This follow-up to 5 Reasons to Batch Your Blog Content is a guest contribution from Christian Karasiewicz.
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 headspace 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A second reason not to batch your content is because your content can become outdated.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 finshed 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 beginining 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?
Let me know by leaving a comment Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or in the comments below. I would love to hear them!
Christian Karasiewicz is the CEO and Founder of Social Chefs, a digital training site that teaches you how to create winning recipes for success in social media marketing and business. Follow him@ckroks.
One of the dangers of batch writing you blog content is that you delay release of content. I just kicked off a 7 week challenge on my blog which I almost didn’t release, because I hadn’t finished all the content. We must learn to pursue progress instead of perfection. Releasing the challenge now gives readers a chance to get going on my material which I will finish up in the coming days and weeks. (This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t write quality content.)
I’ve been blogging as a hobby/ family diary for 5 years. But 6 months ago, I decided to take it more seriously and try to turn into a side business. What do you suggest for how far out to plan content? I’ve been hesitant to plan too far out for all the reasons you mentioned, but want to stay on top of posting consistently even when I don’t “feel like it.” What’s a good planning/ posting time frame in your opinion?!
I’d like to know the answers to these as well. I’d also like to know how your blog is going, after two years! I also battle with the “don’t feel like it” moments and find batching to be very helpful in those moments.
I’ve had mixed experience with batching… I write for my blog every day.
For several weeks I tried writing all of my posts on Monday morning.
It felt FANTASTIC to get them all out of the way and not have to worry about it for the rest of the week.
It also seemed more efficient to just pound them all out at once…
However, after a few weeks I found that I “lost my groove.” Since I wasn’t writing every day, I wasn’t constantly on the lookout for good ideas. I was running out of things to say.
And since I wasn’t pounding out ideas when the inspiration struck, the quality of my writing dropped.
I’d like to revisit this when the volume of my writing increases, though…
I only disagree with number 5 as a reason not to batch. If you have a blog content calendar and you stick to it, there’s no way to lose sight of your goals so … best practices.
The other four do make me think a bit, but I do find that batching, in certain instances, is the way to go if you don’t batch too far in advance and focus the batched content on evergreen topics for your audience.