How to Schedule Your Blog Posts to Publish Later

As I mentioned in my last post, most blogging software offers you a way to write in advance and publish your posts on a schedule. This allows you to write your posts for a whole week or a month in one sitting (or two or three) and schedule them to publish whenever you want.

For example, I like to publish 3-5 posts each week. I published yesterday’s post and then scheduled this post to publish on Tuesday. I scheduled the next post to publish on Thursday. I wrote all of them on the previous Sunday. That way I knew I’d have at least three posts published in the coming week. I didn’t have time to write a fourth post on Sunday. I figured I might get time to do so later in the week. I could post it and schedule it then.

How do you do this? The function for scheduling posts in WordPress can be found just above the “Publish” button. (In most other blogging software programs it’s in about the same place.) There will be a prompt that says, “Publish immediately” with the option to “edit.” Click on “edit,” and you will discover that you can choose the time and date when you would like your post to publish. Then click on “OK,” and “schedule.” (Usually the “publish” button changes to “schedule” at this point. If it doesn’t and still says “publish,” don’t panic. You probably didn’t click “OK.” )

Now go to “Posts” and “edit.” You’ll see the list of all your published and scheduled posts.  Notice that the status of the post you just scheduled appears as “scheduled.” If you had just published it, the status would tell you how long ago you had published the post. If you published it several days ago, it would just say “published.”

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