How To Write A Good Blog Post On A Tight Deadline

Summer is in full swing. And you know what that means, lazy days punctuated by long lunch breaks, summer hours, and flip flop Fridays.

And perhaps the biggest disruption to the entrepreneurial workflow is summer vacations. Those long seven-day stints with your toes buried in the sand do wonders to refresh the spirit, mind, and body, but can wreak havoc on your online marketing efforts.

But it doesn’t have to.

To keep up with your social media, simply use a platform like Buffer or Hootsuite to schedule posts to hit while you’re away.

And for your email marketing, you should be using the schedule function anyway to make sure that your emails go out on the day and time your audience seems to be most interested.

That brings us to your blog. Can you schedule that, too? Actually you can.

Schedule your blog post

Most blog platforms like WordPress and Weebly make it really easy to set a blog to automatically self-publish at a later date. So if you’ve developed an editorial calendar, which is highly recommended, you probably know what blog will be due around the time you’re heading out for vacation. So start writing it early and put it in the queue.

But even the best intentions fall short sometimes. Your plans to pre-write your blog and schedule it to publish can easily be derailed. Murphy’s Law always seems to sneak in there and anything that can go wrong, goes wrong, right before vacation.

And when given the choice between closing pending deals and putting out customer fires or coming up with a 300-word blog post before your trip, guess which one wins.

Generate blog ideas

Worse case, you may have to publish your blog as soon as you get back. If it’s off schedule, that’s less than ideal but better late than never.

You can still come out on top in this if you have these tricks up your sleeve.

• Repurpose old content. If you’ve been blogging for a while or creating other forms of content, revisit some of the top performing pieces and put a fresh spin on it. Your experiences and skills have grown since then, and your insight may be even more relevant now.

• Answer recent customer questions. Think back to the last customer question you answered or fire you put out. Use it to create a short and simple case study style post. A description of the customer, problem, proposed solution, and end result is all you need.

• Get inspiration from your trip. Draw from the experiences you had during your vacation. Did you witness amazing customer service or discover innovative ways to do the same old things? There is a lesson in just about everything if you look close enough.

And lastly, to keep this from happening again, keep a jar of blog ideas on your desk or noted in your smartphone. When you get a good idea, scribble it down and put it in the jar or save it in your favorite app. That way, when you have a tight deadline, ideas are only seconds away.

What you should remember

Everyone needs to step away from their business and recharge their batteries. And planning ahead helps you keep the ship afloat in your absence.

But your small business marketing doesn’t get to take a vacation, especially your blog. “Getting around to it” isn’t a good blogging strategy, and it breaks the number one rule of content marketing: consistency.

So when the pressure is on to meet your blog deadline, use one of these three ideas to get the ideas flowing.