen blogs that publish once a month and are nevertheless topping the Google search results for every post they create. I’ve seen blogs publishing multiple times per day that never break the top ten. Conversely, some of the biggest sites on the internet publish dozens of posts per day, and there’s absolutely no shortage of blogs that publish once a month and are nowhere to be found.

To an extent, it depends on the kind of content you’re publishing. I’ll be going over this soon in another post, but in broad strokes, consider that the less frequently you publish, the more every post needs to be an evergreen traffic driver; conversely, the more frequently you publish, the more you can allow a few trending topics to slip through the cracks with only a few days or weeks of relevance.

If you’re relatively new to blogging, my recommendation is once per week. More than that can be unsustainable unless you have a very refined workflow or outsource a good portion of the work, and less than that can mean it takes forever to get a blog up off the ground.

Sample Template Task-Based Blogging Schedule

At this point, you’re ready to put it all together. Here’s a sample of a weekly schedule for weekly blog posting. Obviously, you can adjust this by just changing the names of the days and rearranging tasks to suit your needs.

Monday

• Check emails, respond to blog comments, and monitor social media.
• Select a topic and perform initial research.
• Choose a primary keyword and topic focus for a post.
• Create an outline for content.
• Gather sources and past posts on similar subjects for linking purposes.
• Previously-scheduled post goes live.

Tuesday

• Check emails, respond to blog comments, and monitor social media.
• Write your first draft of your blog post.
• Note down ideas for future posts as you think of them.

Wednesday

• Check emails, respond to blog comments, and monitor social media.
• Polish up your draft with thorough editing.
• Begin creating images to add to your blog post.

Thursday

• Check emails, respond to blog comments, and monitor social media.
• Continue creating images if necessary.
• Copy and format your blog content to your CMS.

Friday

• Check emails, respond to blog comments, and monitor social media.
• Perform a final review of the blog post and schedule it.
• Create social media posts and schedule them to promote the post.
• Pick an older blog post that needs updating and update it.

Saturday

• Check emails, respond to blog comments, and monitor social media.
• Identify and update older posts that can include references and links to the new post.
• Optionally, pick an older post to promote for a new cycle through life.
• Perform competitive research and read new content from competitors.

Sunday

• Check emails, respond to blog comments, and monitor social media.
• Check analytics for previous post performance.
• Tally up income and expenses for bookkeeping purposes, if necessary.
• Plan new goals and track progress toward existing long-term goals.

Weekly or Monthly

• Perform plugin and site security updates.
• Back up your blog’s content and structure.
• Review or evaluate new possible forms of monetization.
• Spend some time learning a new skill or technique for your blog.
• Perform outreach to build guest posting opportunities, networking, and new relationships.

Of course, this is just a template, and everything on it is modular. Rearrange tasks and build a productivity schedule that meets your needs.

A Note on Backlogs and Batching

Once you have a site up and running, an advanced technique you might consider is leveraging backlogs and batching for your weekly and monthly schedule.

For example, imagine that you have three months’ worth of weekly blog posts already scheduled and ready to go. That gives you a lot of flexibility and leeway with where and when you schedule your tasks.

That means you can, for example, divide a month into four weeks:

• Week 1: Topic ideation, keyword research, resources gathering.
• Week 2: Outlining, writing, editing, and polishing content.
• Week 3: Image creation, social media post creation, task cleanup.
• Week 4: Scheduling, promotion, outreach, and optimization.

As long as you hit your baseline of four posts for that month, you can keep your backlog extended, and if you find that you have additional time each week to add more content, you can easily extend the backlog or increase your post density.

“Batching” your tasks like this allows you to set your mind on one kind of task and do a bunch of it all at once rather than going through an endless weekly cycle. For some people, this is way more effective because they lose a lot of focus and attention-changing gears. Other people prefer to focus on one post and see it through from start to finish. Like many things in blogging, this is a personal preference.

What About a Time-Based Template?

A task-based template is useful, but what about a time-based one? It’s harder to provide a template for a time-based schedule because it all comes down to how much time you are willing to put in each day and whether or not you need that time to be fixed.

For example, I’ve seen some people whose daily blogging schedule is just this:

“Put three hours of work into blogging at some point today.”

Other times, people have dedicated hours in the morning, afternoon, or evening that they set aside to work, just like a job with fixed hours. I’ve even known people working a 9-5 schedule on their blogging, treating it just like a full-time career.

The key is to pick something that works for you and, more importantly, is sustainable. If you set a schedule that’s too ambitious or puts too much of a burden on your free time after you’re working a day job, you’re just going to burn out, and your blog will suffer for it.

What Does Your Schedule Look Like?

All of what I’ve put together above is a sample and example. Pretty much everyone is going to have their own variation of such a schedule, with different amounts of focus on different aspects of blogging. So, I ask you: What does your schedule look like? Let me know in the comments; I’d love to hear it!

I’m also interested to know what tools you use to help with each task along the way. I use a bunch, but more than that, I created Topicfinder as a bespoke tool to help me with all of that Monday stuff; the keyword research, the topic ideation, the competitive research, and more. I designed it to help me with my content marketing and that of my clients, so it’s proven in actual use, so I decided to clean it up and offer it to everyone else as well. Give the new free trial a try, and let me know what you think!

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