Scheduling Posts: Pros and Cons

When I began blogging back in May, I did not pre-schedule posts. As a new blogger, I did not know this was an option. If I had known, I probably would not have seen the purpose in scheduling posts ahead of time.

I began scheduling posts around the same time I joined Netgalley. I noticed that, while publishers put up books months in advance, they did not want the reviews up so early. But as an excited blogger with my first review copies, I wanted to read them right away. I have never waited to write my reviews, and at first I thought I had to remember to post them - which would have been a huge pain!

That was when I discovered scheduling posts, but I only used that feature for reviews. Especially because a lot of my posts were memes such as WWW Wednesday and Friday Finds, I could not really schedule them in advance, anyway.

I think I started to schedule posts more frequently around the time I switched to Blogger. This was also during the time where I changed a lot of my posts, and I went into a pretty bad blogging slump a bit later - making the scheduled posts really useful for when I was in the mood to blog.

Mostly, I am a planner when it comes to blogging - I have a review schedule on a word document, my blogging schedule on Google calendars, and I do schedule nearly every post I write. I can find so many pros to this, number one being: I don't have to blog every day.

Although it's great for beginning bloggers, I think after awhile everyone gets a bit tired of writing posts every day. I go back and forth - sometimes being on the blog a few times daily, and sometimes not checking in for a week or so. The scheduling gives me room to do that, while still putting out posts for my readers.

I also like scheduling posts because it keeps the blog organized. Not only does it keep the posts consistent, so I'm not spamming you guys with ten posts one day and then giving you nothing for an entire month, but it lets me know what is going up each day. It makes it easy to plan around things, to keep to my review-a-week schedule, and to make sure each post goes up at the time I need it to.

There are tons more pros to this feature, I'm sure - I really love having every post ready in advance. It has saved me from feeling guilty a huge number of times. But lately I've been thinking about the cons to the scheduling system.

This one might be limited to me, but I think scheduling posts in advance makes my posts inconsistent, or hypocritical. The thing is, I change my mind a lot. To use a recent example, in my New Year's Resolutions post, I talk about how my Goodreads goal will be 75 books, but I will raise it if needed. But later I posted a discussion about why I will NOT be raising my Goodreads challenge. These posts were both written pretty far in advance, and they were scheduled a few weeks apart - which could be enough time to change my mind. But they were also both written in 2014. I made the decision before either of these posts went up, and if I did not schedule them in advance, they would not be so inconsistent. My mind would have been made up previously and for that reason, the posts would not contradict one another.

I also find myself having to move around posts. Of course, this isn't a huge deal - but sometimes I just don't know where to put them. A post I did not plan for will need to go up very soon, and so all my pre-scheduled posts need to be pushed back. It does get to be a pain, especially if I have to move a lot of posts to make the schedule work again.

The last con I can think of is just having to wait. I'm not an especially patient person, so when I type of a post that I like, I want feedback. I want to know what others think, and obviously I have to wait as the post has not been published yet. This is especially difficult when I really like a book I review, when I make a change in post formats, and when I have a discussion post that I am super excited about.

I would love to hear what you guys think - have you found any more pros or cons to scheduling blog posts? Do you schedule posts in advance, or just publish them as you write?